There used to be a popular poster, in which a kid said “I know I must be something good, because God doesn’t make junk” (or something similar). It gets you thinking - if God made a murderous skinhead, there must be SOMETHING good in him, or else God would have never created him.
However, the older I get, and the more stories I read about where people are brutally murdered, the harder it is to believe that there aren’t people in this world who are nothing but evil. Maybe they aren’t created evil, maybe there is a shred of decency left in the corrupted soul...but its hard to see.
The “formal” discussion, as I see it, leaves open the possibility of being thoroughly MORALLY evil. The “will” is a good in itself. We think plants have no will, and animals don't think well, so their will is weak ... if they can really be said to have one.
So, the will, which somehow is a part of our being “above” plants and beasts, is in itself a good. In that sense the felon represents SOME good, so something less than pure evil.
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Where it gets interesting for me is that I think there's the possibility of a kind of suicide of the will.
Analogy:
If I don't exercise, I will grow weak.
Further, I can actively do things (eat badly, jump off high walls, tell people to hold my beer and watch this) which will make me weaker still.
In my experience on both sides of the pshrink’s divan, just “knowing what's going on,” is rarely enough for health. One has to PRACTICE healthy thought patterns; one has to form new habits of reaction. The best exemplars of, say, AA are those who have “worked the program” for a decade or more. They are, in a sense, reprogrammed.
So, I can imagine that some, even if at birth they had the potential to develop normally and with at least moral aspirations, might destroy or severely injure their capacity to choose and to do good. Habits of vice are deeply ingrained.
Since he's in the news, Carlos Danger is a fun case. At this point we have to ask if he is capable of choosing NOT to sext. For years, I bit my nails unconsciously. Does he send pictures of his privates with a similarly inattentive compulsion? Does he actively CHOOSE to do this disgusting and imprudent thing? Or is he more like an addict who seems unable to divert his focus from his behavior and who will make elaborate, persistent, and even wily schemes to gratify his compulsion?
Is he really CHOOSING this behavior? Or is he FAILING to choose to avoid it? I don't know, I really don't. I'll say this: Addicts don't strike me as “free.” If there's any freedom there, it's like a small ember buried under ashes. It will take clearing away, blowing on, and careful tending if it's ever to be a fire again.
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So while the scheme of moral evils making use of good “faculties” is the right way to approach the problem, it doesn't make everything easy to understand all the way down. And that's before we get to people who seem to be congenital psychopaths.