I have a hard time even imagining how you reach the conclusion that he might be evil. Even the worst out of context headlines on his recent quotes just put him in the "gross" category.
I say this, and I'm very glad he stepped down. I've argued for years that he should have stepped down a long time ago.
In your reply here, you're describing sociopathy. I wouldn't describe Stallman as a sociopath but I could definitely see the arguments for it. But even the most repulsive things I've seen this man say/do never got me to think "Yeah, this dude wants others to suffer".
Edit: And no, I don't think he has a difficult time "figuring out what the problem is".
A psychologist assigned to the Nuremberg trials put it better than I ever could. “In my work with the defendants (at the Nuremberg Trails 1945-1949) I was searching for the nature of evil and I now think I have come close to defining it. A lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants, a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow men. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.”
What he does lack, IMHO, is a huge amount of basic, day-to-day understanding of how the world works. Such as the power dynamics of teenagers in the modern world. Things he's completely incapable of understanding because he chooses to isolate himself and live in an absurdly eccentric way. For fucks sake, have you seen how he browses the internet? [1]
He chooses to live that way because, for him, every single issue seems to be a hill he's ready to die on. It was only a matter of time until the hill was bad enough for this to happen.
Still, I maintain he's not evil, neither by your definition nor mine.
I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children. The arguments that it causes harm seem to be based on cases which aren't voluntary, which are then stretched by parents who are horrified by the idea that their little baby is maturing.
By my book, it's okay to call that evil.
>Through personal conversations in recent years, I've learned to understand how sex with a child can harm per psychologically. This changed my mind about the matter: I think adults should not do that. I am grateful for the conversations that enabled me to understand why.
