(December 3, 2014 at 1:09 am)Exian Wrote: Wouldn't that suggest some mental disability or imbalance?
I see that you clarified this as a practical definition; a way to use a person's actions as an indicator that they should be locked up or treated (I agree), but does this mean they are bad?
I mean, what else would describe a bad person? Maybe somebody who acknowledges the ability to feel remorse, guilt, and empathy, but admits to practicing the suppression of these feelings in order to commit more appalling crimes? This seems absurd. Too many stars would need to align, but what else would make a safe categorization? A bot fly? That's a bad person.
It very well could. From a personal perspective, when I was symptomatic (I have type 1 bipolar disorder, asymptomatic for about 3.5 years now), I did some dreadful things. A great many dreadful things, things I am not proud of, things I would not care to recount.
Was I a bad person? I suppose so, depending on how you measure it. Am I a different person now? Yes and no. I'm fundamentally the same person, with the same values - when I was ill, I didn't act consistently according to my values (and when I was sick, I acted without remorse, though I had periods of lucidity where I certainly did feel remorse greatly).
I'm the same person, but I'm not - the person who did those things no longer exists in one sense.
I suppose you could say I was a bad person with a good person inside screaming to be free.
To add to the above - one of the ways my mental illness manifested itself was a dulled sense of empathy. That was a result of past trauma, and it took a lot of therapy to overcome - but that capacity for empathy was always there, just suppressed, and not intentionally.
Would that have made me bad? I don't know. My actions were, and I take full responsibility for them. Psychology is a slippery fucker.