Did I ask to be born licentious, greedy, slightly misanthropic?

Remember this?

http://people.com/celebrity/will-smith-explains-hitler-quote/

“Even Hitler didn’t wake up going, ‘Let me do the most evil thing I can do today.’ I think he woke up in the morning and using a twisted, backwards logic, he set out to do what he thought was ‘good.'”

Which led to this?

“Adolf Hitler was a vile, heinous, vicious killer responsible for one of the greatest acts of evil committed on this planet.”

Evil.

Pure Evil?

Well Steven Pinker says:

You describe the concept of pure evil as a myth in the book. Why?

The myth of “pure evil” is a debating tactic. We don't think of it that way because that very awareness would undermine the credibility of our brief. If the myth of pure evil is that evil is committed with the intention of causing harm and an absence of moral considerations, then it applies to very few acts of so-called “pure evil” because most evildoers believe what they are doing is forgivable or justifiable.

Now take these passages from George Saunders’ Lincoln In The Bardo:

Was I born with just those predispositions and desires that would lead me, after my whole preceding life (during which I had killed exactly no one), to do just that thing? I was. Was that my doing? Was that fair? Did I ask to be born licentious, greedy, slightly misanthropic, and to find Elmer so irritating? I did not. But there I was.

…

We were as we were! The bass lisper barked. How could we have been otherwise? Or, being that way, have done otherwise? We were that way, at that time, and had been led to that place, not by any innate evil in ourselves, but by the state of our cognition and our experience up until that moment.

…

By the fact that time runs in only one direction, and we are borne along by it, influenced precisely as we are, to do just the things that we do, the bass lisper said.

Free will isn’t so free I guess. But if free will isn’t so free then maybe evil isn’t so pure?