On Morality

[blue]

Originally posted by ladysycamore
To put a small twist on the original question:

"Why do bad things happen to good people"?

It irks me when people debate whether there really is bad & good, right or wrong. Most people do know the difference but either are trying to justify their own stupid actions or are unwilling to take a stand for something. I agree with whoever said laziness is a big part of it.

To quote from That 70's show:

Forman (sadly): Dad, why do bad things happen to me?

Red (seemingly sympathetically): Son, bad things happen to you.....because you're a dumbass!

[smoothmoniker]

Originally posted by ladysycamore
To put a small twist on the original question:

"Why do bad things happen to good people"?

This statement presumes a lot:

That there are bad things;

That there are good people;

That “things” are a controllable condition;

That the controlling agent of “things” has sufficient power to subvert and control the chain of cause and effect and natural consequence;

That the controlling agent of “things” should have sufficient moral knowledge to weigh the morality of the person affected;

That there is a prevailing sense of justice under which people should only be subject to circumstances in accordance with their morally orientation.

Given all of that, we have a world in which a supernatural controlling agent manipulates every circumstance so that no natural consequence, no series of cause and effect, ever transgresses the moral weight of the subject.

Is there any possibility that we could still have free will in a world so completely controlled? And, if there is no free will, no volition or intent, how can we call anything moral or immoral?

-sm

[btw, I don’t think this post really adds anything useful to the discussion. It’s more like just doing the philosophical version of calisthenics – stretching out a statement to its premises and conclusions. Try it! It'll give you a head rush]

[limey]

Originally posted by smoothmoniker

[btw, I don’t think this post really adds anything useful to the discussion. It’s more like just doing the philosophical version of calisthenics – stretching out a statement to its premises and conclusions. Try it! It'll give you a head rush]

Nice one, sm!

"Good" people do "bad" things when they are forced (or believe themselves forced) into impossible situations. To give a highly simplistic example: A person who is honest steals a loaf of bread because he has no other way of feeding his starving child. Maybe this man lives in a poor African nation that is undergoing a famine and no international relief has come to his village yet, so even though he knows it's wrong, he steals from the village store.
Desperation is one answer to your question.

I think good people do bad things also out of a sense of powerlessness or frustration. A man looks around at the world and sees his boss stealing money from the company and getting away with it; he finds out that a friend's daughter was gang-raped and the police did nothing; his wife (who could get no health insurance because of a pre-existing heart condition) has a massive heart attack and dies, leaving him with hundreds of thousands of dollars in hospital bills; he gets laid off from his job and can't find a new one because at age 60 he is too old for an employer to want to hire him (they know he'll retire in 5 years and they can get a younger worker at a lower wage). This man looks around at the world and decides that it's true that "nice guys finish last," so he goes out and robs a bank or blows up the billing office of the hospital where his wife died.

The above examples are the easy answer to your question. Now I'll give you the one that no one wants to hear: Good people make bad things happen. Every single one of us has it within ourselves to be a hero or to be the worst villian imaginable. We all have our dark side. The fact that we live in something called a society and that we have a civilization is proof that the majority of people for the majority of time keep their darker impulses under control.

However, before we are members of a society, we are individuals. That individual has an ego, a "self." Bottom line, we human beings are no different than any other animal. We come equipped with a survival instinct that drives us to meet the basic needs of food, shelter, protection or defense against injury or death, and procreation. No matter how "good" we are, if we feel threatened or our instincts become aroused in one of these areas, the survival instinct takes over.

The irony is that human beings are hard wired to be social animals. Maybe in 2004 AD, someone can say, "To hell with it, I'm becoming a hermit." But to say that in 2004 BC and all the time before from even when we still lived in trees was to commit suicide. We depend upon one another to survive. To be rejected by our group meant to die. One human alone couldn't make it against the other predators out there, couldn't put aside enough meat for the winter, couldn't bring down a woolly mamouth single handed. A woman alone couldn't bear a child all by herself, hold the baby to her breast and at the same time shoot arrows at small game animals.

A "good" person will do anything to be accepted by his fellows. A teenager will shoplift if that's what her friends are doing. An honest man will lie if he percieves that the truth would cause his friends to reject him. A woman living in Nazi Germany in 1936 will look the other way when the Gestapo comes for her Jewish neighbor because she doesn't want to be the next name on the list. A student who has never cheated on an exam will fold a crib sheet up his sleeve to take an exam to get a professional license or gain entry into a prestigous graduate school because he fears the humiliation society will give him if he fails. On and on.

Why do good people do bad things? Fear.

[jaguar]

Welcome back =)

The other thing I feel is worth mention is people do bad things when they don't even know it.

Take for example, going on a P&O cruise, the chances are the ship is registered in Liberia and the money from that supports one of the most brutal and despotic regimes in Africa (no mean feat). The world's a moral quagmire, pick your fights carefully.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Why do good people do bad things? Fear.

I would contend that if I do it to survive, it's not a bad thing.

Originally posted by jaguar
Welcome back =)

The other thing I feel is worth mention is people do bad things when they don't even know it.

Take for example, going on a P&O cruise, the chances are the ship is registered in Liberia and the money from that supports one of the most brutal and despotic regimes in Africa (no mean feat). The world's a moral quagmire, pick your fights carefully.

Thanks, Jag. And I agree that ignorance is responsible for much of the bad things that happen in this world. As I understood SM's question, though, he was asking why good people knowingly do bad things, so I left ignorance out of my discussion.

Still, its a highly interesting point. After WWII the average German would tell anybody who bothered to ask that the German people didn't really understand that Hitler was busily killing 6 million people right out in the front yard. Its hard to believe that someone wouldn't have noticed this going on, but Germans at the time mostly swore that they had no idea.

I think they were actually telling the truth - on one level, anyhow. Ignorance really was bliss for the average citizen in Nazi Germany. If you were a person of integrity and you looked around you at what was going on, you were left with two nasty choices: Turn traitor to your own country and most likely be killed for your efforts, or accept the understanding and be quiet about it - keep your nightmares to yourself and go throw up in private. It was better to just "take the blue pill" and avoid the entire issue.

[nersiegerl]

A person's morals unfortunately is influenced by society. It is not the one person that needs to change his morals, it is Society as a whole....Society definitely needs some help with a lot of issues.

Originally posted by nersiegerl
A person's morals unfortunately is influenced by society. It is not the one person that needs to change his morals, it is Society as a whole....Society definitely needs some help with a lot of issues.

Well, it's a question of which came first, the chicken or the egg, isn't it? What is society but a collection of individuals? The individual members of a society form its structure and belief system. On the other hand, its very difficult for a single individual to change something he sees wrong with the society around him. There were Germans who voted against Hitler; I'm sure many Arabs abhorred the 9/11 incident; many white southerners were against the institution of slavery, but the society around them had in effect tied their hands. In this you are correct.

But then again look at the individual acts of conscience and courage which occurred in all these situations: the white southerner who was a member of the underground railroad, the German citizen who hid a single Jew or an entire family in his attic, the Arabs who fought on the side of the allies with T.E. Lawrence in WWI. There are still plenty of hero's among us, no matter what society we may happen to live in.

[ladysycamore]

Originally posted by ladysycamore
To put a small twist on the original question:
"Why do bad things happen to good people"?

Originally posted by smoothmoniker


This statement presumes a lot:

That there are bad things;

That there are good people;

That “things” are a controllable condition;

Hm...yes, I would venture to say that is true. At least, for certain "things" but not "all" things.

*sniparooney*

[btw, I don’t think this post really adds anything useful to the discussion. It’s more like just doing the philosophical version of calisthenics – stretching out a statement to its premises and conclusions. Try it! It'll give you a head rush]

Argh, too...complex...for me. :p

I'd just chalk it up to "life sucks" and God has a bad sense of humor (juuuust kidding...a bit).

[nersiegerl]

That's exactly what I'm talking about!