Practicing Kindness Toward Wrongdoers?

In response to last night's blog post, a friend of mine, Carole Tiefenbach said that she generally doesn't have any trouble being kind to rocks, plants, and kind animals, but that she sometimes struggles to be kind toward evil people and toward the crows and grackles that eat her baby birds and robin eggs. That got me thinking, should we show kindness to those who do bad things, and what form should that kindness take?

I know that we should always try to love others, regardless of what they do, but love and kindness are not always the same thing. Love is sometimes expressed in the form of correction. Our love and concern for others sometimes requires us to steer them toward the right path. When appropriate, this sometimes requires some punishment, but while punishment can conceivably be loving, it would be a stretch to call it "kind." Are there situations where it's important not to be kind?

I puzzled about this topic off and on all day, and the answer that I eventually came to is that, while one can never be too loving, there are situations where it would be wrong to be too kind. This idea hearkens back to Aristotle's Virtue Theory of Ethics. According to Aristotle, (almost?) any virtue, if taken to an extreme, can become a vice. For example, humility is a virtue, but too much humility can lead to self-abasement and self-esteem issues. Too much humility can cause a person to not evaluate themselves fairly and can be emotionally harmful. Similarly, too much kindness can prevent much-needed correction. On the occasions where punishment is necessary, too much kindness can hold someone back from getting the help that they need.

Exercising too much kindness can also be dangerous. If a person is acting violently and threatening innocents, it's our responsibility to do everything we can to prevent or end that violence and to protect the innocent, even when that means that we need to be violently unkind.

So, confusingly, it is theoretically possible to be too kind to someone. However, this is fortunately not a situation we often run into. Meting out punishment is not often our job. It's true that someone on a position of authority sometimes has to correct someone else's behavior, but that doesn't apply to all of us, and even for those of us who do have to exercise authority, that doesn't always require dealing out punishments. Often, we can afford to be as kind as we can manage. And even when kindness isn't entirely appropriate, we can still act out of love.

It is rare for the average person to have to punish someone else, and it's rare for violence to be the correct solution to any problem other than violence. Since we don't often have to face violence or enact punishment, we don't often find ourselves in situations where we have to worry about being too kind. In general, being too kind is impossible. Still, I suppose it's worth knowing that, under certain, rare circumstance, it's possible to be a little too kind.