On Goodness

Are you a good person? What does it mean to be good? What does it mean to be bad? Does being good even matter? Most of us gain a notion of good and bad early in our lives, but this notion is rarely reexamined. This essay attempts to answer the above questions through three lenses: a Western twenty-first century lens, a classical Greek lens, and an amoral lens.

If you walked up to someone on the street and asked them if they think they’re a bad person, they’d probably say “no.” They’d be right about that, too; the average person is not a thief, adulterer, nor a murderer. They’re not going out of their way to inflict harm on others, so it’s safe to say that the average person is not a bad person.

But what if you walked up to a stranger and asked them if they think they’re a good person?

If we ask them this new question, their response is probably going to be “yes.” They’re not a bad person, after all—we just established that. However, an important assumption lies at the core of that belief. Is it the case that simply not being bad implies being good?

The unwritten definition of good that’s found in Western society involves kindness, generosity, honesty, and any other characteristics of that nature. However, if we define good as embodying those characteristics, as actively ameliorating one’s surroundings and one’s neighbors, then the average person is not good. Instead, the average person falls into a space between good and bad.

This conclusion isn’t revelatory, but it seems like the importance of being a good person has waned. Most of us fend for ourselves and mind our business, which is natural, but that doesn’t make us good people. Perhaps we’ve solved the problem of goodness—the world functions pretty well, all things considered. If all of our basic needs are met without the requirement that we be good according to the above definition, should we reframe the question?

Intriguingly, we tend to frame both modern good and modern bad in the context of interpersonal relations. I’m a good person if I help others, if I give to others, or if I’m kind to others. Similarly, I’m a bad person if I harm others, if I steal from others, or if I turn my nose up at others. Neither distinction has much to do with an individual by themself.

So if we alter our approach, we might end up asking the following: Can a person be good in isolation, or do we require other people in order to consider ourselves good?

To address these new concerns, let’s travel back a few thousand years and look at what Plato had to say.

Using the Platonic point of view is interesting here because it views goodness in two extremes.

(1) In the ideal Platonic city-state, the individuals are less important than the state. Therefore, a good person is one who fits their niche within society and contributes to the benefit of the whole.¹

(2) That said, the Platonic dialogues center around Socrates, who (a) is focused primarily with his own pursuit of truth and (b) actively opposes the wishes of the majority by practicing philosophy.²

Socrates’ search for the good (the truth) doesn’t shun society by any means, but at his core he treats the development of his own soul as his highest priority. So is goodness the cultivation of an individual’s soul, or is it proper contribution to society?

If we take extreme (1) as an acceptable definition, then the modern notion of goodness aligns with it; we are good only in how we interact with others, how we contribute to the welfare of our larger society. By that logic, the decline of the importance of goodness should be a great concern. If we aren’t consciously trying to help our neighbors, so to speak, then goodness itself may slip through our fingers as we become more and more preoccupied with our own interests.

However, if we take (2) as an acceptable definition, then it’s plausible that one can be a good person as long as they faithfully cultivate their own virtue at all costs. That can involve interacting with others, but doesn’t require it. This means that the individual can be good in themselves, and that goodness has some resilience built into it; it’s not dependent on the cohesion of a state to exist.

The modern and the ancient Greek notions of goodness have compelling arguments, but they still feel incomplete. Can we choose one over the other? They don’t seem to provide definitive answers to our questions, nor do they tell us how important it is to be good in the first place.

If we are to take an amoral view, then our notions of good and bad lose their importance. They don’t become irrelevant, but the amoral approach shifts the question even further.

Hans-Georg Moeller, a professor of philosophy at the University of Macau, makes several interesting points in an interview with Ricardo Lopes of the YouTube channel The Dissenter.³ Specifically, when Lopes poses the question “Should we [even] distinguish between good and bad people?” Moeller effectively answers no.

As he states in the interview, there was once a period where a good student was viewed as a good person, and a bad student was viewed as a bad person. It was even thought that a “good student is necessarily a better person than a bad student.” Another example Moeller provides is the idea of a good father. Once upon a time, “a good father, according to traditional morality, was maybe a father who beats his children.”

In cases such as those, Moeller notes that we can still distinguish between good and bad without the moral language. As Moeller states in the interview, “a good student is just a good student.” A good friend is just a good friend. A good father can be a good father but also be a blight on the workplace.

Humans are complex beings, and, in general, it’s inappropriate to make a blanket statement about whether a person is strictly good or strictly bad. We can still judge whether someone is good or bad, but the amoral approach places less emphasis on generalizations and encourages us to make our judgements with context in mind.

Furthermore, the amoral view allows us to look at ourselves more objectively. By doing away with moral connotations, we are able to view each other without the fog of morality clouding our judgement.

Our original question “What does it mean to be ‘good’?” is nebulous, and it will remain nebulous as long as we are a complicated species. However, we may be better off if we put less pressure on ourselves to be good, and if we avoid attaching a moral label to ourselves when it is not necessary.

That said, embracing amorality is different from embracing immorality. Removing the good-and-bad-colored glasses doesn’t entail putting on the menace-to-society glasses. We may not all be good all the time, but we can aim to be good partners, good friends, and good members of our community, however we choose to define what “good” means.

References

¹ Plato. Republic. Translated by G. M. A. Grube, revised by C. D. C. Reeve, Hackett Publishing, 1992.

² Plato. Apology. Translated by G. M. A. Grube, revised by John M. Cooper, in Five Dialogues, Hackett Publishing, 2002.

³ The Dissenter. “#564 Hans-Georg Moeller - The Moral Fool: A Case for Amorality.” YouTube, 23 Dec. 2021, www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxZU0p9SdhA.