As Jeffrey Dean Morgan points out, Rick hasn’t exactly been portrayed as an angel throughout the course of the show, which means that there really should be a curve when it comes to judging Negan and where he falls on the evil scale.
Actors regularly talk about how they don’t think of their villainous characters as villains — as the characters themselves wouldn’t perceive themselves that way — but the world of The Walking Dead makes that conversation more interesting.
After all, within that universe the zombie apocalypse has completely disrupted all of society’s laws, and as a result characters who are supposed to be the “good guys” regularly find themselves doing scary and terrible things.