Vetteguy, think about the end of the book when Jim Taggart was enjoying watching Galt being tortured. That's not misguided; that's evil. Especially when you consider the reasons he wanted to see him tortured.
Edit: clarity and to correct autocheck!

I don't understand your unwillingness to call Jim evil. His actions were evil, we agree. He habitually chose evil actions over good actions, and I think that is what most people commonly mean when they refer to a person as evil. I think that is fair.

Some people would say that he is not evil because his education was faulty, so he didn't know any better. Even if it were true, I don't accept that excuse. Not knowing murder is evil does not make it any less evil. But I believe every human being knows morality proper to human beings. It may be suppressed, buried deep down where they won't be confronted with it, but they cannot ultimately plead ignorance. They are without excuse.

Some people say he is not evil because he had good intentions. Same answer. Committing murder with the good intention of bettering society (the greater good) does not make murder any less evil.

Jim may have been confused, misguided, call it what you will. But he was also evil. That is one of the points that this whole story was building up to. Just read Ayn Rand's description of his end:

"He was seeing his face as the face of a killer whom all men should rightfully loathe, who destroyed values for being values, who killed in order not to discover his own irredeemable evil."

My interpretation of the Jim Taggart character, and a few others, is that he is not a real person but an embodiment of much of the stupidity, if not evil, that there was round then, and now.
Cherryl Brooks on the other hand is real and believable. She has moderate education and morals/ethics. She is not a strong intellect or producer but when faced with stupid remarks she can ask good questions. Her level of intellect, or maybe insufficient moral strength, leads to her death as she is unable to put the right questions to herself.
The character of Cheryl Brooks is crucial to the theme of the book. Here is a person who could be happy and productive if only she had been 1. luckier in relationships, or, 2. if she had the skill to think thru her situation and make the right decisions in her own interests.
1. plays a part in life, but, 2. as it is said, you can make your own luck.
The reader cannot avoid liking Cheryl despite her weaknesses which proved fatal.

I have read to the end of this chain of comments, and disagree with most of them; I tend to agree with VetteGuy.

When experiments are performed that test the willingness of people to torture other people (generally via electric shock) about 70% of the subjects agree to do so when told by ‘authorities’ that it is OK to do this. The other 30% refuse – though this subset is rarely the topic of articles that are written about these experiments. (NB I think there is a definite bias in these experiments because they are drawn from a population that routinely excludes obvious sadists and sociopaths. This will mess up the data for the curve.) We have a spread here that hints of a Gaussian distribution of people around a norm, and the ‘norm’ represents ‘obedience to authority'.

So we have evidence that 70% of the population can be conditioned to obey authority to believe whatever philosophy is currently in vogue. Labeling this +- 2SD of the Norm as “Evil” lays an unnecessarily big burden of 'cosmic original sin' on humankind. I think that it is more accurate to label these people as ‘malleable’.

Jim Taggart is an excellent representative of this segment of the population, and he is chilling for that exact reason. It is not necessary for JT to be innately evil in order for him to enjoy watching Galt’s torture. Remember: Until relatively recently, public torture and execution was something you ‘took the kids to’ for entertainment. Watching Homo superior be tortured is the fulfillment of the philosophy that Jim Taggart has internalized for his entire life. It proves that he is Right.

Do you want shivers down your spine? Jim Taggart is Normal. But he could have been as readily conditioned for belief in the individual; he is a follower. Definitionally, 70% of humankind is Jim Taggart. (And yes, there is some evidence that this tendency is genetic...though it would take me a while to dig this up...came from a book that Pinker wrote.)

Jan

“I don't see Jim Taggart as evil. The concepts, yes. Jim, I see as ... misguided? Probably a better word for it”
I was thinking of his relationship with Cheryl. He liked the notion of having a diamond in the rough wife, of being open-minded enough to treat her as an equal without actually respecting her as an equal. When he sees she believes she is his equal, he becomes nasty.

He has a sick need for Cheryl to feel inferior to him and then for her and his friends to pat him on the back for it.

In the original quote he does the same thing. He holds himself above the “crude, material world”, but he is precisely about controlling the “crude, material world”. He wants stuff that's not his and then to be congratulated for taking it.

Even though he's only partially aware of this, he's misguided and it's due to his education, I'm still calling “evil”, even though there's the remote possibility he could repent in the future.

Jim Taggart, as well as most liberals, are always looking for ways to minimize their responsibility for themselves and to excuse their failure.

So if we apologize for their immoral actions for whatever reason aren't we complicit in some way? Cheryl was misguided. Taggart knowing worked to destroy the property of others.