I am not in favor of focusing only on behavior and then saying, “What the person did was bad.”  No.  There are bad people and we can truly say, “This is a bad person.”  Do you agree?

I would agree with the following:  Humans, unlike any other primates, have a free will. This unique characteristic allows us to make choices that can affect our very humanity.  Given this premise that we all have free will, and given the further premise that our choices can affect our humanity, it then follows that we can grow in our humanity, growing toward the greater good.  If this is the case, then, through our free will choices, we can either grow in our humanity (toward the good of justice, courage, wisdom, temperance, forgiveness, and agape love in service to others) or diminish in our humanity (toward treating others as objects, cowardice, deliberately bad choices, greatly excessive behaviors, hatred, and selfishness).  I would avoid the term “bad person.”  Why?  It is because a diminished humanity, forged by a free will of bad choices, always can be reversed by that very same free will that diminished the person’s true humanity (the goodness mentioned above).  If we say someone is a “bad person” this is too permanent a label, given the free will possibility of reversing the choices that led to the stereotype of others calling the person “bad.”

For additional information, see Why Forgive?  

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