It’s a tale as old as time. Boy achieves scientific breakthrough. Scientific breakthrough goes awry. Boy gains superpowers at expense of his sanity and/or conscience. Spider-Man’s rogues gallery is chock full of such tragic turns. Heck, they’re as responsible as anyone for establishing the trope itself. So it’s no surprise that the love letter to the various cinematic iterations of the character, Spider-Man: No Way Home, would lean so heavily into it.

The film’s conflict centers around the arrival of several such villains from alternate dimensions, some shortly before their deaths in battle against their dimensions’ Spider-Men. When Dr. Strange insists that they be sent back regardless of their fate, Peter Parker decides to save them at all costs. His solution is to reverse engineer, with the help of his fellow webslingers who have also slipped into his dimension, the experimental technology that spurred their rogues’ supervillainy.

His reasoning seems to hinge on the notion that their misdeeds are as much a symptom of their altered conditions as their superpowers, that without these conditions, they would cease being evil. The film never even questions this premise, bearing it out eventually as each villain is in turn rendered both mundane and immediately penitent and/or docile after receiving their “cure.”

It’s natural to wish for so simple an explanation for evil, to ascribe bad choices to bad circumstances. When the goal is saving wayward souls, even geniuses like a trio of Peter Parkers can fall victim to the desire for shortcuts. In fact, such an impulse even shaded the reasoning of so great and influential a mind as Aristotle, whose concept of voluntary was oddly detached from the exercise of the will. Instead, acts of volition fall into at least three categories: voluntary, involuntary, and non-voluntary. Voluntary acts, he posits, all involve volition, but not all volitional acts are voluntary. Some volitional acts, such as those done under compulsion, are considered involuntary. To further complicate matters, volitional acts done through ignorance are called involuntary as well, but only if the agent regrets the action after learning of the effects. If such an act is not regretted, it’s deemed non-voluntary. Confused yet? It’s fine. It took me a few passes too.

Fortunately, No Way Home‘s villains can provide a handy illustration. Dr. Octopus acts involuntarily, as it is not in his power to resist the will of the AI tentacles running the show. Absent this coercive force, he gratefully reverts to his formerly congenial self. Green Goblin would be considered an outside, or at least separate, source for the actions of the body of Norman Osborne, who is ignorant of his alter ego’s devious deeds and whose clear repentance renders such actions involuntary. The Lizard, who likewise seems utterly bewildered upon becoming human again, shows no signs of regret, and thus would be said to have acted non-voluntarily. Or maybe Rhys Ifans just phoned in his performance and stock footage had to be used.

Electro, drunk on power since his accidental dip in an electric eel tank, acts through ignorance and at least seems disappointed in himself. That counts, right? Sandman’s case is somewhat tricky. His acts are volitional and he understands what he’s doing, but the object of his will is the health of his daughter. He would have gone straight years ago if he didn’t need to commit crimes in order raise money for her operation. Honestly. We’ll call that quasi-voluntary.

If all those sound like weak excuses, it’s because they are. In all likelihood, Aristotle would see most of these actions as voluntary and would hold the perpetrators morally accountable. He recognizes that one’s character, whether virtuous or vicious is a condition resulting from cumulative choices for either virtues or vices. Sandman may have felt put upon to fund a lifesaving operation in a pinch, but he put himself in the situation where bank heists seemed his only option by a recurring preference for theft over legitimately lucrative pursuits. Aristotle also made distinctions worth noting, like how a single act by Otto Octavius could be voluntary, in that the object of his will was to activate his fusion reactor, but simultaneously involuntary, in that he didn’t know that doing so would result in his wife’s death and he never would have done so with that knowledge.

These are important distinctions to make, as ultimately our hold of what is and isn’t voluntary informs our morality and ethics. However, baking blame or lack thereof into our concept of what constitutes a willful act loses the all important distinction of where our agency stops and starts. Aristotle’s purview of involuntary may have dwindled considerably to a small set of excusable circumstances from what, at first glance, may seem a ready-made excuse for anything, but it hinges on a repeated assertion that the agent in such situations “contributes nothing.” Outside of autonomic functions and instances where said automatic functions literally override one’s cognitive functions, it is never accurate to claim that the agent contributes nothing.

It seems likely that something has been lost in translation and that he could have been reducing the scope of involuntary to this point precisely to illustrate the absurdity of an agent with no agency. Its also possible that it’s just an oversight, that a culture that embedded its understanding of mankind in tales of capricious deities could produce a sense of passivity so ingrained as to influence even a dissenting, assertive mind to reason itself powerless sometimes. Regardless, the standards Aristotle put forth went to great lengths to explain why certain willful acts were not entirely in the control of the agent, which is the underpinning of every excuse under the sun.

If people are not responsible for acts done under coercion or in ignorance, if these acts can be deemed somehow less than voluntary, then redeeming them is as simple as removing the impediment to good action. Replace the malfunctioning AI inhibitor chip, eliminate the murderous alter ego, remove the instinctive brutality or the lust for power, provide another means of making quick money without breaking the law, and it’s all good . No problem.

Explaining away one’s sins accomplishes nothing, though. Going around won’t work. We’ve got to go through them, and that requires us to recognize our responsibility for our shortcomings, mistakes, and wrongdoings. Without such admittance, there can be no repentance, no forgiveness or growth. Putting the cart of forgiveness ahead of the horse of culpability won’t save anyone because we’re not mad scientists whose bad choices stem from faulty experiments. We’re imperfect beings who act on incomplete, imperfect knowledge that often leads to unintended outcomes, and the foreknowledge of our guaranteed forgiveness is often just the rationale we need to do something we know in our hearts is wrong.

Excuses keep us mired in the same circumstances that we convince ourselves we’re powerless to change. They keep us from recognizing what we’re truly capable of. They keep us blaming others instead of admitting that there’s only so many times we can submit to victimization before it’s obvious that we’ve chosen to be a victim. And it’s only after we realize victimhood is a choice, that we can choose something different.