Why is Light Yagami Evil?

I watched Death Note for the first time last week, and have a lot of thoughts about it. It’s one of those rare stories that forces you to think about uncomfortable questions, and in return, will teach you something about yourself. Fundamentally, the show’s premise is best presented as a thought experiment, similar to the trolley problem: imagine the only resource you have access to is a Death Note, and you see a violent crime in progress with nobody else around to help — what do you do? Kill the criminal or not?

I think what makes Death Note such a great show is that even though Light is obviously the villain, you’re supposed to agree with him a little bit. His early kills — an armed robber holding hostages at a bank, a molester in the act — these are decisions that most people could justify and perhaps even applaud. But somewhere between that and going all out like Light does, it becomes evil. The point is obviously obscured by the fact that he kills several innocent people along the way, but if we consider only the purest form of his ideology, there’s an interesting philosophical discussion to be had.

The way I see it, there are two logically defensible positions here: either you support the first two kills or you don’t (assuming the conditions of the thought experiment as posed earlier). We first consider the hardline anti-murder perspective. Light has no right to take a life, even given the circumstances, and thus he’s wrong from the very beginning. This is probably the correct stance in the real world, but many people defend his first few kills, so we have to consider the other position — that Light’s notion of justice is valid to some extent. (Also it’s just not as fun to end the discussion there as a philosophical exercise.)

Light’s theoretical perspective on justice is just his first few kills scaled to the rest of the world, right? So if the original kills are justifiable, then the rest must also be, as long as they further the goal of creating the ideal world where they’re no longer necessary. The “New World” that Light envisions as a result sounds great, after all — no crime, everybody respects one another and acts altruistically, all the traditional markings of a utopia. There’s just one small problem: that world can only exist in theory. Conflict is a fundamental part of human nature, and no matter how much you change the world, you can’t change human nature. The only way to create a world without conflict would be to eliminate humanity entirely. The fact that Light is too immature to realize this is his real character flaw, and it is the combination of this immaturity and the curse of the Death Note, giving him the power to pursue this impossible goal, that actually makes him evil.