Good or bad? The devil’s in the details
In an effort to deduce if I’m a good person or not, I recently ran myself through a series of rigorous hypotheticals. If I had grown up in 1930s Germany, would I have been a Nazi? If I won Lotto, how much of it would I give away? If I was stuck on a boat with two friends and I had to kill one of them to survive, how would I pick which one?
Well, the results are in, and I don’t say this lightly, but in every scenario I unfailingly did the right thing. It would not be overstatement to say I was borderline heroic. I wasn’t a Nazi, I gave away all my money to charity, and I killed myself to save my friends. Hypothetically, without question, I am a very good person.
However, having never faced these scenarios in real life, I felt the results were inconclusive and, to be honest, the real-life version of me doesn’t fare as well.
In real life, I don’t give all my money away. I keep basically all of it, sometimes because I need it and sometimes because I just want to go to the movies. In real life, I’m not sure I would have the guts to sacrifice myself for the greater good, it seems scary!
And in real life, I’m not a Nazi. Turns out, that one matches perfectly with the hypothetical.
As it is, that particular one really requires no effort on my behalf and I can quite happily go through life comfortable that I’m not a Nazi. It’s a daily moral win for me.
I’d love to think I’m as good and virtuous as the hypothetical me, but the portfolio of evidence just isn’t there to support that.
Instead, I have to assess myself not on the basis of my thoughts, but my actions.
The next step is just figuring out which actions are the good ones. There’s the obvious stuff, such as don’t murder anyone.
I’m confident I should be able to keep to that, unless I suddenly act out one day for attention.
I’m more concerned about the smaller, more complicated dayto-day stuff.
How do you know that the life you’re living is a good and moral one? When I was younger and growing up Catholic, I more or less knew what was expected of me and I fancied myself a pretty good all-rounder.
For the most part I struggled to come up with big confessions to make to the priest and would always say something along the lines of ‘‘forgive me Father, for I have sinned, I was mean to my sister’’.
It was, at its core, a phoney confession, as I was very rarely mean to my sister in a way that I felt was unjustified.
Now, as an agnostic adult (which is my preferred lifestyle), I’m less sure of the parameters and how I’m supposed to behave. The rules are less clear and I’m not sure what everyone else is up to.
It’s almost as if we need a system where we check in every now and then with someone who is morally good, and I just realised I’m describing confession. Maybe this is the key.
Maybe we need to be having these discussions rigorously among ourselves, so that we can more definitively figure out what is good and bad.
Or maybe we have to live in the hell that is ‘‘constantly operating in grey areas and balancing decisions based on all the information available to us, hoping that whatever guides us are principles of fairness and compassion’’.
Honestly, it might be easier just to go back to church.