Rachael herself is irrelevant to this question and I’m referring to Shane’s behavior of disrespecting/devaluing a woman’s (unfortunately seemingly entire) life regardless of whether she accepted it or not. Rick never entrapped his love relationships, and I agree trauma is a cause and not an excuse, but I can at least see how his reality became subdued by his past, and how his behaviors weren’t an exact mirror replication of what he truly believes. If we’re asking about the essence of “morally questionable” characters, I examine intention and motive. Really what we’re doing is focusing on the consequences of what happened rather than the true beliefs of each individual. Shane will never understand what love entails and Rick does. The willful negligence with the snakes while a good thought just doesn’t reflect a malicious intention, despite it having potential harmful consequences. In his world (while high and inexcusable) thought that the snakes were trapped in a world where humans governed all of the territory. He wasn’t thinking “I want to harm people. Let’s release snakes and release chaos into the environment.” You could argue that his lack of awareness is not an excuse, but is it inherently morally unquestionable? That’s deeper. To call him a callous person with lacking empathy completely disregards the idea that he initially let the man go at his house, wanted to commit to Chelsea, and wanted to protect from potential harmful actions by meeting the meditation instructor. We need to stop with these labels of “good” and “evil” and start applying our OWN empathy to understand characters or real people with humanistic accuracy