Four kinds of good
A conversation in Sunday School a few days ago led me to consider how much more complicated it is to make good11 Good as in righteous, moral, ethical, virtuous; not the also-interesting but distinct ideas of effective, efficient, skilled, adept. choices when in a context like war than when in a context like charitable giving. Reflecting on this topic since, I’ve found it helpful to internally distinguish between several kinds of good actions.
The most straightforward kind of good is doing things that others appreciate you doing. Giving charity, being a friend, comforting those who are suffering, leaving places better than you found them: the sort of things that are encompassed by the golden rule.
Kindness does not mean that no one suffers or is harmed. There are some mutually-beneficial situations where the giver’s sense of well-being for being kind outweighs the value of what they gave up or the act and those that follow it lead everyone to a better state than anyone started in. However, there are also acts of kindness that are true sacrifices, costing the actor time and resources and emotional wellbeing in order to benefit the acted upon.
Kindness differs from other forms of goodness primarily in that those (if any) who are harmed are the ones choosing to act. Everyone is either an actor or a beneficiary.
Sometimes there are actions that seem clearly good and in the best interest of everyone involved, but that some involved people don’t yet see in that light. Parents run into these situations often, keeping children from having what they want because those things would not be good for them in the long run (or sometimes even in the moment), or because denying these desires is part of a larger effort to teach them consistency, self-control, resource allocation, and other important life skills. Although I call this category of goodness parenting
, it also includes things like keeping intoxicated people from acting on poor impulses, holding interventions, preventing suicide, and other unwanted but later appreciated help.
Both kindness and parenting seem to the actor to be in the best interest of those acted upon; but with kindness the acted-upon agrees, while with parenting they do not yet agree.
Defining evil is not straightforward, but it generally involves harming others without a larger form of goodness superseding that harm. Law enforcement, peace keeping, and self defense are often seen as being verse evil goodness. However, not everyone sees these situations the same way: what looks like preventing crime to one person might look like enforcing oppression to another.
Versus evil actions can be further broken down into two forms. Some evil actors are aware that what they are doing is bad but choose to do it anyway: vandals, muggers, and the like. Others believe that their actions are justified by something like a Robin Hood sense of equity, a vigilante sense of justice, or a dehumanized view of the victims that makes harming them seem laudable or fair play. This distinction rarely has much bearing on the attitude of the versus evil actor.
Unlike parenting, versus evil actions do not expect the people acted upon to ever appreciate the action: they are being impeded or harmed to protect their victims, not to advance their interests. Some versus evil actors believe that their actions are saving the acted upon from some harm that the acted upon don’t accept, such as judgment in the afterlife or a life of guilt, which can blur the line between versus evil and parenting action.
Sometimes it is evident that people’s interests are at odds with one another and that each party feels the preponderance of justice and right on their side.
The quintessential example of this is when religions teach incompatible things, such as having the same holy land or claiming the same historical religious leader but disagreeing on what they taught. But this is not limited to religion: many topics that spawn political arguments have a degree of this, with people on all sides believing their side is not just clever but truly good and other sides are not just mistaken but actually evil.
Religion wars are a complicated topic. When your personal beliefs are not involved, it is hard to see any side as good; but when your beliefs are on the line, this can seem like versus evil instead.
Any form of goodness can have an accidental or unanticipated bad side-effect. If I am kind in a way that reduces my emotional or financial resources, I may be unable to meet future obligations and thus accidentally do harm. When parenting, I might think I am acting in the best interests of others but actually be mistaken. The evil I oppose or religion I defend might turn out to be propaganda or fanaticism. Any attempt at goodness can be coerced by confidence tricks or other evil machinations.
To be a truly good person, it seems to me to be important to beware of accidental costs and mitigate their impact where possible. It is also important to distinguish real good from religion wars and other faux goods. But as I reflect on my life, the bigger challenge than either of these seems to be the difficulty I have in doing good even when it is clear to my view what it is. Building my capacity for goodness seems to be more challenging than identifying good options or detecting and mitigating their costs.