HOW DO YOU KNOW WHETHER SOMETHING IS “GOOD” OR “BAD”?
Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.
This is going to be fun. I have not been in the heads of many people in my life. Only in my own head, I think! So I don’t know what you , the reader, may think of what I am about to write, but here goes:
The way you know whether something is right of wrong, good or bad, according to me, is you ask yourself how much does the choice result in happiness , and for how many people does it produce this happiness? For example, if you work in a coffee shop, and there are 15 employees, and you, personally, can take all of THEIR paid holidays, and leave them with none, then that is bad/wrong. Because your happiness is miniscule compared to the happiness of the other 14 people who deserve an even share of the paid holidays. You may feel wonderful at the thought of having all of their paid holidays, but it’s wrong, as they deserve these days as much as you do.
RIGHT AND WRONG, GOOD AND BAD, ARE MEASURABLE BY DEGREE
So: right and wrong have a lot to do with how much happiness is produced verses how much misery is produced. Picture you are looking at a long straight line on a paper, like this: (____________________). One one end you have the label “misery” and on the other you have the label “happiness”. In the center, you may have the label, “no emotion”. It would look something like this:
(“high misery”___________________”no emotion”__________________”high happiness”).
The closer on the line you were to “high misery” the more you knew that your choice was wrong. The closer on the line you were to “high happiness” the more you knew that your choice was right.
Keep in mind that “misery” and “happiness” are whatever you honestly say they are. Right and wrong for an individual, though, cannot really be separated from right and wrong for a lot of people. No man/woman is acting entirely for himself, despite what he may think. It’s a group World out there, even at the simplest choices and actions.
A TRULY BAD GUY!
There was a guy who slashed my tires about 15 years ago. I never suspected him! He was posing as a friend. Truly, I had no way to judge this person had a truly evil personality–that is, he loved to create misery for others. He was only really living in happiness when he was causing misery for others. Truly backwards from what you might think. When I found out that it was he who had slashed my tires, I later reasoned that he did this on a vehicle that I needed the next morning to go on a long holiday drive. He knew that I would be leaving early in the morning and just HAD to spoil it. He could not tolerate me happy. Only unhappy. That is what he could be seen doing throughout his life, go his wife, his friends, his work associates, everyone. Amazing.
MAKING A “BAD” OR “WRONG” THING SEEM OK.
So, now that you know what I think of as “good” or “bad”, I will say this: many people, including myself, are guilty of letting truly bad/wrong choices go unchanged and uncorrected, and this is what we say about the thing: “well, I guess it’s really ok to let that bad thing happen, as it’s really not that bad, because, blah, blah, blah….” AND WE LET IT STAY UNCORRECTED. Because it is too much to face it directly, we say that it is NOT that way. It is ACTUALLY good, not bad, or at least it is EXCUSABLE because of …(fill in the blank), blah, blah, blah…. Another way to put it is that we make it seem justifiable because of some stretch of reason. Of course this is not right. But people do it. I do it. Sometimes. BUT MAYBE NOW I WON’T DO IT SO MUCH, AS I JUST WROTE ALL ABOUT IT HERE, SO I SHOULD HOLD MYSELF ACCOUNTABLE…RIGHT? (of course)!
NATURAL EARTHLY LAWS
If you look around, you will find Natural Laws. I capitalize the N and the L in Natural Laws, as they are specific laws, and they exist whether someone says they do or not. On Earth, if you drop something, it will fall down, not up. This is a Natural Law. If wind is blowing against a tree, the tree will tend to move. Another law. If water comes into contact with something, it will bead up, or tend to adhere to the thing. Fire or heat will destroy material things of all kinds, in specific ways. Chemicals will deteriorate in strength in predictable ways.
COMMANDS AND THE FORCE OF WILL OVER OTHERS
As we live as groups, we must have laws that make sense and that give us as much freedom as we want and not more constraints than we want. There will always be some trying to produce order among themselves and others. THE SMALLER THE GROUP, THE MORE RATIONAL THE ORDERS. Did you notice that? Ever been in a group of five people verses a group of ten thousand? Which groups have the most rational, sane laws? The smaller ones. There is willing participation and one can be heard. So if you want Justice, and good laws, you must have small groups maintaining it. Right and wrong, good and bad get lost in super large groups. Look at any country’s laws. Many are inhumane–insane–crazy, due to the group’s size.
More on these things later. I suggest you look back in this post and really think about these things. I did not write them just to see my words on paper. If more people used these points of view, I believe there would be much more justice.
Jeffrey Hendrick