For example, in The Shield, the cop character Shane is super racist and says the N-word, but when a Black girl is killed, Shane gets really mad and wants to find and kill the killer or bring him to justice. Some CEOs who are straight-up classist would still help their employees, and if their employee dies, they would start funds for their kids. But why? Why would people like this do something ‘good,’ especially when there isn’t anything in it for them?
And why do good people do “shitty” things? MLK Jr. was having affairs with white women while protesting for civil rights and Gahndi used to sleep next to naked teenagers.
The answer is humans are nuanced.
people also justify and re-interpret their actions in real time. cheaters often think their cheating is justified rather than thinking of it making them terrible in the eyes of their spouse or family.
on the outside looking at the past, we have hindsight and context and oftentimes a different cultural and historical set of standards than other societies and other times had.
I find it particularly baffling when people like go back and read 18th century books and think they are bad people because they were racist or something. At that time, not being racist would have made you the moral outlier, just like being atheistic would.
Ghandi used to sleep next to naked teenagers, what?
To test his will. It’s fucked up.
Whaaaat???
Each person has a different definition of good. On a Venn diagram, you might even overlap with Hitler or pol pot on one or two points. Humans and their ethics and morality are complex. Different people have different dealbreakers.
Take the example of “even a broken clock is right twice a day” and therein find an answer.
Because people are usually quite complex and rarely fit into the neat labels people want to assign to them.
People keep trying to tell me all sorts of things about myself that I don’t agree with, and are objectively not true about myself.
Like based on my last name they assume I’m an Italian immigrant and often will argue about it with me and tell me how I must have grown up, usually based on TV stereotypes of Italians. It’s totally bizarre. For example I grew up on shitty processed white people food, not Italian food. I never had fresh proper Italian food until I learned to cook it myself in my 30s, and yet people ask me what it was like to have a mom cooking wonderful fresh food at home… and if say that wasn’t what happened in your childhood, they call you a liar.
Why whouldn’t a morally good character do good things?
Log off for real
Leave him be, for real.
Many comments have alluded to this: people are contextual.
I’ll add to this that thoughts are very, very flexible.
In some contexts we learn to think one way and in other contexts we learn to think in other ways. Our thoughts always get activated by context, either external contexts or internal contexts. For example seeing an apple might have us think we’re hungry if we’re hungry. Or it may make us think we don’t even want to see it if we just ate a lot. Or we might think of our upcoming presentation and that may be the context for the thought “I’m not prepared enough”.
Not only are thoughts contextual, but they behave in interesting ways. Often, we transfer thoughts from one context to another context. If we think “I’m never prepared for presentations”, we might end up reinforcing ideas like “I’m never prepared [in general]”. We may end up thinking we’re never prepared for dinner with friends or for tough conversations with loved ones.
Another critical feature of thoughts is that we can even change the role thoughts have in our behavior. For example, the thought “I’m not prepared enough for my presentation” may be seen as a literal truth. Or it could be seen as a thought and just a thought. In other words, thoughts can sometimes be taken literally and we can be fused with them or we can look at them from a distance.
These three examples illustrate my point: thoughts are ridiculously flexible.
This flexibility is what explains the phenomena you notice. That is how we end up with a capitalist who may have strong thoughts about family and may stop focusing on profit-maximization when their employee’s daughter die. That is how we end up with a worker who could have strong thoughts about profits and may stop focusing on solidarity with his peers when a promotion is offered.
My perspective comes from contextual behavioral science and relational frame theory.
What terrifies me, is I feel like a lot of younger people no longer can separate out words, thoughts, and reality. They seem to think if you ever have a racist thought once in your life you are irredeemable forever… it’s wild.
It feels like a evangelical christian craziness, just focused on race rather than sin.
As others have pointed out, there’s no “black-and-white” (if you’ll pardon the irony) way of categorizing people. Bad or good people are fictional. Even the best of us have ugly parts to how we behave, and otherwise terrible people can show surprising compassion. Our values can conflict and in the moment we chose to do something wildly out of character, or indulge in impulses we didn’t even realize we had.
In the real world there are no absolute heroes or villains. A man who gave his boots to a homeless man one moment, could beat another to death a few months later. Human beings are wildly inconsistent.
There are objective good and bad people. They are just rare. Most people are in the bell curve, and the vast majority of us hold some racist/sexist/stupid beliefs… the issue is just if those beliefs align with our peers, then they are good, and bad if they don’t.
I witness people saying horrible shit all the time, but as long as it’s against the ‘bad people’ people think it is great and you are wonderful for saying it.
There are no objectively good and bad people. Never have been, never will be. Every one of us is a grab bag of contradictions. Objectively good people are not rare, they’re fictional. If you seriously look under the surface, we’re all both monsters and angels on some level. Some of us just have better self-control and/or fewer opportunities to be actively transgressive.
right, so criminal psychopaths and such are sometimes good people?
and someone who never harmed anyone in their life, must also be terrible in some way? they are just ‘lucky’ that life never goaded them into violence or hate…
you are clinging really hard to this relativism. i notice people who do that are usually shitty folks who are trying to normalize their history of repeatedly bad actions, like cheaters, drunk drivers, and folks with who are violent or abusive. it’s always people who repeated engage in destructive behaviors who want to drag everyone else down to their level, because they refuse to admit that they are terrible folks.
funny thing about my violent exes, they always took this relativist stance on ethics, because to them ‘good’ was only what benefited themselves and the notion there is something more important than them and their immediate feelings was considered evil to them.
I mean if your go to is to personally attack anyone who disagrees with you I don’t know why anyone would bother to have a serious discussion with you, but for the cheap seats I’ll try.
Yes, Criminal Psychopaths can, in certain circumstances be good people, other than the fact that they brutally kill some people. No mass murderer has ever been arrested that their neighbours weren’t standing there saying “but he was such a nice guy!” That doesn’t mean I don’t think they should be dealt with harshly, but the reality is, there are people who are good husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, and friends who also do absolutely monstrous things when no one else is looking. While we’re at it, there’s no such thing as someone who has never harmed anyone. We’ve all done things that hurt people, and no, just apologizing doesn’t make it all go away. Some harms are more serious than others but no one is blameless. There are absolutely people who tend more toward good, and some that tend more toward bad, but I’ve also watched “good” people rationalize and try to justify some absolutely wild levels of cruelty under the wrong circumstances.
Look, I get it, you’ve been through some shit. I’ve been there and the idea that some people are good and some people are bad and as long as you find the good people you’ll be safe is really comforting. Unfortunately it’s not true. There’s no such thing as someone who is always cartoonishly evil, and there is no one who is perfectly safe, not even you.
No I do totally understand. For you everything is relative, and everyone is equally innocent and guilty of all things at all times. That’s why it’s moral relativism.
Non relativism holds that certain acts are irredeemable, and that being nice to your kids wild murdering millions does not qualify you as ‘somewhat good’, anymore than getting a parking ticket makes a non-murderer ‘somewhat bad’.
It’s not a personal attack, it’s an observation that people who morally relativistic views tend to do some out of their own self interest in the world. Just like psychopaths and sociopaths overwhelmingly tend to be amoral. I don’t know any ‘good’ people who believe in moral relativism… and they rightfully avoid people who who are moral relativist.
There are tons of people who cartoonishly evil, do you read the news? Half of the USA political class are cartoonishly evil people, and lots of average citizens are as well.
We clearly live in totally different realities. You seem to like as long as Pol Pot was a nice guy to you, than you can’t condemn him as evil… lol And yeah, if that is your ‘truth’, why would anyone who actually believes in moral judgement want to associate with you? You basically are writing apologia for pedophiles, murders, abusers, and etc, and claiming they aren’t much different morally from people who are genuinely honest and kind to others and work towards making the world genuine a better place.
And now you’re completely characterizing my statements and lying to make yourself feel better. Good day.
Yeah I am characterizing them as what they are. You articulate a defense of moral relativism, via very pedantic argumentation that equates unpaid parking tickets with murder. And then claim nobody is evil…in a world where objectively evil people are doing objective evil things all the time.
But hey, I believe in an objective reality and objective morality. Clearly I’m a terrible person, to a moral relativist. Especially when I judge them and dispute them.
I also notice lemmy has a lot of fan of solipsism who like to argue that they are very smart because there is no reality outside of themselves and you can’t prove to them that there is, and that I am clearly and ignorant fool if I acknowledge there is something outside of my own feelings. A couple of entire instances have this as their credo.
Morality is not a bell curve. No one is absolutely good or bad, because what is good or bad is relative to the person doing the action and those observing it.
by that definition, as long as i asked someone to kill me, it’s a morally good thing.
Yes, that’s the whole argument for euthanasia. Glad I helped you to understand it.
or just manipulating people so you can murder them!
The philosophical justification for fascism is utilitarianism which essentially boils down to the greatest good for the greatest number of people. It is as Plato said about democracy tyrant of the majority.
Nobody believes that they are bad or evil. People come across as this as their goals are just different from your own. Muslim terrorist believe they are saving the world by doing terrorism. Israeli Zionists believe they are making heaven on earth by their actions in Gaza etc etc.
So its just a matter of what particular flavour of evil u are willing to be for your desired outcomes. U have the choices of blind religious extremism (religious terrorist or Zionist or Christan crusader), hyper rationalism separated from emotion (fasicm or communism depending on ur interpretation). Hyper emotionalism which just makes u a useful idiot to whoever can present the ideology that signals the greatest virtue.
So what do u choose?
Well for one thing, people are complicated, but citing a fictional character isn’t helpful here.
“Man is a double being and can take, now the god’s-eye view of things, now the brute’s-eye view.”
Humanity is shades of gray. Most people don’t do 100% morally and ethically good things or 100% morally and ethically bad things. Likewise it’s probably a small minority of people that are evil and strive to be as evil as possible at all times.
People who are racist arent trying to be evil: they genuinely think that Europeans and Asians are more evolved to live in societies that require cooperation. They are wrong to attribute to color the effects of culture and education.
People who are homophobic arent trying to be evil: they genuinely think that propagating the species is honorable but hedonism is not. They are wrong to dismiss the social and intellectual benefits of cooperative sexual recreation.
If these bigots decide that violence against the other will solve their problems, they become far more dangerous.
And Asians? Over here people are just as racist towards Asians.
I’ve lived in Asia for over a decade and it’s not just anti-asian racism. Hell, as a white blond guy, I have it easy compare to black folks.
everyone is racist.
racism being some ‘white on non-white’ only thing is a figment of rich white liberal imagination. not to mention their ignorance of intra-minority racism, of which asians are particularly nasty ime.
why do anti-abortion women get abortions?
I think this just shows the way socially ingrained attitudes are not total, i.e. there is lots of room for variation and breaks - exceptions exist even to people thinking in terms of stereotypes or generalized patterns.
“Oh I’m different. I had a good reason.”
When you have some time for introspection, you’ll find good characteristics and bad characteristics within you. That’s normal. If you dig deep enough every saint can be an asshole sometimes and the person who just bombed to death 110 girls in a school can be a caring family man. We are complicated monkeys.
Your premise assumes people are morally consistent, and that’s just not how humans work.
Someone can hold racist or classist views and still feel real anger, empathy, or a sense of justice in a specific situation. People compartmentalize constantly. Having prejudice doesn’t turn off basic emotional responses when something concrete and personal happens.
Also, it’s not true that there’s “nothing in it for them.” There are always underlying factors like personal identity, guilt, attachment, social image, or even just the need to see oneself as not completely awful.
What you’re describing isn’t a contradiction. It’s exactly what real people are like, and why well-written characters behave that way too.
One of the dumbest but best examples anyone’s given me for the inconsistencies of morality. Is video game lobbies.
You can find people who do charity work actively protest for civil rights and fight for immigrants rights. Then the load into a Dota 2 match and call the Brazilians dirty f****** slurs every 3 seconds and wish they were all deported for us servers.
The only consistency in humanity is that it’s inconsistent.
