What makes a person “bad”?

I want to start by saying that I’m honestly not comfortable designating a person as bad, or as evil, as though it were some inherent quality that could never change. It’s far too easy for us to get caught up in our own perspective, and forget the humanity of our fellow humans. That said, there are some people who just seem to be bad, even if we can’t always agree on who those people are.

I would hope that the most widely accepted answer is rooted in some version of “doing bad things”, but one of the sadder lessons we must learn is that what actions are “good” or “bad” is often going to vary greatly from person to person, or community to community. Most of what I got from my religious upbringing, as a Quaker in New England, still applies to my current atheist/humanist perspective on things, and I would honestly be surprised to learn that anyone within that community believed it impossible for an atheist to be a good person, or for a Quaker to be a bad person. The perspective I suspect the majority of our species believes, is that the “badness” of a person is determined by their actions, and more specifically by the harm they do, the harm they allow when they could prevent it, and the good they could do, but won’t.

Within this overarching “evil is as evil does” perspective, there are a number of qualifiers, depending on who you ask. For some people, harmful acts are only bad when done to out-groups. This is probably the mindset that allows for a lot of the systemic harm in the world. The extreme example would be fascists, who range from “harmful acts are bad but must be done for the greater good”, to “harmful acts are good, when done to those of various out-groups.

Because for some people, you can only be a good person if you are part of their specific in-group, unless proven otherwise. The best you can hope for is to wrongly believe you’re a good person, or to pretend you’re a good person. Some Christians even believe that everyone actually KNOWS they’re evil and deserving of torture, it’s just that most of us are in denial.

I think one thing that unites even more people than the “badness means doing harm”, is the simple fact that bad people do good things.

Bad people do good things all the time.

It’s possible to be an active and committed member of the 21st century Republican Party – a fascist – and also be nice to the people in your circle, and even self-sacrifice for them. German society, for a famous example, has been very into dogs for a long time, and that includes during the years of Nazi rule. Why, even Mother Theresa might have done some good in her lifetime!

Even those who believe nobody outside their religion can be good accept that outsiders do good things.

This is, to me, obvious.

I also think it’s probably worth stating explicitly from time to time, because when confronted with the worst people in the world, there will invariably be some folks insisting they’re not all THAT bad, because they do [insert good thing here]. It’s how billionaires justify their obscene wealth, while still using it to exert influence by funding some things, and not others. We can, however, grant that every cent of that philanthropy is a purely selfless investment in the betterment of society, and still see that the very real good it does is nowhere near enough to make up for the harm involved in accumulating the obscene wealth of, for example, the tech oligarchs.

The materials for our phones, and our computers, and the cancerous growth of data centers, come at a terrible human cost. Slavery remains a crucial part of capitalism, and the lives consumed in the extraction of things like cobalt rival many of the horrors of the past that we pretend to have left behind. Billionaires, as a class, are the main drivers of the endless wars against communism, terrorism, or whatever the bogeyman of the day happens to be. War is a time-tested way to turn raw material, taxes, and people, into rubble, profits, and corpses. It also keeps the price of labor and goods low, by making it hard for the former colonies from building enough power to assert any kind of sovereignty over their natural resources. If Iran, or Venezuela, for example, did something truly evil like nationalizing their oil supply, well, they’re not honoring contracts signed under colonial occupation and at gunpoint. Stop supplying the corporate overlords with the cheap materials they demand, and the gun comes back out.

Things are going to get worse over the next couple years, as the current US fascist regime grows increasingly desperate to hold on to power, and the tech oligarchs try to set themselves up to rule whatever comes after. Unfortunately, its global military presence and economic dominance mean that the whole world must suffer for what the US has become. But as we move forward, we are going to continue wrestling with the question of how seemingly good people can support such atrocities, and it’s important to remember that while there do seem to be some people who are purely malevolent, like Trump or Stephen Miller, most of the terrible people in history had what some might consider “redeeming qualities”, because they were human, and we tend to be pretty complicated.

I don’t think we should have a punitive justice system, but I think that allowing the people most responsible for the current state of affairs to just get away with it is an even worse option. When deciding what to do with them, we have to remember that just because we saw a different side of them, or we find them relatable in some way, does not lessen the harm they did. It also does not diminish the likelihood of them doing more harm in the future, should they be given the opportunity to do so.

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