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If you dig up a skeleton, can you tell if that person was evil or charitable in his lifetime? We're all merely copies of each other and are equally capable of all the good and all the bad in the world depending on our individual circumstances and upbringings. Nothing is black and white and everything is gray. You'd be Putin too if you were in his shoes.
That is a remarkably bad hot take
Excellent point!
Polish your mirror and look deep, you are the universe as am I, as was Gandhi and as is Putin, capable of all good and all evil, all shaped by life like a rock shaped by a river. The rock has no choice but to take that shape. The rock is special but no more so than any other rock, so don't assume you'd do any different if you were in their situation.
It is completely true; the only reason to punish bad behavior is to disincentivise it.
We are not born with inherent understanding of good, bad, and what ends justify the means. It's all absorbed from our surroundings.
For example, you can be an openly corrupt authoritarian leader or CEO of massive evil corporation, and see yourself as good as you learned to put your family first and that randoms are all self-interested, so you might be as well in the name of something you hold dearer.
There are many ways to corrupt a person's thinking in a way that is hard to unfuck as it gets fundamental. Harder, even, if the base idea is shared by many.
In that regard, getting cruel is, otn the practical side, only really an attempt to reinstate other values, or, more commonly, implant fear in others, so they might consider the danger too high and chicken out.