03/10/2025
Someone stole our phone! We were out to dinner, when a gentleman came up to chat about our walk and his time on the Camino. Afterwards, as we were about to leave, Paige noticed her phone was missing. I soon realized that guy must have pocketed it! As I’m walking inside to find him, he comes out. Paige calls her phone while I’m confronting him about it. It lights up in his pocket, and I reach in and pull it out. “I dunno how that got in there,” he says. And we bid him an abrupt farewell.
Perhaps it was an automaticity—he just felt the phone in front of him and, like a million times before, slipped it where phones go. This was not the subjective impressions either of us experienced, but perhaps.
If it were intentional, are we entitled to some kind of righteous indignation? Because that’s how we respond to these things right? A feeling of moral repugnance: “How dare they? What a terrible person.”
I grew up with people who stole things—and who did a variety of other “morally reprehensible” things. Now, most of them have poured themselves into their families. Now, they are hardly as much what they once were as they are something entirely new. But even back then, while engaged in things that shouldn’t be socially accepted, they would have done a great deal to help me, if I needed anything. They still had some ethical code even if, like most of us, it bent under the weight of selfishness at times.
So was our thief evil? Do I know enough to make a moral judgment? What makes a person “good or bad”? Is it the ratio of their kind actions to their harmful ones—some hidden ledger that tallies the score? Or is goodness found in intention, in the heart behind the deed? If so, what do we make of the old warning that the road to hell is paved with good intentions? And if goodness is a mixture of both action and intention, the question remains: what proportion makes someone worthy of the label? One kind act for every three cruel ones? Ten? Seriously! If we’re going to label people as such, we should at least know when the label is appropriate or not! How much goodness negates bad and how do we define our terms? The formulas collapse before we even begin.
Maybe the problem lies, not in finding the right formula, but in the stories which drive our interpretations of others’ character. Maybe the pursuit of being a “good person” requires us to see through the labels altogether, abandoning them in exchange for a harder, more nuanced reality.
We’re not going to throw a fit about this guy, as if we never should have expected such a thing eventually, as if he should be identified as nothing more than a common criminal, as if he should be cast into social oblivion. We think of his influences, his predispositions, his unknowing, and his potential. Regardless of our experience with him, we can be certain that there is a person in there worth loving. It’s not that we should accept such actions in society. But when it comes to the labels and stories which inform our understanding, we should see them for the reductive concepts that they are. We are all composed of greater and lesser aspects which are only ever viewed through a relative and subjective lens. We will not reduce another to a lesser moment. And we will not let offense blind us to these realities.
We are responsible for our actions, but we are never reducible to them. A single act does not define a person, though patterns of action shape character over time. Don’t be lured into easy demonization; we can hold people accountable while still seeing their humanity.
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