I'm writing this because I don't know what makes a good person and I think I need more perspectives to garner a better idea.
Good people:
There are a few names that immediately spring to mind when you think of people who are considered as 'good people'. Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Mandela and an uncountable amount of other names I could mention.
Mother Teresa is someone that is considered a good person, I mean she has a Nobel piece prize and is a saint in the catholic church which are two of the biggest honors you can get for being good. Mother Teresa was a person just like anyone else so she must have made mistakes and done harmful things? You can't live a life without hurting a single person, purposeful or not.
Now Mother Teresa also has a lot of controversy surrounding her life and was criticized. for many reasons I will go into shortly, regularly by the media and independent journalists.
She was criticized for actually doing a lot more harm than help when treating sick people as the locations set up to care for patients were unsanitary, full of cross contamination, with a general lack of care for patients pain, along with having people with little to no medical knowledge making important medical decisions.
There is also lots of controversy surrounding large sums of money she raised, strong suspicions she was racist, relationships with corrupt individuals along with her stances on abortion and contraception which can directly tie her to the ongoing HIV/AIDS epidemic in parts of the world
Yet after all of this Mother Teresa is still remembered as a good person even though it seems she likely caused a lot more harm and suffering than she stopped. The other names I mentioned along with any other name I can think of all have some ties controversial practices.
Intention:
As these people are considered 'good' even through the 'bad' they did, are there stances as good people then down to the intentions of what they did? Is it because they set out with good intentions that they are remembered as good?
To me this seems strange as good intentions don't mean a lot if you are causing huge amounts of suffering, a terrorist may have good intentions of trying to raise awareness for the suffering and mistreatment of their people, but because of the terrorist act the intentions are null.
Direct impact:
If not intention is it then the direct or non direct impact that makes someone remember as good or bad, because a terrorist directly causes an untold amount of harm they are bad, they set out knowing they would cause harm.
As someone like Mother Teresa didn't actually give people HIV/AIDS or cause peoples suffering she is good? Just because her harm was not caused as directly, she did not force people infected to spread disease rather she just removed the protection against it.
Then if that was the case and direct involvement means you are bad and indirect, however loosely indirect, means the issue can be looked over. Too me that's like saying If I organize a robbery but make sure I'm the driver I should not be held accountable as I did not break anything or steal anything.