Ask Lemmy

Yes, but I am an asshole at the same time

Negative, I am a meat popsicle.

Define "good".

I'm not Fred Rogers good. I know that much.

I try to be.

I don't like to say "good person" and "bad person" because I feel like it implies that there is some objective scale of goodness that people can be compared to, and I think that is simply not the case. So I would rather think of this question as "Do you have a positive opinion of yourself?"

No, no I don't. My opinion of myself is extremely negative.

I will leave that judgment to whomever eats me.

Chaotic good

Absolutely not.

No. I have many regrets. I try to do good but at the end of the day, I am a coward.

I think that's a relative matter...

I mean do I think I'ma good person? Not really.

Do I look around and go "What the fuck is wrong with these sociopaths?" Yes, very much so.

I don't like the person I used to be. I'd like to think i'm a descent person now.

I can't make that kind of judgement to myself. Some people would say that I'm, others would say not.

Yes. I used to say "no" but that was some fucked up internalized religious self-hate shit. I am good. Not perfect, but definitely good within my moral framework and the framework of any people I care about. I have one particular area I'm wrestling with to be "better" and I find it's far more useful to focus on improving that than on self-flagellating over how "bad" I am.

I try really hard to not be a bad person.

I try my best. I lead life with empathy for all people and creatures. We've all only got one world after all.

Like must people I have kneejerk opinions and reactions, though I analyze them before I let them loose. I ask myself "what would a good person do?" and then I do that.

Like the sum total of me, including the past? I'm a good person now, but I used to be a pretty shitty person by most metrics. Like, deplorable.

Most of the time. I work at being good, kind to strangers, kind to service people,kind to myself.

Not even by my own standards, which is not much. Do I try? Sometimes.

I try to be good whenever I can remember or if the opportunity is presented to me without much cost. Being good has a cost in terms of effort and discipline, and yes, I fail at that. For example: I may look the other way whenever someone's suffering, but when I can, I try to do what I can.

And this is why I hate it when people say I am a good person. I know I am not, that I can do so much more. I don't even think I'm worth the resources I consume.

My moral compass operates on the principle: "If everyone else did what I do, would it make the world a better or worse place?" If the answer is worse, I generally don't do it - with a few exceptions. I think this way of thinking also gives some perspective on the true impact of even small things. Throwing a candy wrapper on the ground might not seem like a big deal but if everyone does it we'll drown in trash. Or conversely, if everyone picked a single piece of trash from the ground and put it in the garbage even once a week, the world would be litter-free in no time. Me doing the little thing is doing what can realistically be expected from one person.

Also my job entails locally reversing entropy so you could say I'm taking concrete steps to make the world a bit better every day. And my customers are thankful for it.

I think I do more good than harm and am satisfied enough with that. Not like there's a punch card system where I can do 9 good things and get a free pass to do something bad but I know I'll accidentally screw things up sometimes or make intentional decisions where the least bad option available still isn't great.

I think our moral intuitions are out of alignment with a logical consideration of good and bad. So I'm not a bad person according to my moral intuitions (not the same thing as being a good person) but also pretty much everyone (including me) is a bad person according to logical consideration.

(My logic is that only humans appear to be moral agents, but non-human animals deserve moral consideration and there are a lot more non-human animals than there are humans. Thus even seemingly simple questions like "Is it good to save someone's life?" depend on whether it is better to prevent that person from eating meat by letting him die or to have him contribute to environmental degradation by remaining alive, and thereby prevent wild animals that would have suffered from being born. The effect on the person is not the major deciding factor.)

No. And I'm highly suspicious of anyone claiming to be.

I think I put more good into the world than bad. Whether I put in more good than I've consumed, I wonder about that a lot. I've been very fortunate in life.

I reject the premise of this question.

Yes. I'm not perfect but I try to do positive things and minimize the harm/impact of my life on the world around me.

I would say that I'm a good enough person.

I do the things that good people do because it feels like the right thing to do, up until the point where I feel like I'm risking overextending myself and then I stop doing that.

I feel bad when I do not do a good thing.

At the same time I know I have done bad things. I have accepted my fault in those situations and apologized to the people that I have hurt in the past and I am still trying to become a better person. So I am good enough to pass for a good person, but I am not an objectively purely good person.

But then again, no one is.

I don't really think that there are good people. I don't mean it as cynical as it sounds. I KNOW there are bad people. I don't think I'm one of those.

I'm a person capable of being good or bad. I try very hard to be good, I've failed once or twice.

Heck no for several reasons. First of all, I straight up knew something was wrong with me since I was 7, I just didn't know what. Had nightmares about it.

I was selfishly oblivious, never had many friends, and was inconsiderate to others. I mostly spent my time playing videogames. When my parents were struggling, I fussed about small things, took up the toilet all the time, I didn't study much at all.

Because of my fear of people, I didn't believe I could ever get a job, so I almost never tried to get a simple cashier job, and lived off my parents. I would go between trying to learn programing, absurd projects, and just going back to videogames.

I hurt many people, many insults, unjust accusations, made many enemies. I could never stick to rules or promises, I was always a coward, and never able to stick with anything.

Just some of the best people I meet, not wanting to be around me, how little I contribute to communities, and friends, is proof enough that I am a fundamentaly bad person.

I doubt that can ever change, so my goal is just to prevent others from being the same, if at all possible.

I understand that I don't deserve the things that normal people do, and I don't expect them anymore.

God, no. But I’ve been much worse.

I think my impact on the world is a nut positive. I make it a point to help other people when I can, I've given a bunch of strangers a jumpstart in the parking lot, helped them change a tire, gave a stranded bicyclist a lift home when his pedal broke, clear my schedule to help my friends move, put my shopping cart back the right way and even sometimes straighten out the ones that were carelessly pushed in the general direction of the cart corral by some degenerate, and generally try not to be a bother to others.

As for whether that makes me a good person, I think that's kind of up for debate. At my core, my motivations tend to be pretty selfish. I do those good deeds because I want others to do the same kinds of things for me. If I need help moving, I can count on a small army of friends and acquaintances showing up to help me because I've always made time for them. I want to live in a world where other people treat me the right way, and if I'm not even willing to do that, why should I count on others to do that? Not that it's all a 1:1 transactional thing, I don't expect every good deed I do to directly come back around to benefit me, but I do kind of hope that I'm sort of kicking off a chain of "paying it forward" that maybe inspires even more people to do the same and eventually I get to be the recipient of some random acts of kindness.

So a lot of the time it's not really some sort of selfless altruism that drives me to do the right thing, which is a big part of what people imagine when they think of a "good" person.

No. I'm a piece of shit.

No. I'm barely even a functional organism for about 90% of the day.

(But hey, I'm not a politician or a vacuous online personality, so I've got that going for me)

A long time ago, I was trying to figure out why I had so much trouble making friends. I talked to the few connections I had and did some online searches. Paraphrasing, I found an analysis similar to the following:

Friendship is like two people holding containers of water. In this metaphor, one person is holding a drinking glass, one is holding a bucket. If the person with the drinking glass offers ever bit of water they have, the person with the bucket feels it's inadequate. If the person with the bucket offers all of their water, the other person feels overwhelmed.

When I read that, I was quite a bit younger and found it fairly profound. I shared it publicly in several places. Every person who saw it - including those I considered to be the metaphorical drinking glass people - declared themselves the bucket person. I did the same of myself so, whether I was right or wrong, I can't blame any of those people.

In conclusion, I try to be a good person and I think I largely succeed, but experience has taught me that I shouldn't trust people's judgment of themselves. I'd like to think I'm an exception, but I'm no more exempt from this than anyone else I've observed, just - predictably - less able to see it in myself.