If doing “bad” things (choose your own definition) makes you a Bad Person, then everyone who has ever acted immorally is a Bad Person. Personally, I have done quite a lot of immoral things (by my own standards), as has everyone else ever. Does this make me a Bad Person? I hope not.
You are making precisely the mistake that the Politics is the Mind-Killer sequence warns against—you are seeing actions you disagree with and deciding that the actors are inherently wicked. This is a combination of correspondence bias, or the fundamental attribution error, (explaining actions in terms of enduring traits, rather than situations) and assuming that any reasonable person would agree to whatever moral standard you pick. A person is moral if they desire to follow a moral standard, irrespective of whether anyone else agrees with that standard.
If a broken machine is a machine that doesn’t work, does that mean that all machines are broken, because there was a time for each machine when it did not work?
More clearly: reading “someone who does bad things” as “someone who has ever done a bad thing” requires additional assumptions.
If doing “bad” things (choose your own definition) makes you a Bad Person, then everyone who has ever acted immorally is a Bad Person. Personally, I have done quite a lot of immoral things (by my own standards), as has everyone else ever. Does this make me a Bad Person? I hope not.
You are making precisely the mistake that the Politics is the Mind-Killer sequence warns against—you are seeing actions you disagree with and deciding that the actors are inherently wicked. This is a combination of correspondence bias, or the fundamental attribution error, (explaining actions in terms of enduring traits, rather than situations) and assuming that any reasonable person would agree to whatever moral standard you pick. A person is moral if they desire to follow a moral standard, irrespective of whether anyone else agrees with that standard.
If a broken machine is a machine that doesn’t work, does that mean that all machines are broken, because there was a time for each machine when it did not work?
More clearly: reading “someone who does bad things” as “someone who has ever done a bad thing” requires additional assumptions.