(December 1, 2014 at 9:35 pm)Losty Wrote: Do you think there's a difference between a bad person and just a person who does bad things?I think that "bad people" are very rare. People who do bad things can be quite common, depending on how you define a "bad thing." Many of those are bound to be context-dependent. Lying to a spouse about a bank withdrawal because you don't want them to know about their present may not be seen as bad. Lying to a spouse to cover a gambling addiction probably would.
Categorizing people as bad is probably a function of one of our mental coping mechanisms: we will often define a person by a trait that is only part (sometimes a small part) of their personality until/unless we get to know them better. Even after getting to know them, that trait may still define them in our mind. "Oh, that's Tom. He's Bob's friend" or "Oh, that's Bob's friend, the cop." "That's Betty's niece, she plays the piano." And so on.
The "bad person" designation may be our way of coping with someone we don't know well, and that we do not want to know well, or that we do not want others to get close to. We don't have to specifically identify them as bad people; just describe their most negative qualities and that's all we will know about them. Presto-- a bad person.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
