Yes, but what should you do, if you know you’re a good person, and feel worthless of your education and upraising? Intimitating?
Not quite sure what you mean or are reacting to in the OP or elsewhere. Can you connect the issues you are raising with the OP or something someone has said here? (it may fit in just fine, I’m just not sure what you are responding to)
An “act” is deliberate. Not all behavior is deliberate.
What is the dangerous aspect of groupthink?
But leadership has everything to do with it, it’s just you who needs enlightment on that area.
Too tired now to write any longer meaningful post, stay tuned.
yes, ofcourse but the vibe is not something magical, “its not what you do or say its how you say it,” your are still acting and behaving. part from that its stereotypes.
i understand completely what you are saying, but the vibe are subconsiocus associations that are made of actions and things see perceive (sense) of the person, you might feel that someone is sad, but have no idea why he is sad or why you think it is. this is subconscious reasoning. or the vibe.
my point about intentions is that in the above case its hard to say who is moral and who isnt, i have an ability of deducoing peaople personality from intecracting with them far faster most people as well as doing it by looking at their fotos and hand writting. (im more accurate with people from my culture) for obvious reasons.
my point being im very good, looking at intentions, but most people arent. most poeple would see the above and say 2 is dodgy but since i am someone who is of the number 2. at a smaller age, i cannot by experience say that the person is not moral, although i can concieve he is less trustworthy.
note normal people are induced into morality by emotions and most never defy them but people like me, needed to learnh them as such i didnt acquire them fast enough.
I am not suggesting it is magic. I am not really saying what I think it is or isn’t, just that it is not actions, at least not actions we can measure or show as evidence. And it need not be acting or behaving. Sometimes a person can just sit there and it enhances the room or brings it down.
But maybe he is not less trustworthy. I think some of these people act morally right up to the grave. They may even do less in number immoral things (and in severity) than other people. Nevertheless they bring things down in ways their more fallible peers to not. (this last is one example. I am not referring in general in this thread to a specific group that is infallible but feel bad. But this is one example. There are some people who are really rather careful to never act immorally - with various criteria for that adverb - and may make less immoral choices than people who feel vastly better to be around than them.)
You tell me. And also tell me how group think and the danger of it relates to the issue I am raising about moral doing vs. Being. How do your ideas relate to the distinction I am making in the OP.
Show don’t tell. ACtually do the work. And there was no need to focus on me as a person.
OK
I’m not sure if it’s what you are saying, but it provoked me to thinking.
The acts themselves, the verbs of the description, are clearly important, but it’s also important to pay attention to the way in which the acts are carried out. Honest criticism is (usually) an ethically-desirable act, for example, allowing improvement and promoting clarity - but there’s a difference between criticism delivered kindly and delivered curtly or resentfully. In a sense, it leads in the direction of virtue ethics (as you’d expect for a theory talking about “good people”).
The utilitarian could fairly argue that delivering honest criticism kindly is a different act to doing so resentfully. Insofar as any ethical guidelines abstract away from specifics to generalities, kindness can be seen as a characteristic of good acts to the utilitarian, and the behaviour exemplified by kind people to the virtue ethicist. I don’t think there’s particularly a conflict there; that an old woman is friendly and does a lot of voluntary work for charity doesn’t excuse her contributing money to nationalist hate groups, and that an otherwise good person occasionally slips up doesn’t make them categorically unvirtuous.
On the other hand, the halo effect is a powerful psychological bias, and one that I think is worth guarding against. That people seem nice/noble/trustworthy can be a factor of their looks, their race, their height, their dialect… many different factors that have simply no connection to the relevant assessment, but of which we are not consciously aware.
I read through peices of this thread, maybe half in total. i hope I don’t sound insulting but all the arguments and speculation I see here are such that I had years ago with no guidance from other people or books. I tried very hard to hold to one way of thinking; a person is defined by his actions, his intentions, both, or both and one can factor in the quality of one’s life up until then. I could go on and on, but it never went anywhere.
Nonetheless, while I may have the disposition to just wave my hand at the whole argument, I’m really not that much different. While I no longer can convince myself that any one person has any more worth or virtue than another, with one exception (not myself), I do act that way. There is a certain ‘type’ of person that I used to loath, I no longer will admit to loathing them nor can I find an argument for loathing them that isn’t completely contrived, but nonetheless in practice (my actions) I treat them worse than others, for example I would be much less likely to do them a favor.
It seems you took a different approach in my thread (Prerequisite to a Discussion on Morality). There you spoke of those raised with good manners and how some of them (the most rational) could keep such manners despite adversity, now you seem to be admiting that some people are in situations they can’t win.
This is complete nonsens, no win situations are also a reality, why shouldn’t it be?
I’m not arguing against no-win situations, I believe that they are so common as to almost be the rule. I’m saying that you led me to believe that you thought differently in the other thread. Perhaps I misinterpreted you there.
I’m afraid so.
I think his point is that there is some interaction which reveals the essential quality of the person … during this interaction, the person is not wearing any masks or acting in a contrived way. Even if this raw state is exposed, I’m not sure how useful it is to see it. This ‘good’ person can act in ways which are directly contrary to his essential being, he can make judgement errors and good actions/intentions do not necessarily produce good results. And since life is full of trade-offs, one has to ask : Good for who?
‘The road to hell is paved with good intentions.’
I happen to believe that a good person is very rare when leaving things to chance. If we were to write our genes in the best way we could, if we had that ability, then truly good beings would be more common. Chance doesn’t have a sense of right and wrong, but it controls how we are born and how our ecosystem works. Many worlds are corrupt due to chance.
I think conventional morality neglects allot of things. For example, the purpose of a human life is left blank. They have to do that part on their own. There is no national goal or purpose. The purposes are rotating around money and base democratic senses. It’s crap.
I would say that in your first paragraph you move part way to the issue I am raising, but not the full way. I agree with the utilitarian in your example. The how is a part of the what. I am trying to get at something less measurable. I think we could measure most of those immoral hows in seemingly moral acts. Why do you always bring up Sally’s grammar misuse when she is going through a break up? Your tone is so judgmental, you sound angry when you tell me all the things you are doing for mother? And so on. Of course some would be hard to prove, but in generally we are talking about traditionally empirical facets of actions.
While I consider my focus to be empirical, I think it is less traditional and likely precisely because of fears and genuine concerns of things like the halo effect. The halo effect could be used as an argument saying something like ‘Given that we can react emotionally to factors that really have nothing to do with a person’s goodness, but think we are experiencing their moral nature, all such intuitions are meaningless.’
I don’t think this is the case (and note I am not assuming you think this is the case).
I experience some people as yechy and as far as I can tell I have to black box the issue of where there is some how issue involved. They do good or in any case not bad things, as far as I can tell. Nevertheless their presence detracts - from groups, from gatherings, from me, from people I know who come in contact with this person.
My focus here is not simply to categorize a group of yechy people. I am using this example as one end of a spectrum, a spectrum that involves all of us to varying degrees. Also to push on what seems to me an out of balance focus on acts in ethics. And on acts as the area to focus on to being a good person. And probably other stuff I haven’t thought of yet.
A position close to mine was raised by victor where he states that intent is most important for him. If intent, however, is seen as an internal action, it is not going far enough.
And also, there are positive versions of this issue. The person who just makes you feel good - not a romantic object - when they are in the room. Maybe they don’t do very much, but the party is better, the stress of living seems more dealable with and so on. Such people may do very little to save the starving in Africa and may not be as generous as other friends, may not even say as many kind words as person X, but still, if you think in terms of goodness, they seem much higher up there than people who ‘score’ higher or even much higher in terms of interpersonal, political or any acts at all. In fact such a person may be more morally flawed in terms of acts.
I mean, that is the first threshold for me in this thread: can people connect to the experience. That they are revulsed by someone in what feels very much like a moral way, despite the actions of the person indicating they are good or ‘my kind of fellah’ or ‘they do the right things’. That what feels very much like a moral rejection is made
but based on a reaction to the person’s presence
not to their actions.
Likewise being struck by someone’s goodness, also not based on acts.
It seems, from this post, like you can connect to this experience.
Does it seem like an important experience to you?
(I have been mulling over a thread on Corporate Culture. Even setting aside situations where the corporations are ‘doing bad things’ I find the corporate culture to be anti-life, often simply in what could be called aesthetic terms. The aesthetics of the building, ads, corporatespeak. If the only way that is valid to judge is via actions, than all of this is negated. It is simply taste. Well, sure, it is a taste issue. But some tastes are anti-life. I want Being to be noticed and counted.)
Hi Dan. I tried to connect this with my OP and the one sentence I could directly was the one I bolded above. I think conventional morality neglects Being and focuses only on actions - including the way these actions are carried out. I think I can connect to this absence of the purpose of human life, to some degree. What is missing there for you? What do you wish filled in that blank?
Moreno, have you ever met, or known, a ‘Good’ person? I don’t know I have. Does a ‘good’ person do ‘good’ things? Everyone does something good at least once in a while–even feeding the dog on time! (Hey, that’s good for the dog, isn’t it?) Most people don’t talk about themselves in terms of what ‘good’ they’ve done, because what they do isn’t done out of value consideration. They just do it because they think it’s the right thing to do, without thinking of the consequences.
I guess that means that good people aren’t utilitarians. Or that ‘good’ people come in all philosophies.
On the other hand, I’ve met people who just don’t like me. Given that, how can I like them? I think that’s a personality thing that can do more harm than good–so I try to stay away from them. Why flagellate yourself?