(November 3, 2022 at 11:16 pm)Tomato Wrote: If someone does something really bad, illegal according to the law bad, is there anything that individual can do to atone for his crime? Is there anything the individual can say or do to alter your perception of him being a bad person? Let us delve slightly further with a related question: does one mistake have to stick with the individual in your mind where you will always consider him a bad person?
(Upon reflection, this is probably better suited for a philosophy thread. A mod can move it if s/he deems it necessary.)
Yea, he could repair the damage done by the bad thing?
No, one mistake does not always stick with the individual. There are people who have done pretty bad things but whom I would rate much higher than most who had not.
My conceptual definition of a bad person is not whether the person had done bad things, but whether the person had strong propensity to do bad things.
A person with low propensity to do bad things can still experience a set of conditions which drove him to do the bad thing. A person with high propensity to do bad things may never yet had the opportunity to do bad things. I would rate the former much higher than the latter.
