# About being Good Since a very young age I have often wondered about what being good really means. Because of my upbringing I have had unshaking faith in the traditional victory of Good over Evil. Since then I have grown and changed a lot. I still have that unshaken faith in the overall Goodness of Humanity, but I have come to question it more than once. I have been looking for why being Good should matter at all. In the modern context, people often follow rules built upon complex social structures, taking into account the public opinion and many other things in forming a judgement of what is Good and what is considered Evil. There is also a note of human bias, of which many many kinds exist which can lead people to disagreements in their judgement. ## How do we know what is Good and what is Bad If we try to ask what being Good even means, we run into problems very very quickly. The truth is we do not have a good general model of what is Good and what is Bad. Since pre-historic times, humans have used these terms to describe what seems to be opposites, often drawing parallels with other seemingly similar opposites. In earliest religions, including Hunduism, Christianity and many others, the following dualities have been used in attempts to characterize Good and Evil: 1. Desirable and Undesirable 2. Moral Right and Moral Wrong 3. Truthful and Deceiving 4. Kind, Considerate and Unkind, Inconsiderate ... Many many more The problem here is that no matter how many words we use to describe such a characterisation, at the end of the day it is a subjective definition. It is dependent on context, on time, on the scale of conflicts, on the history of parties involved and on the interpretation of actions. Historically throught religious texts, people have adopted the approach of trying to describe the qualities of Good and the qualities of Bad. Because of the subjectivity of the definitions, religious texts often give a set of rules to stick to. Examples include the ten Commandments in Christianity. ### There is always two sides to the same coin, Good and Evil as perspectives Many other religions such as Buddhism, and even the later religious texts in Hinduism suggest that in fact there is no Good and there is no Evil. In Western Philosophy, Pyrrhonism holds that good and evil do not exist by nature, meaning that good and evil do not exist within the things themselves. All judgments of good and evil are relative to the one doing the judging. But what a cancept is called is meaningless for the discussion at hand. The idea is that if a particular situation is bad and undesirable for one person, it might well be very desirable for another person, even though the situation is exactly the same. This goes to show that most human conflict is motivated by differences in people and how they look at a situation rather than the situations themselves. A lot of political debates have explored the idea of good and bad. Any decently educated and experienced political figure will tell you that their opposition is not necessarily evil. Although polarisation in today's world will tell you otherwise and with the advent of the internet it has become a common belief that there are always two sides and the side you are not on is led by pigs or any number of such metaphors. Pink Floyd is a very popular band whose entire albums was based on disapproval of political leaders of their time. Mny other artists such as Green Day, Linkin Park and Guns N' Roses have composed such anti-war pieces of art. But an artist's purpose is to drive home one single point, which all of these artists have done very well. In reality I might find that political opposites often treat each other like every other human being, hang around in similar places and the reason is very simple, they have to work together, whether they like it or not. Whether or not it is good for a country to declare war is a matter of strategic planning not passion. Whether or not the so-painted enemy of the state is truly evil is a whole different ordeal. ## Rooting the interpretations in reality, Life vs Death Ultimately it seems rather impossible to decide whether something is truly good or bad. It is complicated by the ever growing and complex world and will continue to become more and more nuanced as the world progresses. So what do we do? My proposition begins here, that rather than trying to define what we thing is right and good, we should work by the process of elimination and try to define what is certainly wrong and evil. The motivation is simple, science is based on this idea, the idea of giving up the search of truth but instead trying to eliminate what is not true, what is falsifiable. In science, if an idea cannot theoretically be proven wrong, it is not a scientific idea at all. All theories have to allow themselves to be tested and face the possibility of being wrong. Let us try to do the same thing with morality. Let us try to define what is evil, avoid doing said things, and then be content with the fact that we tried our best. We certainly will not become all good by this approach, but we will have, to the best of our knowledge, done our best to not be evil. With this simple idea, we will have become better than before. We begin our search by defining one very simple thing, which I am sure we will all agree to. Unprovoked and premeditated murder is bad. It is evil. Simple. I believe this will even hold up in most legal courtrooms of today. If one person thinks consciously about murder and devises a plan and commits to it, that person is evil. I realise even this has it's caveats, such as dubious, unclear motivations, mental health problems and what not. But we have to begin somewhere, and I am not even saying that this should be the de facto starting place to define evil. Im just taking an example to begin my demonstration. ## A presentation of Modern Human Conflict From here we can build. From this we can argue that any party or person when it knowingly causes the death of another party or person is evil. We can apply this process of reduction to historic atrocities, most of which will now fall under the category of evil. The extremist German regime during World War 2 was evil, because it propagated and committed the premeditated murder of countless people. The French ruling class was evil because even though it had been brought to their attention that famine is killing people, they continued to make choices which would knowingly oppress (and kill) the working class. There is an amazing movie called Les Misérables about the plight of the people during the French Revolution. But what about revolutions themselves? Did not the uprising during the French Revolution kill people? The leaders of the revolution literally severed the heads of the nobility in a public display, doesn't that count as murder? We would still classify that as a triumph of good over evil. Some people would argue that what we are really talking about here is the Greater Good. It is the idea of that the suffering of many people outweighs the suffering of a few people, and that people themselves are fully considered to be equals. But I think even this idea has a lot of problems when it comes down to negotiating what is overall _more_ but individually minor suffering of a lot of people and what is overall _less_ but individually great suffering of a few peoople. For example, very famously the mathematicians and engineers who had broken the German enigma code during World War 2 had to allow some British ships to be sunk by German attacks because otherwise they would divulge the information that the infamous Enigma Code had been broken, leading to the British losing sight on German communication, which could arguably cause far greater deaths overall. What is the Greater Good is often unclear and not satisfactory to many. But with the method of elimination, we know that suffering is unprovoked, it is evil. Therefore war doesn't necessarily count as evil if it is motivated by unprovoked, premeditated war from the enemy. The extent of war waged in response will still have to be constraint though, one should not end up using _more force_ than has been deployed by the enemy, be cause then one risks doing damage that could be unprovoked. ## Interpreting the Good and the Bad: Escalations From this lenghty discussion, I present my conclusion here. Escalation is evil. In any human conflict, be it war, be it your daily office arguments, or be it a domestic disagreement, escalation is the heart of evil, becuase it leads to a spiral. When you believe that someone has been unfair to you, you gain the right to be a bit unfair to them, but not too much so as to escalate the situation. The middle ground will be found when situation is not changing, when neither side has escalated the situation and therefore both are facing the negative consequences of conflict. I would like to borrowing a concept from Game Theory. In games with multiple rational people, all acting according to their self interest, the best strategy is to find a mutually beneficial strategy that everyone follows. This involves two parts, everyone should follow the same strategy, and the strategy should benefit everyone even if by a little. Game theory proves that players who reject a larger profit giving strategy by opting such a cooperative strategy end up further ahead than if they had adopted the strategy which gives a larger benefit to them. And the reason is simple, if you give me 1 unit of benefit every year, and in return I give you 1 unit of benefit, we will eventually spiral and our mutual benefit will become large enough that it will be more profitable for me than to adopt an uncooperating strategy which gives me a fixed 10 units of benefit every year. In conclusion, the true way to be good, is to in fact, not be evil. Escalation in human conflict leads to evil, and as game theory will tell us, cooperation is better than unhealthy competition. ## Further Questions How does this resolve the televangelist/spiritual guru problem where one party is self deceived or brain washed?