Where does it say in WoT that people are evil only if the DO taints them?
But that aside, I think Cannoli is using "evil" in the sense of immoral, bad, wrong, unethical, etc. Murder is evil, rape is evil, and so on. This isn't capital E Evil, but evil as we use it in the everyday sense.

Ummm... that is still evil. "I only killed him because I'd lose my job and my children would starve otherwise" is no excuse. If Jaime and Cersei cared for their life and that of their children, they shouldn't have been screwing each other in strange places where someone might see.
They did not kill Bran for the joy of seeing him fall and suffer, but restricting the label "evil" to just such motivations seems ridiculous to me.

The question is, are these the motives or the justification he offers to himself?
You're right that no one is evil for the heck of it... but Jaime's thoughts seem to be more his spin on events. He remembers his early desire to be a shining knight, and reinterprets his actions so that he wouldn't have to face the fact that he was a spectacular failure.
I know of no measure of good and evil that allows murder of innocents for the sake of family pride or self protection. If that were so, every drug peddler who kills an innocent witness to his crime so he can save his life and that of his friends can justify his act.

But he does so only if it is convenient to him. If things hadn't worked out at Riverrun, he was ready to break his oath.
As for finding Sansa, he sent an inconvenient companion away on a solitary hunt. Big deal. If he wanted to stay true to his oath, he should have had Cersei call off her hunt for Sansa, and used the extensive resources he has access to as head of the Kingsguard to search for Sansa, and ensured her protection. He didn't have the guts to face his sister.

This is what frustrates me with aSoIaF. Not the books themselves, because these ideas about the worth of characters are not GRRM's, but the readers. Everyone is so overjoyed with this supposedly new idea of a morally gray world that they forget that the absence of a source of ultimate Evil and Good in a world doesn't mean individual people and actions can still be good and evil.


Ned's death did not prove that being honorable can have a cost, it proved that leaving the path of honor can have a cost. Had Ned put kingdom above family as honor demanded and refused to give his false confession, Carsei would have been unable to do anything, and once Jaime was captured, Ned would have been in a powerful position. Tywin would have ensured the release of Ned (and maybe even Sansa) in exchange for Jaime so he could concentrate on Stannis and Renly. With him alive, there would have been no talk about the King in the North, and as you can imagine, things would have been considerably easier since then.