Multiple consistent evil acts anchor attribution of evil to a person

Evidence

If we have an intuitive sense of an evil act, how do we pass from that to a recognition of the evilness of a person? Obviously, an evil person is one who has committed an evil action, and we are even more certain of our attribution of evilness if that individual has committed many evil actions, particularly if they all seem to point to some consistent origin of that evil, that is, to locate the evildoer in some particular corner of the linked set of domains that represents our conceptualization of evil. Saddam Hussein is a current candidate, as was Ted Bundy, the psychopathic serial killer of young women. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 3877

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Controlling another’s acts should make one discount those acts as evidence of character — Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber (eds.), Understanding Genocide: The Social…, 357