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So, might you even consider these to be foil character traits?

I agree with @i-david that this deals mainly with the perversion of what is good – let’s take a look at it in the sense of basic economic theory. In economics, we have these magical things called incentives. Incentives are exactly what they sound like – an external or internal motivation to do some thing. Anything. They can bring about good or bad, but it depends upon the incentive to determine whether the outcome is the wanted outcome or not. We like to call these perverted incentives – incentives that appear to fix the problem, but actually create the opposite result. There was once a story about a country(I believe it may have been India?) that put a bounty on a certain type of venomous snake. For every dead snake brought in, they would award a sum of money.

Well, turns out the sum must have been big enough to make people look, because you can bet they started bringing all sorts of dead snakes. But then they got smarter, and started breeding the snakes, killing some and bringing them in, and breeding more. By the time to government noticed, they had more snakes that they had started out with in the beginning. They cut the bounty on the snakes, and people released them. The problem had doubled, because of a perverted incentive.

I like to compare a perverted incentive to what we’re talking about here – an incentive that might look good but can be twisted to meet human measure. Justice is a noble enough pursuit – our God is just after all, and cannot tolerate injustice. Naturally a good pursuit would be justice – but in some contexts even justice in a plain sense can become revenge quite easily.

Humans are absolutely terrible to being objective – it’s nearly impossible to put aside all person prejudice, goals, thoughts, and personality to make a truly objective statement, unless you’re saying “up is up and down is down” (Though if you’ve ever taken Physics, even that can be subjective.) Due to this, we quite easily twist about everything and anything to our own perverted incentives. Even the protagonist of a novel in his noble pursuit of justice against the man who killed his estranged father and escaped justice is not free from this – he can very easily turn it to revenge even without strong personal connections.

As for the wrong ways people meet these needs – well, pretty much any way that is not God’s way. The ends do not justify the means, so even if the outcome is good it doesn’t mean it’s truly good if the means of getting there are bad. It’s one part of the massive problem that is mental wellness in the world right now – let’s take the whole “be yourself/unique” spiel. Sure, on the outside it looks okay. We all like being different than the next person – but why? There’s a great deal of narcissism brought into the world today by the notion that we should do whatever makes us happy, and you’ve got Adam Smith(and all of humanity) to thank for voicing that in The Theory of Moral Sentiments – the pursuit of one man for whatever makes him happiest is not the best way, if that’s not already shown by basic business theory and basic morality(even if we don’t realize it). Unfortunately history seems to endlessly repeat itself in that manner.

So yeah. These are all good foils and mirrors for villains to mimic, and I’d be interested to see them used. 🙂 Enjoy my very economically-based rant. (We’re studying economics and I personally love them, so yeah…. it’s bound to leak in somewhere. XD )