Must we BE good to DO good?
NOprophet_NØprofit
Shipmate
in Purgatory
The formula of salvation by grace and not by merit being understood as the accepted orthodoxy, but what could possibly be wrong with good things done by bad people, or by people who aren't exactly bad but not good either?**
The above was said in different words to make the point that good done by the bad or the unsalvated was by definition abominable. This hurt my ears. A lot. My custom when speaking to people isn't to object in ways that create argument. All I said was that I was sad that the speaker held this view. I got a little more evangelical fever thrown at the concept with that mile objection, and I let it rest. Later I wondered about the saying (if it is a saying): some read scripture to find love, and others read scripture with love.
I think that any good thing done by anyone at all is a good thing. That it is good to aspire to be good, that while we should try to improve ourselves and the doings of others, good might be done by any. I'd be interested if people are hard-core about good not being good when bad or unwashed folks are involved, like the speaker I listened to, and again I'd query if it isn't harsh and wrong.
** not that I'm very strong about salvationism, querying whether God's grace as demonstrated by those who profess to speak for and about God is very desireable, but that's a different discussion
The above was said in different words to make the point that good done by the bad or the unsalvated was by definition abominable. This hurt my ears. A lot. My custom when speaking to people isn't to object in ways that create argument. All I said was that I was sad that the speaker held this view. I got a little more evangelical fever thrown at the concept with that mile objection, and I let it rest. Later I wondered about the saying (if it is a saying): some read scripture to find love, and others read scripture with love.
I think that any good thing done by anyone at all is a good thing. That it is good to aspire to be good, that while we should try to improve ourselves and the doings of others, good might be done by any. I'd be interested if people are hard-core about good not being good when bad or unwashed folks are involved, like the speaker I listened to, and again I'd query if it isn't harsh and wrong.
** not that I'm very strong about salvationism, querying whether God's grace as demonstrated by those who profess to speak for and about God is very desireable, but that's a different discussion
Comments
Jesus saw good in that dirty unwashed Samaritan who did the neighborly thing in spite of possible threat to his own life.
Hate to say it, but if Trump can get us out of the Afghan conflict, that would be good.
In truth, none of us is perfectly good, but we still can do good things.
I've seen bad people do good for selfish reasons. Charities and aid groups don't ask for motivations, just assistance. They cannot afford to care if your heart is pure, as long as your money is real. Ask a starving person if they can taste the "abomination" in the food they receive.
As Gramps says, most people are not bad or good, but both. So are only part of their good deeds truly good? Should we have a feather to weight the hearts of the doers of good deeds?
The dilemma comes (at least within the C of E) when we say the creeds, where there are clear references to us being judged according to our works. Same with some of the canticles. They never seemed to fit with the "reformed" doctrines of "total depravity" and "Irresistible Grace," yet these things were never talked about.
Therefore the question seems entirely moot.
We're talking about the "imputed righteousness" St Paul talked of (see also Jeremiah 31:33-34).
I wouldn't just dismiss it as a "moot" question, rather discuss what Paul meant and the validity of some of the doctrines ascribed to it.
I've been a teacher for a long time. Figuring out how to help a student who seems to be lagging is a constant struggle. When should I say something? What should I say? Should I say anything at all? Should I wait for the student to ask? (Many students assume they can't.) What will actually help this particular student? Encouragement? Consequences? Referral to tutoring or counseling? $5 so the student can get her first meal in two days? Even with the very best intentions, there's no way to be sure that (whatever I do) any action I take will actually benefit the student. There's no way to guarantee that (whatever I do or don't do) the student won't end up less well off instead of better off.
It's the same dilemma with handing cash to the panhandler. Are we enabling an addict or helping someone simply down on his/her luck? Should we care which it is?
What matters here, in terms of evaluating good and evil? The outcomes? The intentions? I don't know. I don't even know how we can tell.
I ponder this often. I can’t join in ventures which help 50 people because I’m busy raising a puppy who will only benefit one person/family when he qualifies.
But I believe we should work to our strengths. When we are going good and doing what we are good at then we are happiest and most productive.
And there’s nothing worse than being helped by miserable folk! (said tongue in cheek in case I’m jumped on by a miserable person
I'm sorry I can't join you in your magical thinking.
Are we not talking about those who do good but are bad people?
So (eg) they volunteer all day at the local shelter then go home and are horribly controlling with their family.
Surely much of the time not being helped at all would be worse..
More seriously, I don't see that there is a lot of point in stressing over the things one is not doing and weighing them against the things one is doing, rather one sees the task in front of you and does it (or not).
On the general topic, it seems to me that Christianity is absolutely not about being "good" - or sadly even "better" than others.
If anything, it is about a form of training to recognise, and take responsibility for the challenges in front of you whilst becoming increasingly aware of one's (and everyone else's) own failings, brokenness and need for healing.
Good things are to be celebrated, wherever they come from (even miserable bastards!?) failings are to be recognised and used for learning.
I think being truly and helpfully useful to others does us all good - and faith doesn’t need to come into the equation at all. (It can do, but it doesn’t need to.)
Two firemen go into a burning building and pull out two victims, saving their lives. The first is a Christian and this is an outworking of his faith. The other is a Hindu and his bravery can be ignored because he isn't In The Truth.
That's ridiculous.
(X-post)
Utterly ridiculous.
We act in fear and trembling.
The quesiton of vocation may also be worth considering in this connection. Being the only source of good, God can't call people to do evil. But it is perfectly possible for people to act in ways that appear evil, from a conviction of vocation.
Confusion of motivation and even result is so commonplace that this may just be a long-winded way of agreeing with those who say that it's so difficult to know whether an action or a person is good or evil that the statement, ultimately, has little meaning.
Jesus said that even those who don't know God give good gifts to their children. How much more should we give God's good gift of love to everyone we meet?
That goes back a long, long way, both in RL and in scripture.
If people could be good then they could achieve goodness through their own efforts. We know what a load of balls that is: we can be admired and lauded, but I don't think we can "be good" however many good acts we perform. It goes against our nature and any notion of humility.
Of course it is - exactly my point about us all being "judged according to our works." - in this matter I would think the two will be judged exactly the same. "Inputed righteousness" has more to do with past sins which cannot be resolved, but does not make us good when we knowingly do evil.
............and Charles Wesley's observation, after Paul:
Perhaps you can expand on this verse - I have to admit that I never quite understood it, other than it being used by unitarians to deny the Holy Trinity.
I believe I have seen this in other people, but since I cannot see into any mind but my own, I cannot be certain.
For myself, I have done good things with no reward and I am not even a particularly good person. I've done the right thing and felt great personal pain for doing so, certainly more pain than any dopamine reward. I've done the right thing and had selfish motives imputed, dulling any chemical upper.
And when I say that I am not a good person, this is not self-effacing, but self-knowledge.
Yes, doing good can be its own rewards, but it is not the only way good happens.
A similar story is about the good enough mother, which is a standard phrase found in therapy, but we had an addition, also bad enough. If she was only good, you are fucked, as her shadow would leak into you unconsciously, and you would end up acting it out. Of course, this requires accepting that there is such a thing, not difficult for Christians, I would think.
Mark 10 v 18: "And Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone."
As I understand it, Jesus asserts in this verse the Jewish theological view that only God is essentially good. Thus, for the man in question to describe Jesus as good either means that Jesus is divine or that Jesus is suggesting it is inappropriately ascribed to himself. Clearly, Chalcedonian Christians and Unitarians would adopt different positions as to what Jesus was implying, though its pretty clear what Mark (and Luke) thought and why he (they) included the anecdote.* It would seem, however, in the context of this discussion that only God can be described as good, though that does not preclude human beings performing good acts despite their limitations. So the answer to the question at the start of this post is that an individual does not have to be good in order to do good, though it does imply that apart from being God it is impossible to do good all the time. I would hasten to add, however, that does not mean humans are intrinsically evil, but, unlike God, morally complicated.
* (You might compare the above text with Mark 2: "And when Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, “My son, your sins are forgiven.” 6 Now some of the scribes were sitting there, questioning in their hearts, 7 “Why does this man speak thus? It is blasphemy! Who can forgive sins but God alone?” I think it's pretty clear that Mark was referring to these incidents as proofs of Christ's divine nature).
Note that none of these systems deal with outcomes, only intentions and/or whether a set of rules is obeyed. To take into account the effects of one's actions in assessing whether they were good or bad requires consequentialism, a later invention.
The link is a good (if long) read, and part of a (longer still) series.
(As an example of the error: see Russ' belief that as soon as you take consequences into account in say your tax policy you're committing yourself to locking up journalists who write critical articles if that makes your power base more secure.)
Aristotelian ethics (being the paradigm example of virtue ethics) believes that an action is right if it is the right thing (one of the right things) to do, done in the right way, and for the right reasons. Nothing rules out 'because it will have good consequences' as a right reason. Indeed, it's hard to see how being courageous can be distinguished from being reckless without some attention to the probable consequences.
The reason it's called virtue ethics is that it thinks that character trait terms - courageous, generous, self-controlled, just - are descriptions of a disposition to do the right thing for the right reasons, whereas vice terms (reckless, cowardly, mean, prodigal, self-indulgent, self-denying) are descriptions of dispositions to do otherwise.
(Medieval voluntarism, from the description, is I suspect actually a form of deontology.) Deontology is the belief that moral action is done in conformity to some moral rule. Again, nothing means one of the rules can't be 'avoid bad consequences', or 'bring about good consequences', and nothing means that a deontologist can't say that a good action done for a bad reason is still morally bad. The difference between a deontologist and a virtue ethicist is that a deontologist doesn't think that character trait terms do any work in ethical analysis. (A deontologist can still use them, but will reduce them to tendencies to follow the rules in the spirit of the rules.)
What is distinctive about consequentialism is firstly, the belief that consequences can be considered as states of affairs without reference to how they came about, and secondly, that states of affairs can be ranked such that the best state of affairs can be chosen. This ordinarily requires some way of making the elements of states of affairs fungible in order that states of affairs can be commensurable. An obvious way of doing that is to reduce everything to the monetary value: it is not an accident that Jeremy Bentham, the first generally recognised true consequentialist, was also am extreme free-market economist. The polemic of Victorian reformers like Dickens against utilitarianism is incomprehensible if you think of utilitarians as modern left-wingers like Peter Singer rather than as the forerunners of modern libertarians.
Machiavelli is I think more of a somewhat eccentric virtue ethicist than a consequentialist. Aristotle's Ethics is notable for omitting what we think of as central ethical virtues such as kindness and compassion and for including oddities such as magnanimity (pride and ambition in the service of the community); Machiavelli is I think best seen as intensifying this by ruthlessly pruning the list of virtues down to magnanimity and its adjuncts.
I think, at its base, this is a simple equation.
Life adds some complexity to this, of course. However, as much employment as it gives to philosophers and priests, not much more than that means anything.
Maybe I'm oversimplifying too - but I don't really see how this helps. It seems to unravel as soon as you say 'that person is virtuous, I'll practice being more like them so that I become virtuous too. But, wait a second, how do I recognise what is virtuous and how do I know that person is virtuous.. unless I'm already virtuous?"
Also it seems to gloss over errors in the practices of a good person by saying "they're virtuous therefore what they are doing must be virtuous.. even when it isn't. Otherwise they wouldn't be and it wouldn't be."
There was a little girl,
Who had a little curl,
Right in the middle of her forehead.
When she was good,
She was very good indeed,
But when she was bad she was horrid.
In that case I'm the goodest person I know.
I agree. There is no such thing as a good person or a bad person. We cannot assign moral value to human beings, but we can assign moral worth (every human being is worthy of love, etc.).
What matters is how good an action is, which probably lies on a spectrum between completely good and completely evil. A person's intent sometimes is relevant in determining how good an action is, but no amount of bad actions or bad intentions makes someone a bad person.
Obviously, some people have some degree of sociopathy, which weakens a person's ability to take the needs and wants of others into account in their decision making. I was listening to a TED Talk (my eyes role every time I say the words "TED Talk") about how some people are at the opposite end of the empathy spectrum from sociopaths and have brains that are actually wired to be highly attuned to the concerns of others and hence tend to be more altruistic. Even these things do not make a person "good" or "bad."
All of this is relevant in constructing and reforming systems of criminal justice, which is a topic that might be relevant to this thread.
That raises the theoretical possibility of a society in which all the ethical concepts are faulty. There are two responses open to an Aristotelian. The historical Aristotle I fear would probably have said, yes, those are barbarians, only Greeks have the right kind of society in which to be properly ethical. A less chauvinistic Aristotelian would probably say that in order for a human society to be more or less functional for human beings it has to have at least a minimum level of virtue. A society with no understanding of virtue would fall apart.
If the sum total seems to be positive, they can at least satisfy themselves they are on the right road to being good. However, if the sum total seems to be negative, they must conclude they have serious work to do.
You'll notice I didn't go as far as to say that a positive result makes a person "good." It can only ever be an indication, because God is the final Judge.
What if those good deeds are unintended or accidental?
Regarding the question as to whether one has to be good in order to do good, your answer would seem to be in the negative, because, respecting causality, your view is that one becomes good by doing good. Would you not agree, however, that God always does good because that is his nature?
No problem, it's not only the basis of a lot of religion but specifically the basis of Christianity. Those biological imperatives and learned behaviours have, at most times and in most places, put man in the position of not being good. Man is a wanting animal. He wants the best and then he wants some more. All that is natural and the consumer society adds to it. Ambition, beating the next man, is the right and proper thing. Turning your back on what you want and what others expect of you is very, very hard. Doing so doesn't make you good or even do you good, but it does give you the resources, mostly the time, to do good things.
However, the idea of it only being possible to do good if you are already "good" is something that we've inherited from Calvinism. He's probably at least partly responsible for option 3 (above) as well.
I agree that man is a social animal, but he is a very choosy social animal. If he can't get what he wants with who he wants and where and when he wants then he becomes an anti-social animal very quickly unless some external factor steps in. While we have moral codes and ethics to counter these we also have laws and regulations, enforced by other fallible persons, to minimise anti-social actions.