Basis of Crime: Harry Powell and the Consequentialism in The Night of the Hunter

Machiavelli once said that ‘the end justifies the means’, which implies that if the final result is important enough, it really doesn't matter the actions that one has to take in order to achieve it. And even though many people would find this ideology iniquitous, it has been employed in several aspects of the society, including the not so different opposites of government and crime.

Criminals are commonly known as sadistic, unfaithful and almost deplorable people who do evil at the expense of innocents for their own purposes. However, it is important to understand the differences between a psychopath and other criminals like mobsters, for example. There is a study of the italian researcher Schimenti and his colleagues, who went to a prison in Palermo to study the contrast between Mafia’s and psychopath’s psychology. It suggested that 23% of Mafia members were accused of murder and 57% for drug trafficking, extortion, fraud, sexual exploitation and kidnapping. On the other hand, the group of non gang-related delinquents reported murder, rape, child sexual abuse, and armed robbery as main crimes.

The PCL-R or Hare Psychopathy Checklist, was also applied to this italian research, where none of the Mafia scored above the cutoff on the test, while 10% of the others were diagnosed psychopaths. Furthermore, the interview showed that mobsters were highly attached to their families, so their crimes related mostly with loyalty and they actually distinguished between ‘business’ and their personal lives. Also, they were less likely to be drug addicts than the other prisoners.

This study might not be the ultimate truth about lawbreakers or the reason behind criminal behavior, but it shows a different perspective of man’s psyche and the fragility of society's moral ideas when it comes to do the ‘right thing’. If we look closely, we will find a considerable number of circumstances where people do inappropriate things to serve a ‘higher good’. This is the case of Harry Powell, a fictional character who became really famous as the villain of the movie: The Night of the Hunter. Harry is a sinister but good-looking priest who has a serious issue with sex; he kills ‘sinful women’ and keeps their fortune to accomplish God’s will.

Harry Powell is a great representation of consequentialism, which explains that “the consequences of one’s behaviour is the ultimate basis for any judgement about the rightness or wrongness of that conduct”. According to Powell’s ideas, God sent him to liquidate lustful women, and even though he knew that murder was sin, his purpose was even more important. Although this example may sound absurd and unacceptable, we can observe the same situation in our religions; through time the church has been responsible for numerous murders and violence because of its beliefs, not to mention the abominations that Eastern religions have caused in the last century.

For its part, Mafia raised as a social group with their own rules to save their families from a fraudulent government. “I don't trust society to protect us, I have no intention of placing my fate in the hands of men whose only qualification is that they managed to con a block of people to vote for them.” Mario Puzo, The Godfather. In Mexico, Chapo Guzmán himself said recently in an interview that he started in the business of drug dealing because it was the only source of work in his state. Even Jesús Malverde, the alleged saint of narcos, was some sort of ‘Mexican Robin Hood’ who did evil in order to do something right.

Authorities, religions, drug dealers, families, even science have had to take immoral actions to achieve a major goal that will bring welfare to people, but is it there any limits or any difference between actions? Or is it just that some of them are covered with a white cover while the others show the blood for all to see? Hopefully one day we will be able to figure out the complexity of this kind of duality; “after all, we're not murderers, in spite of what this undertaker thinks” as Don corleone said in Mario Puzo’s book: The Godfather.

References:

-Are The Mafia Psychopaths? - Neuroskeptic. (2014, April 03). Retrieved February 17, 2016, from http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2014/04/03/mafia-psychopaths/#.VsTJI_nhDIU

-Sinnott-Armstrong, W. (2003, May 20). Consequentialism. Retrieved February 17, 2016, from http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consequentialism/