The Good, The Bad, But Hopefully Not Ugly

Understanding the relationship between “good” and “bad” is an interesting road. I mean we know “good” is good and “bad” is bad. Except when it’s not. Right? Or Wrong? I am not even sure how good the words good and bad are. It might be clearer to define good as beneficial and bad as harmful when describing human behaviors.  It also adds weight and shifts the focus more toward the impact on others which easily gets dropped as a consideration. We naturally think of impact on ourselves first but if we stay in that space then we are much more likely to make poor choices from a moral and social perspective. As discussed in previous posts, the purpose of moral thinking has a lot to do with humans successfully living in community with each other. The species runs into survival issues if individual members seek only to do what benefits the self without taking into account potential harm to other members. We are not nor ever will be islands onto ourselves.

Our lessons in benefit vs harm start when we are toddlers hearing “no” over and over and over. As we get older, we learn more lessons about good, bad, right and wrong yet as more concrete thinkers our view is the more polar black and white. In adulthood we start seeing inconsistencies with what we learned growing up and realize like our hair, there is a lot of gray!

There have been so many times I have heard or even caught myself saying, “She is such a good person” as if people exist entirely in one category or the other. Of Course, we ourselves are usually the good people, right? Then we hear “(insert identity marker here) are bad people.” We might take them at their word or be skeptical. Either way at some point someone we personally know is tagged as one of the bad people. We are affronted because we have seen them doing good things. In those moment we choose to either stubbornly stick to the good people/bad people polar understanding or revise our ideas based on the new information. In truth, we are ALL capable of beneficial and harmful behaviors. In fact, this sort of categorization of people can lead to significant harm.

I personally experienced the following. It was difficult and impacted relationships. Let us say the rule is: the good a person does cancels out the bad. Like a tally sheet with two columns. The goal in life is to have more tallies in the win column. It almost makes sense at first. Right up until you are on the receiving end of the bad. There is also a qualitative aspect to good and bad. How beneficial is the good and who benefits? How much harm is caused by the bad? It may be that an individual has done a lot of good things but if one or more behaviors in the bad column were very harmful, you will be unable to cancel it out no matter how many tallies you racked up on the plus side. Everyone involved live with the consequences and you still own it regardless of your intentions. Intentions do not change the reality of the results.

Just as how we process benefit and harm differently as we mature (hopefully) the same thing can happen with the ideas of “right” and “wrong.” Our added life experiences provide new opportunities for reexamination. Different situations may not be entirely as they appear or bring nuances into play that require additional thought and consideration. Weighing benefit and harm, right and wrong is not always clear cut even if you do have all the information. These moral dilemmas may not even be a choice between benefit and harm, good and bad. The choices might be bad or worse, good or better.

Wisdom can be described as the ability to apply accumulated knowledge and experiences to discern how to navigate life’s complexities. If we as a human species wish to improve our collective survival or our moral thinking, it requires us to continue accumulating knowledge and understanding in order to make better and better choices along the way. We are counting on it.  With this in mind, the question is not, "Where do we go from here?" but "HOW do we go from here?"