You Can Dislike Them and Still Be Fair
We all have someone we know doesn't like us. We also have someone we don't like one bit. Cannot tolerate even if our life depended on it. But if you were asked to name three good things about the person you absolutely despise, who despises you in return, could you do it? The honest answer is no.
Whatever we say, our judgments are clouded by emotion. Emotions are rooted in what we feel, not necessarily in what happened to us, but in how we interpreted what happened. Especially when we know the other person dislikes us too. Then we feel obligated to return the favour. In such cases it becomes impossible to even register the good qualities in them.
To say they have none is naive. Every human being has something admirable. Even criminals. You are judged by whichever traits dominate the perception others have of you. You need to see a person as an entity that carries both virtues and flaws. The definition of good and bad shifts depending on the context and the person doing the evaluating.
To assess someone with genuine objectivity, you need to separate their personality from their actions. You also need to strip the emotion from your evaluation. Your assessment of what they do shouldn't be contaminated by how you feel about who they are. This is a common error. Hate them all you want. But their actions must be evaluated on their own terms.
A criminal, for instance, is judged by what they did. It doesn't matter if they are warm-hearted, generous, or kind to strangers when they aren't breaking the law. All of these dimensions deserve acknowledgment, but the dominant fact is the crime. They must be judged on that basis, not through the lens of unrelated sentiment.
When you dislike someone, the temptation is to belittle everything they do. To find reasons to dismiss their achievements. To attribute their success to luck. We do this because we sense that appreciating their actions would undermine our grounds for disliking them. Hatred needs constant fuel, and so every act of theirs gets conscripted into feeding it.
If you assessed them purely on the merit of their actions, however, you could acknowledge those actions without surrendering your broader opinion of them. You don't have to admire their personality. You don't have to seek their company. You can respect the work without endorsing the person. This might seem like it would create internal conflict. It doesn't. It actually frees you. You uphold meritocracy on one hand, and on the other, you stop punishing them for things they haven't done. That is how objectivity is maintained.
A person can be judged on their character and on how well they align with your values. Their disliking you is not a verdict on your worth. Equally, your disliking them should not distort your reading of their conduct. Hold your personal feelings about them in one hand, and their actions in the other. Keep the two separate.