ArgumentativeMonotheist@lemmy.world 22 hours ago
This is close to the “if people were educated they wouldn’t be evil” fallacy, as if people like Henry Kissinger didn’t exist, lol.
No, as Hume brilliantly pointed out: shoulds and ares are fundamentally disconnected. You can be extremely smart and knowledgeable about the world and still conduct yourself viciously (at times, monstrously so). What’s the name of that physically disabled physicist that cheated on his wife and was just chilling with/close to Epstein?
The only real difference between a moral person and a monster is that the former 1) believes that, for every occasion and decision, some acts are visibly, objectively more moral than others; 2) believes they should always privilege righteousness before vice, and do the moral thing. That’s it. One of my closest male friends is literally illiterate and he’s an excellent dad who chooses virtue regularly, my dad was a lawyer and that didn’t stop him from being abusive to his family and to cheat on his wife, lol.
So no, stop it, that’s not how it works. Good people are good because they decide to be good (which is easy to see, you don’t need degrees, you don’t even need to know how to read or write!), every day, and even when they slip they still know that they DID slip, they don’t just rationalize their mistake as something virtuous (because they believe in objective morality and etc etc.).
SenK@lemmy.ca 22 hours ago
You’re mixing up two things: knowing right from wrong and having the capacity to act on it. Hume’s right: you CAN be brilliant and still vicious. But that’s not an argument for inherent morality; it’s proof that knowledge alone doesn’t shape behavior. Your literate friend ‘chooses virtue’ because he can. His life gave him stability, models, and the luxury of slip-ups. Your dad, the lawyer who cheated? He had power without consequences, which is its own kind of support system: one that rewards harm. The difference isn’t ‘moral vs. monster.’ It’s who had the tools to practice what they preached. and who didn’t. You’re arguing that ‘good people’ are the ones who succeed at morality. I’m saying morality is a skill, and skills require resources. No resources? No skill. Just survival.
ArgumentativeMonotheist@lemmy.world 22 hours ago
He was raised in the streets and used to sell drugs, which is why he ended up in jail for 7 years. To this day, he doesn’t know his mom or dad. The man had no support. Fair enough, “morality is a skill” as in the more you choose right over wrong, the easier it gets, it becomes a part of your identity you’re proud of, but I don’t think it requires resources the way you see it. Also, people can be and have been self-sacrificial, even in the absence of resources. The poorest people are the ones that give more to charity, there’s more union and prosociality in Gaza amongst the bombs than in any American neighborhood… Idk man, I’m not buying this. I think that it’s a variable that can affect your decision making, especially if your moral framework is flimsy, but not the main variable behind moral decision making.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding your point, TBF.
SenK@lemmy.ca 20 hours ago
You’re seeing a “self” or an “identity” where there are only conditions. My point is that your friend didn’t “choose” virtue in a vacuum; he finally encountered conditions - perhaps a moment of stability or a specific mentor - where pro-social behavior wasn’t actively punished by his environment, or it was even rewarded in ways that aren’t immediately obvious.
In places like Gaza, prosociality isn’t a miracle of “free will”; it’s a survival requirement. When the external world is hostile, the internal community must be hyper-cooperative to survive. That is a reinforced behavior.
If you put a “good” person in a system that rewards predation and punishes kindness with death or starvation, that “virtuous identity” eventually collapses into survival. We aren’t essentially “good” or “bad”, we are reflections of the resources, safety, and reinforcements available to us. Character is just the name we give to a long chain of causes and conditions that happened to go right.