If you can't control your circumstances are you still a bad person?

I would like to begin by saying that I liked Beloved. I think that reading a book and not being able to get past the shocking surface defeats the purpose of reading it. At times it was indeed a little gruesome but it added to the overall concept. I found it enchanting and I loved how twisted the story was, you never knew what you would discover next. With that, it also completely connected to my big blog question. Sethe believed that she was entirely justified in killing all of her children so that they would not have to suffer what she had. Everyone else did not believe so. It seems that a lot of the books that we are dealing with this year focus on a single, isolated character who has different beliefs than the rest of the society in which they live. That is essentially my question, can a person determine their own set of morals, or, do they have to adhere to society’s to be accepted? Sethe was entirely isolated after she tried to murder her children. Even until the very end she believed it was right. She refused to believe that Beloved was a malevolent spirit. So was Morrison trying to show that a person’s morals can become so warped that they are beyond help, like there are things that we simply cannot recover from? Or was she trying to show that a person’s experiences help in forming morals? Either way, Sethe seemed to have inflicted harm on more people than not. Is she a bad person or is it not her fault because she cannot control the experiences which made her that way? I personally think that most people are able to choose whether or not they make themselves a good person, but in some circumstances it is almost impossible to thrive and become a moral hero. Beloved raised many good questions. One of my main ones for much of the time I was reading it was “what the hell?” However, by the end I found that I had enjoyed the book and the many questions it raised.