Comment by throwaway150
9 hours ago
I don't think being human is inherently bad. But you have to draw the line to consider someone as "bad" somewhere, right? If you don't draw a line, then nobody in the world is a bad person. So my question is where exactly is that line?
You guys are saying that drink driving does not make someone a bad person. Ok. Let's say I grant you that. Where do you draw the line for someone being a bad person?
I mean with this line of reasoning you can "explain way" every bad deed and then nobody is a bad person. So do you guys consider someone to be actually a bad person and what did they have to do to cross that line where you can't explain away their bad deed anymore and you really consider them to be bad?
> If you don't draw a line, then nobody in the world is a bad person. So my question is where exactly is that line?
I don't think that that line can be drawn exactly. There are many factors to consider and I'm not sure that even considering them will allow you to draw this line and not come to claims like '99% of people are bad' or '99% of people are not bad'.
'Bad' is not an innate property of a person. 'Bad' is a label that exists only in an observer's model of the world. A spherical person in vacuum cannot be 'bad', but if we add an observer of the person, then they may become bad.
To my mind, the decision of labeling a person to be bad or not labeling them is a decision reflecting how the labeling subject cares about the one on the receiving side. So, it goes like this: first you decide what to do with bad behavior of someone, and if you decide to go about it with punishment, then you call them 'bad', if you decide to help them somehow to stop their bad behavior, then you don't call them bad.
It works like this: when observing some bad behavior I decide what to do about it. If I decide to punish a person, I declare them to be bad. If I decide to help them stop their behavior, I declare them to be not bad, but 'confused' or circumstantially forced, or whatever. Y'see: you cannot change personal traits of others, so if you declare that the reason of bad behavior is a personal trait 'bad' then you cannot do anything about it. If you want to change things, you need to find a cause of bad behavior, that can be controlled.