You don’t have to be shown. All it takes to be a good person is empathy. All it takes to be a bad one is its lack.
‘Plenty of monsters with support systems’ - so were they inherently monsters? If yes, then they couldn’t help it, like a polar bear can’t help hunting. We don’t call polar bears ‘monsters.’ We call them predators, which is what humans become when their ‘support’ teaches them cruelty, not care.
‘Plenty of decent people beaten down by life’ - same logic. No inherent goodness, just luck: someone, somewhere, showed them ‘don’t be cruel’ before it was too late.
I don’t believe in inherent good or evil.
Protoknuckles@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
SenK@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
That statement dangerously oversimplifies human behavior and stigmatizes neurodivergent individuals, particularly those on the autism spectrum, who may experience empathy differently but are not inherently “bad.”
Anuttara@leminal.space 3 weeks ago
omg thank u!!!
i was bullied for being “evil witch” when i was in school cuz i was autist and there was the meme that autists “can’t feel empathy”. i was like… watching cartoons and saw the “bad guys” and i thought i wasn’t like them… but then at school they told me i was?? it was awful
thank u for saying this
SenK@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
Yeah I have read on empathy and mental health issues. Good vs. Evil aside, it’s a terrible and ableist lens to view people through. Sorry you had to go through that.
Protoknuckles@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
They may experience it differently, but if they can act on it, they will be good people. Without being able to act on empathy, no matter how you perceive it, you cannot be good, and refusing to act with empathy towards people and other lives on earth is bad.
SenK@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
So if someone literally cannot “act” in some way, you get to decide if they are good or evil?
GalacticSushi@piefed.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago
I think the point they were making is that a decent support system is not the determining factor as your post suggests.
Even your counterarguments rest on the assumption that this is true. You suggest that if it’s not a support system they just be “inherently” good or evil, completely ignoring the more likely possibility that there are countless other variables that could factor into what kind of person someone is.
SenK@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
Like what? You have inherent factors (genes) or environment (the support network, “the village that raises the child” etc.).
ageedizzle@piefed.ca 3 weeks ago
A lot of this comes down to people’s free will. If you could perfectly analyze the reasons for every decision a person makes then those decisions would hardly be free.
SenK@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
You’d have to now prove that free will is real.