Should we discard achievements made by unlikable people?

[bennyboy]

?????

The fact Cosby has done bad stuff is what makes him a bad person. Imagining awful things doesn't make someone bad at all.

Acting nice in public has nothing to do with how good a person is. Fake niceness is not the same thing as good actions.

It seems to me that you could look at it another way: the innate tendency to act badly is itself badness-- like the start of rot in an apple-- even if someone's never done wrong; at best, we'd expect such a person might be a ticking time bomb, right? But I'm not so sure that people who do bad things are necessarily bad people all the time-- plenty of war heroes have risked life and limb for their countrymen, then gone home from war to beat their wives. So are they heroes or villains?

Hermann Hesse in Steppenwolf talks about the divisions in the apparent unity. In that book, Steppenwolf sees himself as a division between the nature of human and wolf, but Hesse seems to suggest that a human is so fractured that finding a unified individual is impossible. (or at least so far as I've read-- I'm in the hospital now and I don't have that book here)

I for sure wouldn't excuse Cosby's crimes against women. Rape is rape, and it's a terrible crime and should be punished. However, I suspect that when he was educating kids or doing light-hearted stand-up, that he wasn't a fraud-- in that mode, he was also expressing a very real side of his humanity.

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Depends on the achievement and how it helps us. Great inventions that we use can be celebrated without acknowledging the inventor. Trivial things can be forgotten. Lead singer of the Lost Prophets was caught doing very bad things and despite liking their music I will never again listen to it.

I gotta say that in looking at rape-y scenes in some of these guys' movies, it does affect my perception of what was behind the camera. I mean, The Cosby Show even used to have a lot of sexual education: I recently watched an episode about the dangers of pornography: "Hey hey heyyy!"

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Like what? You imagine Sam Harris is a notorious rapist? Or that Joe Rogan is a traitor, who fights to keep black people enslaved? You seem to think, that demented sociopaths constitute a much larger percentage of the population, than is the case.

It might just be me. Whenever I close my eyes, my visual field slowly fades to black (it takes about 3 seconds). Sometimes I'll open and close my eyes to see how long I can hold that fading image. I assumed that everyone is like that. But so far, nobody I've talked to has confirmed they have the same effect: for them, when you close your eyes, there is a complete and almost instant total lack of visual imagery.

Maybe I really am a sociopath, like the 1%. I've had daydreams where I imagined someone harming my daughter, and then had a complete scenario unfold in my head of how I would react; sometimes, I get so engrossed in it that it borders on hallucination.

I'm a pacifist vegetarian. I've never fought anyone since grade 5, I've never beat my wife, I've certainly never raped. But given my experiences, I can imagine that in the right climate-- maybe sleep-deprived or very upset, maybe in wartime or when attacked-- there's a real tendency toward violence hiding under the surface. I think that at least part of my humanity consists of a real capacity not only for evil, but for the lust to do it.

I wish these guys could elaborate: really honestly open up and explain how they ended up doing the things they did (Cosby and Weinstein, I mean). I suspect they'd tell stories of guilt, of abuse, of addiction, of insecurity, etc. I also wonder about the degree to which normal or even especially decent people struggle with negative thoughts and impulses. I'll bet that Joe Rogan is about 1 bad day from being the Devil incarnate, for example.

That doesn't exonerate anyone, ever, at least in my opinion. But maybe after all this, we are finally going to arrive at a better understanding of how so many people end up in these places.