A discussion such as this sometimes seems too abstract. I am going to try to connect it to something I think we experience personally. Many of us here have been abused by someone we trusted -- at a time when our own "selves" were being formed, and we were told, or it seemed to us, that we were bad people. We took much of that judgement into our selves.

Now it is hard to think about what made those people, upon whom we depended, treat us that way. Our feelings are so strong that it is hard to think about them aside from those feelings. When we get some of our issues with them resolved better, then we can begin to think about them as themselves and not react to them solely as our oppressors -- to think about them more calmly.

Many people here consider abusers to be evil, beyond redemption, people who should not be allowed to associate with the rest of us. Their reactions to those people are very strong. On the other hand, some of us discover the possibilities within ourselves to become abusive. We find to our dismay that we have some things in common with our abusers. We find that given enough stress we can become like them in many ways. "There but for the grace of God go I"?
What makes the difference between someone who abuses and someone who has those tendencies, but refrains from abusing? Do abusers freely "choose" to abuse? Do they decide one day "I am going to abuse somebody, just because I can, I like to"?

My mother was an abuser. In some sense she enjoyed hurting us children. She got something out of it. Yet when I think about her, I do not see a "free" woman at all; I see someone driven, someone intensely unhappy. Do you think she "chose" that life?

So what happens if we start to see our abusers as unhappy, driven, tormented, possibly abused people themselves? Is it still easy to see them as "evil"? This is something I have struggled with, to try to reconcile two seemingly incompatible views of people. But I have found that the more I am able to work out what my feelings are about them, the less "trapped" I am by them, by concern with them, with their judgements of me. I start to be able to think about them, in a way less colored by my instinctive reaction to them. I start to be able to see them more "rationally" (I think), more as they probably are, rather than solely as how they made me feel.

And there is a lot of freedom in being able to do that. One becomes more able to cope independently with such people, to act in spite of what they do, to think about them, to not be trapped by feelings about them which one cannot fathom. I no longer think that using assessments such as "evil" are useful approaches to people. To the contrary, using such words makes one less effective, since one is still "trapped" and unseparated from them in one's own mind.

This is how I think that throwing around words such as "evil" and other judgemental terms are destructive: they mislead, they let us avoid looking inside ourselves by claiming that badness is on the outside, as a description about a reality in other people. It is hard to set aside that way of looking at things, since it is so common and approved of in our society, so much so that we don't even notice anything wrong with it. But it is time to learn to see things in a new way. The old way has not worked.