are you good?

nah :c

all jokes aside.. being good is often mocked godde.. i believe some kind of shame is behind such actions

Peter Singer has argued rather famously that almost everyone is evil, under the premise that:

1. Suffering and painful death is bad

2. If you can prevent that at minimal cost to yourself you should (e.g. letting someone drown because the life preserver would require you to get up from your chair is also bad)

3. There are organizations that prevent this all over the world (e.g. Action Against Hunger, Doctors Without Borders, etc.)

His argument is that if Action Against Hunger can turn $20 into saving someone's life, then you should. Almost no one does this, so they're evil. Personally I think there's an argument that by doing this on a societal level we reward societies that don't take care of their people. Dictators have long used humanitarian aid to subsidize the military because every dollar that goes to keeping their subjects alive and productive is one they can put to something else. Was the FBI evil when they decided that stopping hostage takers and ransomers from getting away with their crimes was more important than saving the hostages? It's hard to say, because those aren't problems we have anymore in the US precisely as a result of those actions.


Psychologically, people tend to treat morality as a bank account. As social creatures, we're caught in a conundrum between doing things that increase our own ability to survive and reproduce (extracting value from our tribe) and doing things that enhance our social standing (investing value in our tribe). From a purely genetic standpoint, the incentive is to extract as much value from others as possible without getting kicked out of the tribe (for a social creature, this is death), and so this explains some of the rather unsavory individuals you can encounter doing charity work.


It's also worth noting that the list that you give is context dependent. My girlfriend would probably agree with that list. My coworkers might agree with about half of it. My landlord might agree with a few. Those who have fucked around and found out probably agree with none. Traits like selflessness, tolerance, and generosity aren't automatic goods. "Evil Thrives When Good Men Do Nothing" and all that.

Which is a rather long winded way to say that there's no point trying to determine if you're a good person, we've already established that Godde is the best person and everyone else is just a poser trying to copy his style.

I think you can be a good person but going around saying that you are a good person without actually doing good things is bad.

Yes, I think you should try to be a good person, because typically, being a good person is just what other people expect of you.

However, what I am saying is a that it is taboo to say that a person is more or less "good" in western society because doing so would imply that some people are worth more than others.

On an interpersonal level, we typically reward people who acts good against ourselves.
However, if we as a society, only reward people who we deem are good or who have done good in the past, then some people will never receive any rewards and might in turn, never do good to us.

I'm alright thanks

This is a great question SmokeDragon! (I disagree with some of your list though)

On "can I call myself good", I am always perplexed at those, usually non-religious, that seem to think it is as easy as "just being good". If I am being honest, most of these virtues I do not routinely show. The reason this is a problem when it comes to calling myself good, I explain by analogy:

We usually consider elderly people to be frailer than young people.
We usually consider whoever routinely benchpresses 90kg strong.
We usually consider those who run 100 meters in less than 10 seconds fast.
We usually consider the top 10 matchmaking/custom players here to be better players.

What makes these facts intuitive? I would say it is:
Because elderly people usually have to put in more effort than young people to lift things, move around, etc
Because people are unable to bench 90kg, and of those who can, can only do a few reps.
Because few people, in societies where being overweight is >40% of the population, can even run 100m without being winded, let alone run 100m in less than 10 seconds.
Because the top players can do things with their units and gameplan that a lot of people cannot.

All of this shows a principle we are not usually thinking about consciously:
The better we are at something, the easier it gets to us.

That is why we say:
"You make it look easy!"
Or why Sun Tzu can say:
"The skillful warrior of old won easy battles"

For myself, I don't spend much time calculating every dagger infiltration - if you've ever had the misfortune of losing a factory to me sending 15 daggers at you, you know what I'm talking about. For me, sneaking daggers through gaps is a normal part of my playstyle, and I don't spend any effort hold firing to snipe your lotus, so I take less losses, I don't struggle focus firing things whilst moving my daggers, I don't struggle finding gaps through lotus walls.

But if you're new, you're probably fighting a bit with the controls, or struggle with understanding how many of a raider you need to kill a lotus, scalpel/moderator One Salvo KO breakpoints...

Now, if I am not extending the above examples too far:
Surely, if you are not good at doing something, you find it hard? And if you find it hard, you are not good at it? This is why students say Engineering Calculus is hard, because they are not good at it (and I'm not that good either).

So, if we find the many higher ideals in many religions or philosophies difficult to attain, or if we, being honest, cannot reliably carry out even SmokeDragon's list, does it not show that you are not good at doing good? Certainly, the very fact people recognize that these virtues are "higher" and "strive" to cultivate these should give us pause:

We have to cultivate these virtues because they are not naturally in us.
We need to check our tongues when we get angry because we find it easy to speak harshly.
We remind ourselves to be peaceful when insulted because we find it easy to lash out.
If we are being honest, it takes us focus to focus on someone else instead of thinking about what I am going to do, or what I am going to say.
We find it easier to argue than it is to understand.

Concluding, we find these things hard - perhaps it is easier when alone, because it appears that it is a lot easier to be peaceful when no one is "bugging" you, which shows something about us. That we are not, contrary to our own beliefs, good people. We are rash, angry, self-absorbed, argumentative people. Just like we call someone who finds it difficult to stand upright unstable, so we should call ourselves, who find it difficult to do good, "not good".

Believing myself a good person is too dangerous. It means I'm downplaying or outright blinding myself to my own flaws. It means I'm willing to proclaim my actions good by virtue of my own virtue, and ignore some amount of evidence to the contrary, or I'm attempting to balance goods against unrelated evils which is no comfort to the victims.

I aspire to be a good person. I never call myself one.