morals vs actions, witch one determines if you're good/evil

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Painrunner
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morals vs actions, witch one determines if you're good/evil

Post by Painrunner »

Basicly a random thought that popped into my head.
Let's say, I'm a morrally challenged individual with a very egocentric personality and a general dislike of humanity.
My personal tastes leave me endlessly interested in making others suffer, I express this via fairly humiliating practical jokes.
I apply for the army, having a "knack" for human anatomy and having an nice tolerance against blood and gore, I somehow end up being an infantry medic. During the long and succesful career that followed (succesful meaning you live through it) I am regularly faced with fallen comrades needing help. Being the medic and wanting to keep my job I try to let as little of them die as possible. Eventually upon retirement I am honorably discharged with several men owing their lives to me.

the question is, am I to be judged an asshole for my personality, or a fairly nice guy for my battlefield career?
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Re: morals vs actions, witch one determines if you're good/evil

Post by Forrest »

I think there's two different answers to two different questions here.

In my philosophy, the primary things which are good are bad are actions. Whether you live "a good life" in the sense of doing many good things and few bad ones is dependant entirely on the sort of actions you in fact end up taking in your life.

But then there's whether you're a good or bad person, which I would define as your situation-independent, overall tendency to do good and bad things. You could be, on the whole, a bad person, and yet be fortunate enough to find yourself rarely in situations where you would tend to act badly and often in situations where you tend to act goodly, and thus live a good life; even though you would not have lived a good life in most other possible sets of situations you might have found yourself in in another life.

Of course this whole good person / bad person thing is further complicated by two factors: people are complex, and they are always changing. Most significant decisions people make aren't simple "I'm inclined to act this way" reflexes; they involve competing inclinations, and the overall output is based on the complex interactions of those internal mental processes. Thus, you could have someone who is really, pathologically violent in nature "inside", as in he has very strong desires to hurt other people; and yet has an even stronger sense of duty, or fear of punishment, or some other mitigating factor that causes him to almost always do good things rather than bad, even though some part of him strongly wants to do bad. In that case, such a person would still be a good person, as he tends usually to do good things; though an otherwise identical person without that negative inclination would be a better person, as the odds of them doing bad things would be significantly lessened. Likewise, people may be very good people when one part of their life (say their personal life) is looked at in isolation, and very bad people when another part (say their professional work) is looked at in isolation; and making any overall judge of a person's character could only be done by summing all those aspect up. But that sort of glosses over things; just as you can say that someone's a good person overall but it's bad that they have these violent feelings, even though they refrain from acting on them, you can also say that someone is generally a good person and generally does good things but they're still an asshole in such-and-such respect, and being good in some ways doesn't excuse being bad in others.

And then there's the issue of change. People's personalities aren't just fixed sets of responses to various stimuli; present stimuli change the states of people's minds and give them different sets of responses to future stimuli. So someone may right now be a "bad person" in that the present state of their mind causes them to tend to do bad things, but given a certain series of experiences come to be a "good person". And there's all different levels of this; how someone's mood changes from day to day is just a shorter version of the same sort of change as when someone's temperament changes over a lifetime. So looking back on a dead man's life, you might say that he turned out, in the end, to be a good person, because toward the end of his life he was of a very good temperament and tended to do many good things and few bad ones; or you might say that he was really a bad person, since most of his life he was a total asshole who did shitty things to lots of people, and just tried to make up for it at the end, but with too little, too late. The only accurate thing to say would be that at every moment of his life his moral tendencies were slightly different, and that for most of his life he was an asshole, but toward the end of his life he was a nice guy. We don't try to describe one single value for someone's weight or wealth across their entire life, because being get fatter or skinnier, richer or poorer; likewise, people can get "gooder" and "badder".

So with all these complications involving judgement of people's character, I find it most reasonable to just judge people's actions, and respond to people in ways that will encourage further good actions and discourage further bad ones, i.e. make them a better person. And note that this doesn't just mean punishment; there are plenty of other, often more effective means of behavior modification...
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Re: morals vs actions, witch one determines if you're good/evil

Post by Viking-Sensei »

To me, it's not possible to be 'good' without having at least the capacity to be 'bad' and vice versa. If you trip blissfully through your entire life without a single evil thought popping into your head, it doesn't make you a 'good' person... just a bland one. Conversely, while a person who is incapable of recognizing or acting upon 'good' impulses is likely to be highly unpleasant, that doesn't actually make them 'bad'. Good and bad have to be a choice.

You also have to acknowledge that intent is not a direct corralary with outcome. How many have been condemned over the years for "meaning well" or trying to "do the right thing"? The same can be true the other way around... look at the major technological leaps forward we make every time there's a war. Sure, they may have been trying to design a biological weapon, but if they accidentally cure a rare previously uncured virus in the process... do we condem their accidental discovery as 'bad' and refuse to use it because of it's nefarious origins?

In your scenario, just as easily, you could have 'played god', deciding who lives and who dies, wielding your power of life and death as easily as you wielded a scalpel. Actually, a lot of doctors fall into this trap one way or another... the normal manifestation isn't abuse of situation so much as it is becoming an asshole by thinking far too much of themselves and their position's inherant power.

So, yes... you chose to do what appears externally as 'the right thing' for entirely selfish and selfcentered reasons. I'd say that your motivations were bad, but you still made the choice to do good when there were other less-positive possibilities.
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Re: morals vs actions, witch one determines if you're good/evil

Post by Forrest »

Viking-Sensei wrote:To me, it's not possible to be 'good' without having at least the capacity to be 'bad' and vice versa. If you trip blissfully through your entire life without a single evil thought popping into your head, it doesn't make you a 'good' person... just a bland one. Conversely, while a person who is incapable of recognizing or acting upon 'good' impulses is likely to be highly unpleasant, that doesn't actually make them 'bad'. Good and bad have to be a choice.
I would distinguish between being strictly good or bad, and being praiseworthy or blameworthy. Things which are not people can be good and bad, inasmuch as they do things which are to people's benefit or detriment; but only a person, someone who can make rational choices, can be blameworthy or praiseworthy. For a long time this whole notion of praise- and blame-"worthiness" seemed weird and mystical to me; what the heck does it mean for something to be praiseworthy or blameworthy, to be "deserving" of praise or blame? The only kind of rational sense I've ever been able to make of it is to say that it would be good to blame or good to praise, and praise or blame would only be good if they had some positive effect, e.g. if the thing you're praising of blaming is the sort of thing susceptible to such conditioning; something capable of making choices, learning and thinking, not just an automaton. This is the only ethically justifiable "insanity" defense I can think of: if punishing the defendant won't do any good because he already wishes he hadn't done what he did as much as he would after punishment. Of course, if he's really so incapable of controlling himself, then restraining him may still be warranted; but punishment for behavior modification's sake would not be, i.e. he's not to blame.

So, if you have some robot who is programmed to mindlessly perform certain good actions, then that robot is good, but not praiseworthy. However, if the robot has artificial intelligence (i.e. is an artificial person) and is capable of independently evaluating any given circumstances and formulating a response, and it is programmed such that its evaluation always leads it to do the right thing, AND it is programmed such that its programming can be changed by reinforcement and punishment (i.e. it can learn), then it is certainly praiseworthy, as praise reinforces its good behavior. But if you have such a robot who is "genuinely capable" of doing bad things - i.e. there are some circumstances where it would choose a bad action instead of a good ones - that doesn't make it any more morally responsible, that just makes it somewhat morally defective.
You also have to acknowledge that intent is not a direct corralary with outcome. How many have been condemned over the years for "meaning well" or trying to "do the right thing"? The same can be true the other way around... look at the major technological leaps forward we make every time there's a war. Sure, they may have been trying to design a biological weapon, but if they accidentally cure a rare previously uncured virus in the process... do we condem their accidental discovery as 'bad' and refuse to use it because of it's nefarious origins?
I'd say you call the results good or bad as warranted, and the intentions likewise. There's nothing keeping you from condemning someone's intentions and still being happy with the outcome, or vice versa. And if someone has good intentions and does bad things from them, you can still blame their stupidity or carelessness to the extent that those were factors in the bad actions.
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Re: morals vs actions, witch one determines if you're good/evil

Post by Shteven »

Hopefully I won't derail things too much if I recommend a movie, Sling Blade, to those interested in these topics. It raises more or less this exact question. It details a mentally retarded man who has killed in his past (when he was only a boy) because people were doing things that just didn't seem right to him (adultery). This is all the backstory explained at the start of the film, I won't spoil the actual events. But the question of whether or not the main character, played by (and written by) Billy Bob Thorton, is a moral character is left open. It is the purpose of the film, imho. And it's very well done.

Just how much of his actions he understands is never perfectly clear, but I do think he was making choices based on his morality.
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