Good Cannot Comprehend Evil

Marge to Grimsrud, Fargo

Jerry is being terrorized by Serial Killer Thomas "Tom" Deathmurderkill. He has hunted him, attacked him, and nearly gotten him killed on several occasions. He goes to his good friends, Larry and Heather for rescource and Heather is convinced that Tom has kicked the dog more than enough times to warrant Jerry fighting back with lethal force. Larry, however, insists that he must have a good reason, such as an abusive childhood or maybe that it's all just a big misunderstanding. Despite any evidence to the contrary, Larry refuses to believe that he can actually be doing things just to be psychopathic. After all, no one's that soulless, right?

This trope is, in its essence, a character who firmly believes they're in a world of White and Gray Morality, that everyone can be redeemed, and there is no Moral Event Horizon. Whether Larry is right or not depends on the work's placement on the Sliding Scale of Idealism vs. Cynicism. In an idealistic show, this attitude could very possibly lead to a Heel Face Turn and a Defeat Means Friendship. In a cynical one, expect his death to be the very thing to push the villain over the Moral Event Horizon.

This trope is usually limited to the very naive and very young, or the very old and war-weary, who've grown tired of the "black and white, us vs. them" attitudes of those around them.

Note: Be careful not to just stick this trope onto any pacifistic characters, whether technical, actual, or martial. The tropes are related, but one does not automatically imply the other.

Compare Stupid Good, The Pollyanna, White and Gray Morality. Contrast Evil Cannot Comprehend Good, Complete Monster, This Is Unforgivable!.

Examples of Good Cannot Comprehend Evil include:

Comic Books

• Superman in Superman Red Son. He genuinely wants nothing more than to help everyone, regardless of race or creed, and even as he becomes Obliviously Evil can't comprehend why people like Batman would try and stop his utopia. He also spends much time musing on the indecipherable pettiness of Lex Luthor.

Film

• Star Wars: The Jedi Order suffers from this problem, and pay dearly for it, as the prequels show. In fact, the Star Wars Expanded Universe has shown again and again that for a group that acts as champions of good, the Jedi Order has absolutely no understanding of the Sith. All the Jedi can really grasp is that the Sith use powerful emotions to fuel themselves, and have swung in the opposite direction, swearing off all attachments, fearing that they led to the darkness. This trope is best seen in Revenge of the Sith where Anakin needs advice from Yoda whose Black and White Morality prevents him from giving Anakin anything of use.
• Marge expresses this in Fargo, as seen in the page quote.
• Most characters in No Country for Old Men also struggle with this, usually when they face Anton Chigurh. Likewise, Anton Chigurh cannot understand why his victims always implore him to have mercy.
• In Avengers: Infinity War, Gamora assumed that Thanos was incapable of love given how abusive he was towards her and Nebula. As it turns out, he is capable of love, at least a twisted version of it.
• Optimus Prime has shades of this in the Bayverse. Despite many Autobots and Decepticons telling him how cruel and petty humanity can be, Optimus always sees the best in them, being willfully blind to the All Take and No Give relationship that the humans have forced the Autobots into. By the time of Transformers: Age of Extinction, and the US government enacting The Purge against all Autobots, Optimus has shed this.
• Peter Parker in the Marvel Cinematic Universe shows shades of this, being dumbstruck at the chaos that his Big Bads unleashed for quite petty reasons.

Literature

• Harry Potter: Dumbledore has shown that he can understand quite a bit about Lord Voldemort. However, it turns out that Dumbledore was unable to figure out that Voldemort hid one of his Horcruxes in the Room of Requirement. Why? Because Dumbledore was a model student who never cheated and hence had no need to use the room. Harry, however, was certainly not a model student, he cheated a couple of times, and he used that room, so he could figure it out. He lampshades it.
• In Death: Dr. Mira in Midnight In Death is unable to find out why David Palmer is such a Complete Monster. Eve Dallas is unable to find out why her own mother is a Complete Monster in New York To Dallas.
• In The Silmarillion, it is said that the Valar don't understand Morgoth's evil, and explicitly didn't understand it was incurable.
• Sisterhood series by Fern Michaels: The Vigilantes have shown that they cannot understand why people like the Monarch HMO in Payback, Karl Woodley in The Jury, and Maxwell Zenowicz in Fast Track are such evil people.
• This is a recurring theme throughout No Country for Old Men.
• Early in the Discworld series, Granny Weatherwax of all people. The Duchess mocked Granny's attempt to make her have a Heel Realization, claiming that Granny was naive for believing that all people really are good deep down.
• In the Warrior Cats series, when Bluestar's suffering from dementia and is absolutely convinced that WindClan is stealing prey, she won't listen to Fireheart when he gives her evidence that a dog has been killing the prey. She tells him that he's a good and noble warrior, so he can't comprehend that other cats would have morals any less pristine than his own. He especially thinks this comment is odd, since he was the one that exposed Tigerclaw as a traitor and murderer.

Live Action TV

• In the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "The Savage Curtain", Surak, Spock and President Lincoln have a hard time understanding the motives and actions of the opposing "evil" side. Only Kirk seems to have a grasp of their potential for deceptiveness and duplicity.
• Played with in Victorious. Tori can comprehend evil quite well, and fires back just as good as she gets, but she's often dumbstruck by how utterly petty the villains are.
• Fifth season of Cobra Kai: As the only student that has never trained at the namesake dojo, Sam has zero insight into the true impact of that dojo's training. It's precisely why the other Cobras (particularly Johnny's original student Miguel) were so ready to welcome longtime rival Tory into the Miyagi-Fang ranks: because they experienced the effects on their own psyches. Sam changes her tune when she gets a firsthand look at the squalor that is Tory's home life.

Video Games

• In Mass Effect 3, a defector from an evil organization thought that she had hidden families safely on a remote world, because she "couldn't imagine" the organization's leader coming after them. Shepard says "That's what evil counts on..."
  • After discovering the various atrocities at Sanctuary, Ash (who is by no means a naive character,) says she truly cannot understand what motivated it. She also says that she's actually glad she can't, as it makes her feel human.
• Ratchet & Clank:
  • Clank. Much as he's a genius, he genuinely cannot comprehend why anyone would ever do something selfish or cruel when there exists countless diplomatic ways to go about the problem that wouldn't hurt anyone. This is in sharp contrast to the more emotionally driven Ratchet who can understand why some villains do what they do. Though Clank's stubborn refusal to budge from this purely altruistic mindset ends up becoming a Morality Chain for most heroes he meets, making them better people.
  • The Lombaxes. As revealed in the backstory for Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction, when they couldn't match Tachyon's vendetta against them, they decided to leave for Another Dimension, thinking that if they were off the board, Tachyon wouldn't hurt anyone else. With the biggest threat to his reign gone, Tachyon simply began conquering other planets uncontested.

Western Animation

• The Batman has one episode where Batman actually tries to make sense of The Joker. By the end, it is safe to say that Batman figures out that doing this is an exercise of futility and madness.
• Aang holds this view for the majority of the first season, in keeping with his pacifistic views. Even at the end, when he's facing a Complete Monster like Ozai, he can't bring himself to kill him until the lion-turtle gives him an Eleventh-Hour Superpower.
• Hank Pym in The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes will often try to reason with enemies first, especially if they used to be his villainy-rehab patients. In his defense, it almost works on Wonder Man in ""Everything Is Wonderful"" before Iron Man brings down an Interrupted Cooldown Hug.
• Steven Universe. He's so selfless that he honestly believes that anything "mean" boils down to Poor Communication Kills. While this trope usually works for him, it's sometimes deconstructed as this means he can't really process that a hero has to sometimes do less than noble deeds to save the day. By the time of Steven Universe: Future, Steven has started to dip into Black and White Insanity as he brands his mother as evil as he learns more and more about what she got up to before her Heel Face Turn, despite fully knowing that she saved the Earth at great personal cost. By the end of the Sequel Series, this inability to grasp that heroes aren't 100% good causes Steven to self-corrupt, warping his physical form into a monster, for that's what he thinks he's become for doing things that could be considered evil.
• When Laser-Guided Amnesia sends Optimus Prime back to being Orion Pax in Season 2 of Transformers Prime, he shows a few shades of this, unable to process why the Decepticons are so hateful and willing to employ such brutal tactics against the Autobots. In his defense, he did just lose anywhere from a few thousand to several million years worth of memories about the Great War and still thinks Megatron is a good guy. He wises up by the end of the "Orion Pax" arc before his memories are restored.

Real Life

• Ulysses S Grant's presidency was one of the most corrupt in American history. Historians often attribute this to Grant's political naïveté - he himself was so morally upright that he couldn't see the shady dealings around him.