Am I a good person?

You asked Google heres the answer

Andrew Brown
Andrew Brown
Every day millions of internet users ask Google lifes most difficult questions,
big and small. Our writers answer some of the commonest queries
statue of Socrates in Athens
Socrates (pictured) thought that it was part of virtue to harm your enemies and
other bad people. Jesus disagreed. Photograph: Yannis Behrakis/Reuters

Shares
519
Comments
926

Wednesday 31 August 2016 08.00 BST

Last modified on Thursday 11 May 2017 12.35 BST

The beginning of being a good person is the knowledge that you may not be, or that
you have acted as a bad one would. After that it gets complicated.

The most obvious complication, perhaps, is that there is no agreement on what

constitutes a good person. In fact theres no agreement on whether we should even
agree who a good person is. In some extreme forms of theoretical individualism, the
only judge of whether you are good is you yourself: cheating on your taxes, being
Donald Trump, writing comments on news sites whatevers right for you. In
practice, however, no one ever really believes this. Even the sociopath cares for
the opinion of others. Its just that the tribute he wants from them is awe and
devotion rather than love and respect.

But before we even get to the question of what would make a good person, there is a
basic difficulty with our inquiry: if we ask ourselves, the answer we get will
probably be tainted with lies. Even when we know we have done wrong, our minds set
at work to scrub the knowledge out. A rather elegant study recently published in
PNAS showed that we have difficulties even forming memories of the times we have
behaved unethically, and if they ever are formed, they disintegrate faster than
other ones. And this is a truth that was known long before lab science, by anyone
who studies human nature, from St Augustine to Jane Austen.
Current Time 0:00
/
Duration Time 0:31
Loaded: 0%
Progress: 0%
Mute
Facebook
Twitter
Pinterest
Trump jokes that good presidency may be his only ticket to heaven

This isnt an insurmountable obstacle, but any project of self-knowledge has to

take into account what a hard and largely unrewarding prospect it is. The
alternatives, however, are worse. And it is always possible that at the end of our
explorations we discover that we were not, after all, wholly intolerable and
disgusting but just possibly good enough.

What would it mean to be good enough? Good enough at what?

Am I going to hell? You asked Google heres the answer
Andrew Brown
Andrew Brown
Read more
Very roughly speaking there are three big ideas about how we could measure
goodness: it could be a matter of following the right rules; it could be a matter
of cultivating the right virtues; it might be something that was judged by success:
did I leave the world a better place? All of these have been held to be self-
evident in some cultures, and ludicrous in others. In practice, any judgment will
have elements of all three, but one of them will be treated as predominant.

Our own culture now mostly takes consequentialism for granted. In that scheme,
being a good person means that you had a good effect on the world. So you can
answer the question by totting up all the good you did, balancing it against the
bad things you have such a hard time remembering, and seeing how the register comes
out. This is problematic for two reasons. The first is the element of luck. People
with power seem more morally significant, and capable of being better, under these
rules because they can change the world more. Conversely, the wholly powerless
babies, very old people, or severely disabled people would seem morally
insignificant because they cant do anything. Theres also the problem of how you
measure the good done in the world. Socrates thought that it was part of virtue to
harm your enemies and other bad people. Jesus disagreed. Which scale do you want to
measure yourself against?
The Book of Job, dating from the 11th century.
Facebook
Twitter
Pinterest
The Book of Job, dating from the 11th century. Photograph: Alamy

Virtue ethics gets round the first objection (and in this light, Christianity is a
kind of virtue ethics, since the command is to love God and neighbour before you
follow any particular rules). What matters is not whether you won or lost, but how
you played the game. The price you pay for this is tragedy. You have to acknowledge
that really good people will lose and suffer horribly, or even devote their
goodness to wicked causes. This seems to me a gain in realism rather than
cheerfulness. In the Old Testament, Job was a good man and look what happened to
him. Satan got to take away his health, his family and everything he owned.

Job, however, is not held up as a virtuous man, who cultivated courage, or

temperance, or justice, so much as one who followed the rules. He did what God
commanded, and what society expected. Leaving, if you like, God out of it, thats
how most people most of the time have always lived, and had to do. You do whats
expected and expect the reward of good behaviour. Then you die, and never realise
that in a couple of hundred years, society will have moved on, and some of the
things you took for granted are regarded as monstrous crimes.

The only certain thing about this question is that if youve never thought to ask
it, the answer has to be no.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/aug/31/am-i-good-person-google