It’s a core Disney tenet that the bad guy gets what’s coming to him in the end. Ursula is gored by a ship’s mast, Captain Hook is digested by a kooky croc, and the almost-incestuous siblings in High School Musical lose their lead roles when they try to stop the quirky-but-hot outsiders from auditioning.
To accept that that’s a core Disney tenet, you have to start from the premise that Jack is, in fact, not evil. You therefore cannot use that tenet as evidence that he’s not evil, because to do so would be circular reasoning.
From the Rules, of course.
That’s what I meant about opposite endpoints.
I don’t think so. He wants the Pearl (it is, in fact, his only abiding motivator), and he wants adventure, but I don’t think he’s in control at all. And I think Jack’s internal conception of what it means to be a pirate is more akin to Captain Pugwash than Captain Blackbeard.
Here’s a question: Whatever Jack’s morality is, does he deserve a hanging?
Legally? Unambiguously yes. He’s a pirate, and the penalty for piracy is to hang suspended by the neck until dead.
I"m not certain he is evil by the standards of his world. In the first film he saves Elizabeth and then tries to reason with Will during the entire fight. Evil Jack would simply have let her drown, and assuming he found himself in the same situation with Will, just shot him in the face. Barbossa certainly would have done those things. Both of those situations were not of Jack’s doing either. Norrington insists on being a a prig, and Will wants to use Jack’s corpse as a stepping stone to high society. Considering the circumstances, his taking Elizabeth hostage is neutral, and his attempt to reason with the ill-motivated Will is actually good.
He isn’t a good man, but he seems to be more a rogue than a truly evil man. He steals, Cheats, lies, backstabs, and plunders; but he seems to avoid killing when not strictly necessary, only takes shiny valuables as opposed to necessities, seems to have at least a personal aversion to rape, and rarely acts cruelly or violently at all, and never for pleasure.
Jack Sparrow is the pirate version of Cugel the Clever.