If you compared pirates to, say, the general population of Britain or France, sure. But that’s not really the point. These are men used to rough, brutal lives. Of course they’d be different from an artisan in London. I think the better comparison would be to merchant sailors or members of the British/French/Spanish navy, who definitely committed atrocities of their own. And looking at it from a larger scale, pirates never brutally colonized large swathes of Africa and the Caribbean, established slavery, or committed genocide. So you know, I’d say any individual atrocities committed by pirates were less than that of the system their more civilized counterparts contributed to.