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Mee @reddthat.com

Why do any good at all?

Considering the fact the doing good will not earn you anything in anyway and that if you are not a millionaire or billionaire your good acts won't matter at all.

What's the point?

I had seen with my own eyes good people being manipulated and fucked because they did something good, on the other hand it's pretty rare for evil people to face any consequences.

Why should I restrict my free hands with ethics and why should I think about it?

Just a note: I am a deist, so I don't believe that doing good will get you anything in the after life.

37 comments

  • Because helping others around you and "doing good" helps build community, which you are a part of.

    If you want to look at it from a selfish perspective, doing good and helping others builds goodwill towards yourself, and sooner or later, you may need to rely on others doing good for you. It's much easier to get help if others think highly of you.

    As far as being manipulated, you probably shouldn't just blindly help people who request it. Keep your eyes open and your guard up when dealing with people you don't know or trust.

    • I spent my current age doing good and that earned me zero returns and some losses and I know a lot of people who had a similar experience to me.

      No one even feels greatful for the good I do.

      Respectfully your argument does not hold up for me.

      • Do good to the right people !

        Upvoted your post since this is a good question :) !

      • No one even feels greatful for the good I do.

        Who, exactly? Be specific. You are most likely helping the wrong crowd. Even Jesus said to not give pearls to swine, therefore implying that not everyone is swine. Spend time and efforts wisely.

  • Dude, looks like you are just looking for an excuse to be an asshole. Don't ask for permission, just go and make other people suffer, if that's what you want. Let's see how far you get with that mindset. Maybe one day you'll be the president of a country. Shrugs

    • Actually no, I spent my time on earth thinking and practicing the best ethics I could, even in sometimes if it meant I will lose.

      Currently, I don't see any reason to continue to do so.

  • Most people here are taking the moral high road or talking about the current state of society. Lets look at game theory instead to get some fundamental understanding.

    Consider a game with 10 players. Each player has two options: be charitable or be selfish. If they are charitable, they add 3 points to the collective score. If they are selfish, they add 2 points to their own score. All players decide at the same, and afterwards the collective is evenly divided among all players. So if all players are charitable, everyone ends up with a personal score of 3. If everyone is selfish, everyone ends up with a score of 2.

    If you are the only selfish person in the game, you score a jackpot. You get a total score of 4.7.

    Now consider the idea that you play this game over and over with random players, accumulating score in each game. If everyone is always selfish, no-one will score higher than 2. But if you, individually are never selfish, you never score higher than 3.

    If we consider all players to follow the same strategy, then we get an optimization puzzle for individual score. How often do you randomly choose for selfish? Instinct and DNA, but also culture and social norms create a common recipe in humans for how to make this decision. So while reality is more complex, we still act anough alike to get some wisdom when applying this assumption.

    But it turns out that we don't play these games with random people, but we are grouped by our strategy for choosing selfish or charitable (e.g. grouped by culture). And the groups also compete. If a group does particularly bad with their global score, they will be removed from the game (conquored, culture changed, etc). So not only does your choice for selfish or charitable need to optimize for personal gain to get a survival edge within your group, it also needs to optimize for survival of the group. A group with only selfish people will never thrive.

    Hence, in this simple example, randomly doing good can be good for the survival of your DNA and culture. Real life is much more complicated, but a similar balance of interests may be at play. After all, evolution means that life is constantly competing with itself, yet it also benefits from working together with itself.

    Whether you feel survival of your DNA and culture are relevant, is up to you. But when entire groups exist that don't feel like that, they tend to go extinct.

  • “It’s the small things, everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keeps the darkness at bay”

    Gandalf

    Do good, you never know when you will be the one ray of light through someone's darkness.

  • Because you shouldn't want to make the world harder for anyone else, and should be able to put yourself in someone else's shoes and see how they'd feel from your poor treatment of them.

    • What guarantee that if they were in my own shoes they wouldn't fuck me up?

      Why not focus on my benefit regardless of its effect on the world?

      Why care about a society that does not care about me?

      I feel that The Platform movie answer exactly this question, everyone care only about himself.

      • You can't control what others do to you, but that's no reason to make the same people in your class miserable. That's my point. Perpetuating the poor behavior will only make the world a harsher place, and that could eventually come right back to you.

  • If your perspective is "doing good = personal gain", then you're doing it wrong.

    You do good because it benefits other people, not you.

    I set up a Little Free Library and have spent a couple hundred dollars giving away books in my community, it doesn't benefit me, personally, but other people are enjoying it!

  • Because your evolutionary heritage tells you to. You're part of a social species, we're hardwired to be altruistic because it's helped us survive (some people's wiring is faulty).

  • The point is that you'd also like to have good things done to you.

    It really depends on how much you have to do, to be considered as doing 'good'. Do you consider returning a shopping trolley as a good act? It's a simple, small act that you do have to go out of your way to accomplish, and it brings some utility to others, which you might unknowingly be a recipient of.

    That's not to say you're expected to return every trolley in the carpark, or that all the evil corporations are actively trying to exploit this for free labour.

    Society requires that people do good to exist, while continued Evils tend to slowly destroy their community.

    • As I said before, I did not get anything from doing good and I only lost by doing it.

      Evil society exists, if the good has to be done, then why should I be the one to do it?

      • Anytime you do something good, you lose something of yours in doing so, be it time, attention, wealth, etc. Having good done to you, you only gain.

        That being said, good acts, and evil outcomes are not transactions, and thinking about it that way only leads to the belief that life is a zero sum game.

        Sure society full of Evils exists, but they're not stable. Do you want to live in such a society? Or do you want to live in one where the people do good?

        Obviously you're thinking of living in a good society, but then not contributing your part - but that's how a society slowly turns Evil, from the absence of Good. You can try chasing the good society, but as more good societies see your non-existent good acts, the harder it will be for you to join.

  • This is a struggle I find myself in now. I was very politically active in my youth, and I'm currently looking back on everything I did thinking "wtf was the point of any of it? Should I have just focused on college/employment the whole time? If I did, would I have been in a position to escape?"

    In the past, the big thing that kept me going was my local community. Sure, I never accomplished anything that reached a further stage, but I was at least making my local community better. Eventually though, I was given the opportunity to leave my shitty local community, and I immediately took it. Now I live somewhere great, that fully represents me, to the point that I started taking a step back from politics. No reason to campaign for an opposition mayor if I like my mayor, right? I still go to the monthly town hall meetings, if only to assure myself that things are going well locally, but I'm less vocal. I don't really need to be, and that's wonderful, but it's pushing me to be even less active.

    I'm sure my hometown has gotten significantly worse in my absence though, since visiting family feels like visiting a corpse. Did I even make a difference there, or was it a temporary mirage? What was the point of any of it?

  • (Quick aside, just wanted to mention that I hate how this post has -15 votes on it. Its a relevant question to at least discuss, at this time in history.)

    To answer the OP, because its the right thing to do, if you care about others, and care about how others would treat you. A.k.a., "The Golden Rule" (the Socialist one, not the Capitalistic one).

    If you need a more "closer to home" personal/selfish type of answer, I'd say because if everybody, and I mean EVERYBODY, plays the humanity system to their benefit over all others, then the center does not hold, and humanity collapses. And our lives and/or happiness then is at risk during times of anarchy.

    Try to remember that, as a species, we're very young, still evolving, from the animalistic ("Every person for Themself") to the spiritual ("One for All, All for One"). Things swing back-and-forth, over time. Can't have the Good without the Bad.

    Also, cooperation is bred into us, at the meta/species level, less so at the individual level, but still somewhat there too. It can be trained/psyop'd out of us during childhood, but its there. But overall, we're each other superpower, in a tame sort of way. Imagine any problem, then imagine what it would be like if everybody worked together to solve that problem. That problem would be solved.

    When you see everybody else around you cheating and winning, and getting ahead of you, its tempting to do the same. But if you're not that kind of person, you lose a part of yourself if you acquiesce to those negative feelings. Its better to be able to look in the mirror each day, and like what you see looking back at you.

    And finally, remember, there are others that believe the same way you do, even during the darkest times.

    Edit: Typos.

    This comment is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

  • You were born into a highly social species. The basis of human society (and that of many other social species) is co-operation and mutual aid to increase the individual's chance of survival and reproduction, make life for group members easier and, at least since Neanderthals and Denisovians, longer, rather than, as Thomas Hobbes opined "nasty, brutish and short". While it is quite true that there are those who game the system to reap more than their share of the benefits while giving less or nothing back, overall, those who give more are more likely to 'earn' the respect of their fellows and gain the help they need to live as well as possible within whatever circumstances they find themselves.

    Don't be too sure that the evil face no consequences. Until their book is finished and closed, you cannot know they will not wish once more to ride down the slope on Rosebud. I knew a woman who was the head nurse on a terminal ward for years -- to this day, I don't know how she did it. She told me one evening that, in all those years, no one had ever died wishing they'd made more money or achieved greater power, but many of the elite that passed through her ward died alone.

37 comments