Considering the fact the doing good will not earn you anything in anyway and that if you are not a millionaire or billionaire your good acts won’t matter at all.
What’s the point?
I had seen with my own eyes good people being manipulated and fucked because they did something good, on the other hand it’s pretty rare for evil people to face any consequences.
Why should I restrict my free hands with ethics and why should I think about it?
Just a note: I am a deist, so I don’t believe that doing good will get you anything in the after life.
Most people here are taking the moral high road or talking about the current state of society. Lets look at game theory instead to get some fundamental understanding.
Consider a game with 10 players. Each player has two options: be charitable or be selfish. If they are charitable, they add 3 points to the collective score. If they are selfish, they add 2 points to their own score. All players decide at the same, and afterwards the collective is evenly divided among all players. So if all players are charitable, everyone ends up with a personal score of 3. If everyone is selfish, everyone ends up with a score of 2.
If you are the only selfish person in the game, you score a jackpot. You get a total score of 4.7.
Now consider the idea that you play this game over and over with random players, accumulating score in each game. If everyone is always selfish, no-one will score higher than 2. But if you, individually are never selfish, you never score higher than 3.
If we consider all players to follow the same strategy, then we get an optimization puzzle for individual score. How often do you randomly choose for selfish? Instinct and DNA, but also culture and social norms create a common recipe in humans for how to make this decision. So while reality is more complex, we still act anough alike to get some wisdom when applying this assumption.
But it turns out that we don’t play these games with random people, but we are grouped by our strategy for choosing selfish or charitable (e.g. grouped by culture). And the groups also compete. If a group does particularly bad with their global score, they will be removed from the game (conquored, culture changed, etc). So not only does your choice for selfish or charitable need to optimize for personal gain to get a survival edge within your group, it also needs to optimize for survival of the group. A group with only selfish people will never thrive.
Hence, in this simple example, randomly doing good can be good for the survival of your DNA and culture. Real life is much more complicated, but a similar balance of interests may be at play. After all, evolution means that life is constantly competing with itself, yet it also benefits from working together with itself.
Whether you feel survival of your DNA and culture are relevant, is up to you. But when entire groups exist that don’t feel like that, they tend to go extinct.
(Quick aside, just wanted to mention that I hate how this post has -15 votes on it. Its a relevant question to at least discuss, at this time in history.)
To answer the OP, because its the right thing to do, if you care about others, and care about how others would treat you. A.k.a., “The Golden Rule” (the Socialist one, not the Capitalistic one).
If you need a more “closer to home” personal/selfish type of answer, I’d say because if everybody, and I mean EVERYBODY, plays the humanity system to their benefit over all others, then the center does not hold, and humanity collapses. And our lives and/or happiness then is at risk during times of anarchy.
Try to remember that, as a species, we’re very young, still evolving, from the animalistic (“Every person for themself”) to the spiritual (“One for All, All for One”). Thinks swing back-and-forth, over time. Can’t have the Good without the Bad.
Also, cooperation is bred into us, at the meta/species level, less so at the individual level, but still somewhat there too. It can be trained/psyop-d out of us during childhood, but its there. But overall, we’re each other superpower, in a tame sort of way. Imagine any problem, then imagine what it would be like if everybody worked together to solve that problem. That problem would be solved.
When you see everybody else around you cheating and winning, and getting ahead of you, its tempting to do the same. But if you’re not that kind of person, you lose a part of yourself if you acquiesce to those negative feelings. Its better to be able to look in the mirror each day, and like what you see looking back at you.
And finally, remember, there are others that believe the same way you do, even during the darkest times.
If your perspective is “doing good = personal gain”, then you’re doing it wrong.
You do good because it benefits other people, not you.
I set up a Little Free Library and have spent a couple hundred dollars giving away books in my community, it doesn’t benefit me, personally, but other people are enjoying it!
Because doing good isn’t supposed to be with the goal of being rewarded, it’s supposed to be to help make other people’s lives better. When you help someone by giving them a ride somewhere, it doesn’t make much of a difference to the universe but it makes a difference to that person in that moment
Why religious people think atheists are bad. Because if there isn’t a big reward then why would you ever be good? I don’t know, empathy? Which they clearly show they don’t have much of if they need to be rewarded for doing things as simple as not judging others
Because your evolutionary heritage tells you to. You’re part of a social species, we’re hardwired to be altruistic because it’s helped us survive (some people’s wiring is faulty).
Because peace of mind and your own view of self worth are priceless.
You can’t buy morals and being happy with yourself. What makes material gain or whatever ends you think would be better chased amorally worth losing that that you can not buy back?
This is a struggle I find myself in now. I was very politically active in my youth, and I’m currently looking back on everything I did thinking “wtf was the point of any of it? Should I have just focused on college/employment the whole time? If I did, would I have been in a position to escape?”
In the past, the big thing that kept me going was my local community. Sure, I never accomplished anything that reached a further stage, but I was at least making my local community better. Eventually though, I was given the opportunity to leave my shitty local community, and I immediately took it. Now I live somewhere great, that fully represents me, to the point that I started taking a step back from politics. No reason to campaign for an opposition mayor if I like my mayor, right? I still go to the monthly town hall meetings, if only to assure myself that things are going well locally, but I’m less vocal. I don’t really need to be, and that’s wonderful, but it’s pushing me to be even less active.
I’m sure my hometown has gotten significantly worse in my absence though, since visiting family feels like visiting a corpse. Did I even make a difference there, or was it a temporary mirage? What was the point of any of it?
Dude, looks like you are just looking for an excuse to be an asshole. Don’t ask for permission, just go and make other people suffer, if that’s what you want. Let’s see how far you get with that mindset. Maybe one day you’ll be the president of a country. Shrugs
Actually no, I spent my time on earth thinking and practicing the best ethics I could, even in sometimes if it meant I will lose.
Currently, I don’t see any reason to continue to do so.
Well, if what you have been doing doesn’t work, then stop doing it, and do something different.
One should do good because seeing good done to world, or to others, is itself a source of satisfaction. If it is not, then I don’t know what anyone can tell you.
The point is that you’d also like to have good things done to you.
It really depends on how much you have to do, to be considered as doing ‘good’. Do you consider returning a shopping trolley as a good act? It’s a simple, small act that you do have to go out of your way to accomplish, and it brings some utility to others, which you might unknowingly be a recipient of.
That’s not to say you’re expected to return every trolley in the carpark, or that all the evil corporations are actively trying to exploit this for free labour.
Society requires that people do good to exist, while continued Evils tend to slowly destroy their community.
As I said before, I did not get anything from doing good and I only lost by doing it.
Evil society exists, if the good has to be done, then why should I be the one to do it?
Anytime you do something good, you lose something of yours in doing so, be it time, attention, wealth, etc. Having good done to you, you only gain.
That being said, good acts, and evil outcomes are not transactions, and thinking about it that way only leads to the belief that life is a zero sum game.
Sure society full of Evils exists, but they’re not stable. Do you want to live in such a society? Or do you want to live in one where the people do good?
Obviously you’re thinking of living in a good society, but then not contributing your part - but that’s how a society slowly turns Evil, from the absence of Good. You can try chasing the good society, but as more good societies see your non-existent good acts, the harder it will be for you to join.
Doing good feels good. Our brains are wired for cooperation. I think most evil people are miserable.
Right now in society grifting is the sole way to make a comfortable living. I refuse that path because I believe that this is a reflection of a deeply broken society and work to support those people around me that I can.
This isn’t a case of “if more people act selfishly it’ll become the norm” because it is the norm - the time for that thinking was in the 80s, 90s and maybe the 00s - but I will still stubbornly reject it and be economically kind when I have the option.
I’m an atheist. I do good things because I have a conscience. I have a legacy. Being a good person feels better than being greedy and spiteful. I pity the rich—never knowing which of their friends and family are true and who would abandon them if they weren’t rich.
I mean of course I wish I had more than I have but I have enough to be fulfilled. So why not do good things? Being kind to people is its own reward.
Because helping others around you and “doing good” helps build community, which you are a part of.
If you want to look at it from a selfish perspective, doing good and helping others builds goodwill towards yourself, and sooner or later, you may need to rely on others doing good for you. It’s much easier to get help if others think highly of you.
As far as being manipulated, you probably shouldn’t just blindly help people who request it. Keep your eyes open and your guard up when dealing with people you don’t know or trust.
I spent my current age doing good and that earned me zero returns and some losses and I know a lot of people who had a similar experience to me.
No one even feels greatful for the good I do.
Respectfully your argument does not hold up for me.
Do good to the right people !
Upvoted your post since this is a good question :) !
“Considering the fact the doing good will not earn you anything in anyway”
This simply isn’t an accurate statement.
I treat my co-workers well, help them out, and one of them bought me a pin that says “Hello, My name is Inigo Montoya, you killed my father, prepare to die!!!” because they know I like that movie.
I help people, people help me. Do they sometimes not help me, sure, but on balance everyone is better off for helping. It’s not a zero sum game.
What you’re describing is a common or free kindness - it’s a social kindness that costs nearly nothing and delivers many times its value. The problem is more with economic kindness and selfishness and in that regard your coworker is (mostly, unless you unionize) irrelevant… the question is whether your boss, if looking at a 20 million dollar payout for a company of a dozen people will take half that and make you all rich or take it all and tell you plebs to get fucked.
The story of recent history is that plebs are getting fucked pretty much without exception. Social norms have shifted to the point where fucking over your employees is “cool” and there’s not much we can do about it except slowly try and turn back the social compass and, of course, fucking unionize.
