What does it mean to be a good person?

[mumstheword]

Lots of grey areas, contextuality.

 

[Teasel]

I grew up feeling I was a bad person and tried desperately to be a good person which made me a perfect victim to bad people who could control me by calling me a bad person.

I'm no longer so fussed about being a good person as I was though I've still a long way to go.

It does seem to be a common theme amongst abused people to be worried about being bad doesn't it.

 

[Abstract]

Are you perhaps really trying to process how people can do cruel damaging things to others? I know I went through obsession about this for many years and still do a bit. It was partly about understanding the past and partly about trying to ensure I stayed safe in the future.

 

[frogthroat]

Ayyy @somerandomguy good and evil don't exist. Why worry about it.

 

[Teasel]

Think I've often heard it said the reason people don' believe abused ppl is because that threatens their nice and safe worldview. Ie believing such awful things happen to good or innocent peoole means this could happen to them too. Ie they are not safe. I guess this is a bit like what you'e saying @somerandomguy ?

 

[scout86]

there are no bad people, just severely damaged people who do terrible things.

I'll grant that there are terribly damaged people in the world. Some of them do bad things. Some of them don't. It's a choice.How you choose matters.

Having said that, I'll also say that I think, good people can do "bad" things and bad people can do good things (even if it's by accident). Because people make mistakes, and we can't see all ends, so the best of intentions sometimes don't turn out real well. Motivation matters too, at least to me.

 

[Abstract]

Could you also be acknowleding more responsibility to people when they do wrong? Sometimes, if we have been overly empathic about others when they have done damaging things, it stops us processing some of our feelings about being harmed by others wrong actions. .

 

[mamachick]

This is a great topic and the responses are very interesting and well thought out. They really show the differences and similarities in our thinking.

I have two conflicting "school of thoughts" that relate to this.
1. We are all judgmental people. While being judgmental does not sound like the correct way to be, in our personal lives and sometimes professional lives, its necessary for us to be to make the best decisions. Making judgements about others keeps us safe and allows us to make the choices for our own lives that will produce the best likely outcome. We do this everyday in who we chose to be friends with, in our partner choices, parenting decisions, work decisions, etc.
2. Because I am in the counseling field, or more likely why I went into counseling field, I am not judgmental towards others in the scope of my work. Almost nothing shocks me. I do not put my values on clients or judge their behaviors in a particular way, as the goal is for them to get better. A professor once told our class to write down our 5 best qualities-1 word. Then he told us to write down the opposite word. Then he told us that we all had the opposite inside of us. This is our shadow side. We have it in us and are capable under certain circumstances. I pondered this and have found this to be very true...at least for myself.

I feel like I have met pure evil in my life....I don't know that that is true, but anyone who has had experience with a sociopath may feel this way.

For me, being a good person means to live with integrity....or at times it may be working toward it. I know that when others use manipulation in attempts to make us feel "less than" or "bad", it works sometimes. We have to work harder to see the good in ourselves, practice it everyday, keep filling those buckets as another poster mentioned. Its contagious.

 

[Freida]

First -- huge kudos for realizing you are a good person!!!

I had a similar problem when I first started to acknowledge some of my encounters but it was more along the line of accepting that level of evil exists in our world. good people, bad people? you can be both. But evil, true evil, is something else. Even after being the person who crossed it's path, it was still hard to accept.

Before that, I knew that bad things could happen to good people, and bad people could do good things. How did I know? Because I had seen examples of it. Spend 20 minutes on google and you can find dozens of examples -- that big bad felon who saves kitties and puppies, or the good church minister who abuses his wife. But evil? That true evil that exists simply to harm someone else? That was harder to understand.
Why are some people evil? How do you accept being the victim of someone truly evil? What is wrong with them? Those are your hitlers and stalins and the woman next door or the man down the hall. People who can be truly evil are outside the norm of good person/bad person. They have their own category. Once I got my head wrapped around that it helped with how to understand good/bad.

I still wonder some times, but it is becoming easier to accept the possibility that I was a good person who was a victim of an evil person and that caused me to do bad person things to survive.

 

[Swift]

What an interesting question.
And you are a good person.
There are two things to judge good by: what we do and what our intentions are.

To me, intentions can be split into pro-social and anti-social. Like, my intentions are good if I intend to help others, and bad if I intend to hurt them.
Likewise, actions can be judged on their impacts - good actions do social good, and bad actions do social 'bad'.
Then it gets interesting.
If I rescue a puppy, that's a good action, in it's impacts. But, if I'm rescuing the puppy so I can torture it later, that's bad, because my intentions are bad.
If I kill Hitler, murder is bad, but my intentions are good. Killing Hitler prevents suffering, so, good action, good intentions?

But...
Stuff the ethics for a minute.

When I tell myself I'm not a bad person, I'm not trying to tell myself that on the basis of my actions and their effects.
I'm trying to tell myself that fundamentally, there is nothing "bad" about me. I am no badder than any other person, at the core. There is nothing outright bad, or dirty or shameful. Nothing that makes me more likely to act immorally than any other person. And the things that have happened to me, the things I did or they did to me, more accurately, they don't make me fundamentally bad either.
My innate "badness" is a core belief more than an evaluation of my actions or my intentions.
Because it's a feeling, not logic.

 

[Chris-duck]

I'm not sure what I think about the whole ethical debate, so I'm just going to speak for myself. I've said before you seem like a good guy, and I stand by that. What I mean when I say that is that you appear to care about other people, you keep working on yourself to try and better your own life (you aren't using your own shit as an excuse for shitty behaviour) and a lot of things like the way you speak of your son demonstrates this to me. I've never seen anyone who I would define as a "bad" person worry openly that they're not good, it takes worrying about your effect on people to even entertain that possibility imo. I know this doesn't answer the good/bad people existing debate but it's what I mean when I tell you this.

 

[frogthroat]

I wanted to add to my previous post since it didn't explain my perspective on this topic much.
From the time we're born we get bombarded with these concepts of "good" and "evil." If you had enough religion in your childhood for it to f*ck you up then you know what I'm talking about. Everything is set in stone. Bad people do this. Good people do this. Men do this. Women do this. Certain groups of people are this exact stereotype and so on and so forth. The truth is we're all just complicated assholes.
Being alive is as much about surviving as it was back in caveman days. It's just filled with different dangers and struggles. I think people have to seperate themselves from what they feel they could never be. Nobody wants to think they have the capacity to rape or murder but we all have that inside of us. It reminds me of how I read about in medieval times or around that time period that when they found children murdered they blamed it on ogres. Que the 5,000,000 different tales about evil spirits, the devil, demons, and monsters. They were all created as a catalyst for our own human savagery.
As someone who was incited to rape under fear of my own death I can tell you everyone is always looking out for number one. If you were stuck and starving on a desert island you would eat the first person who died. People who say they would never do this or never do that don't know until they're in a situation that truly makes them confront their primal fear of death.
Even supposed morality isn't even all that moral. The facets for being a "good" person are all just tedious bullshit rules made up for population control. People are still raping, robbing, and killing. It's just how it is and it will always be that way.
There will always middle ground people and then people of either extreme. There's people that generally follow the rules set by the society they live in. I don't give a shit about the rules but I know that if I want a nice place to sleep, to be able to eat on the regular, and have modern convenience then I have to make money and be at least somewhat capable of interacting with other people. I would love to leave society and do the DIY thing but I'm too lazy. I want to be able to shit in my own toilet, be warm when it's cold, and go to a hospital if I need to. That's most people. Then there's the extremely manipulative I use everyone as resource to leech myself through life type of people and the psychos who just like pillaging and plundering.
I draw the line at societal rules as far as if anyone tries to hurt me or anyone I love. For example, if I had a kid and someone molested him or her I would shoot the motherf*cker right between the eyes. I don't care if he/she was on a crowded street. Yeah, I would have to go to jail for doing a "bad" thing but I don't care. I've been through the court system in America and it's a big joke. Ideals like "justice," "true love," and "integrity" are all a whole nother subject and I've already written novella.
So anyway that's my take on existence. It's not good or bad. I don't consider myself good or bad. I don't consider other people good or bad. We're all like poorly wired robots. Lol