Assignment 3: Walt_the_salt: Vigilante, or murderer?

In the modern day court system, there are not allowances for motives, at least in the classifications of crimes.  When someone intentionally kills someone, no matter the motives, it is automatically classified as a homicide.  But there are instances where the motives for the crime must be accounted for.  You see this in  a lot of video games.  One in particular is Watchdogs.


In the game you are a modern day vigilante, and many times, in order to stop the bad guys, you are forced to kill the bad guy.  To your normal civilian, the ends completely justify the means.  You stopped whatever evil this man might have done in the future, and avenged whatever he had already done in the past.  But to the police, this does not matter... All they see is a dead man.  And a killer.  They may see the positives that came from the murder of the one bad guy, but they are required to prosecute and hunt down the killer to the full extent of the law.


There should be accommodations for the motives of crimes, not just the short sighted immediate results of the crime with respect to the victim.


Another part of pop culture where we see this conflicting grey area between good and evil is in the show White Collar.  The main character is a convicted bond forger, Neal Caffrey. Many times, Neal takes the unorthodox method to solve problems.  Some times these methods are very illegal.  For example, when his parole officer was wrongly accused of murder, he was forced to steal millions of dollars of gold coins to bribe a federal prosecutor and forge a tape proving his innocence.  His parole officer was completely innocent, but would have been wrongly convicted had it not been for Neal's actions. 


So did the ends justify the means?  Some would say no; I say yes.  There is no such thing as absolute evil and absolute good.  Sometimes people do bad things for good reasons.  And vice versa.  To tell if someone is truly good or truly evil, one must look beyond the façade of their actions, and see the motives for them.