RE: What is goodness?
July 15, 2020 at 8:00 pm
(This post was last modified: July 15, 2020 at 8:02 pm by Gnomey.)
Well, if you want to get scientific, we tend to look at things, situations, experiences, art, people, actions, etc. as "good" when it causes the release of neurotransmitters such as dopamine in our brains. That can be caused by anything from sex to chocolate to laughter to roller coasters to exercise to listening to music to looking at your phone when it pings.....
If you want to get into the morality/ethics debate, here's an interesting stance:
Let's separate morality and ethics. Morality is absolute: to be moral is to never intrude on another person's right to be. That is, to never take away their choice to do as they wish, as long as they aren't choosing to take away someone else's right to choose. Everyone has a right to decide how they spend their money, or who they have sex with, or how they behave; as long as they aren't hurting or impeding someone else in the process, there's no reason to stop them. Essentially, any act of aggression is immoral (unless someone has asked for the aggression to be afflicted upon themselves).
Ethics is more complicated. Ethics is about "the greater good." Some things are ethical, but initiate aggression in some form, and as such are immoral. Take one of life's two inevitabilities: taxes (the other being death). Taxes suck, yes, but they pay for things like roads, healthcare (in Canada, anyway), fire departments, social services, and other important things. But taxes also initiate aggression - if you don't pay your taxes, you're threatened with fines and jail time. The government is, in a sense, holding a gun to your head to steal your money. But we argue that taxes do good things; as such, they are ethical.
So, are immoral things always bad? Are ethical things always good or right? Well. That's where the debate happens.
If you want to get into the morality/ethics debate, here's an interesting stance:
Let's separate morality and ethics. Morality is absolute: to be moral is to never intrude on another person's right to be. That is, to never take away their choice to do as they wish, as long as they aren't choosing to take away someone else's right to choose. Everyone has a right to decide how they spend their money, or who they have sex with, or how they behave; as long as they aren't hurting or impeding someone else in the process, there's no reason to stop them. Essentially, any act of aggression is immoral (unless someone has asked for the aggression to be afflicted upon themselves).
Ethics is more complicated. Ethics is about "the greater good." Some things are ethical, but initiate aggression in some form, and as such are immoral. Take one of life's two inevitabilities: taxes (the other being death). Taxes suck, yes, but they pay for things like roads, healthcare (in Canada, anyway), fire departments, social services, and other important things. But taxes also initiate aggression - if you don't pay your taxes, you're threatened with fines and jail time. The government is, in a sense, holding a gun to your head to steal your money. But we argue that taxes do good things; as such, they are ethical.
So, are immoral things always bad? Are ethical things always good or right? Well. That's where the debate happens.
