Doing Good

I think it's impossible to identify one, most plausible cause for why people do good. There are many and they all seem plausible. Paul Farmer, for example does good to a scale that is almost unimaginable, yet seems to be motivated solely to do good. And he doesn't really even think he is doing good or doing something above and beyond, he just believes that he is doing what is right. Dr. Maret's presentation for TSD is another example of someone doing good on a larger scale than most without an expectation of receiving anything in return.

But some people do good while expecting something in return. This is called reciprocal altruism. Some people say that if you do good because you want to get something in return, it mitigates the good deed. I don't think this is the case. If a guy volunteers at a soup kitchen, it is looked upon as an act of kindness, but if it turns out the guy only did so to impress a girl, it takes away from what he did. But does it make the people he served any less full? If you do good because you have an incentive, you're still doing good.

I don't think it matters as much why you are doing good, just that you are. That you are going out of your way to help others, and feeling what others are feeling. I think little things like Dr. Maret's work and the activism that the school does with the Campus Ministry are positively changing the wold. And if everyone did things like that, or even smaller things like work in soup kitchens, that our communities and those of other people can and will be better.

Causes of Empathy

Where the ability to feel for others comes from is much debated today. One of the biggest debates I have seen is that of nature versus nurture. Nature being the genetics behind who you are and nurture being the environmental factors. People who like the nature side say people are "born that way"; for example enlightenment theorist Thomas Hobbes wrote that people were born "brutish and selfish" in his Leviathon. Nurture supporters like John Locke think people were born "tabula rasa", or blank slate, and are affected by outside influences.

I tend to think it is somewhere in the middle. The book, The Nurture Assumption, by Judith Harris talks about different environmental factors can have a huge effect on the personality and disposition but does not explain all of the "variance for most traits (such as adult IQ and the Big Five personality traits)". I think that empathy is one of these things that is affected by environment but can still have a genetic component. There are lots of people who grow up in awful conditions, but don't become sociopaths and sociopaths who grew up in ok conditions, like Dahmer or Bundy.

But i guess more to the point of this assignment, empathy for others that comes out in volunteer work or helping others. Most people accept that intelligence is sometimes an inherited trait, and an article by Deborah Ruf in the Roeper Review called "How Personality and Gender May Relate to Individual Attitudes Toward Caring for and About Others" suggests "heightened global awareness and caring can be attributes of high intelligence". If intelligence can be inherited, empathy probably can be too.

Empathy

I think empathy is one of the most important contributing causes of people doing good. Merriam Webster defines empathy as "The action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experiences of another of either the past of present without having the feelings thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner, also: the capacity for this.Researchers in empathy, Eisenberg & Fabes, (1990) defines empathy as “an affective response that stems from the apprehension or comprehension of another’s emotional state or condition, and that is similar to what the other person is feeling or would be expected to feel.”



Merriam Webster;
Eisenberg, N., & Fabes, R.A. (1990). Empathy: conceptualization, measurement, and relation to prosocial behavior. Motivation and Emotion, 14, 131-149.

Why do good?

What causes people to do good things in the world? There are a plethora of reasons. There are times in our lives when doing good is expected of us. For example, as toddlers, we do not want to share and yet we do. Mainly, we do this because it is expected of us. Adults impress upon children that sharing is a necessarily and will be rewarded. However, children often display natural empathy. This, I feel, is the root of all good actions. Empathy is the ability to feel what others are feelings. Almost all humans have it and even some types of animals.

As we grow older, our reasons for doing good change. We still have the expectations of others facing us, but we also still have empathy. There are many, many people who can turn away from others in need. There are those that can turn a blind eye to the pain in others lives, but there are also many that cannot. Sometimes there are people that are more naturally empathetic. Often, people learn to be more empathetic by having shared experiences. For example, if you have ever been cold, hungry, or felt lost, then you can often feel for another individual going through the same thing. But even those people that can ignore others often empathize with characters in movies, tv shows, or books.

Empathy compels people to do good. It is difficult to feel the pain of another and not act to help them.

Empathy Chip

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Does Good Exist?

It has. It just has to.

When I think about good, I immediately think of its counterpart, evil. Does evil exist? There is no doubt whatsoever that evil exists. Wherever there is hatred, bigotry, violence, racism, apathy, corruption, deceit, etc..., there is evil. No one can deny that bad things don't happen all the time, and while the caliber of those bad things might vary, be it petty theft or murder or genocide, they are inherently bad.

Sometimes it is easier to define bad things over good things because the bad seem to be easier to identify and harder to challenge. Hitler was evil. End of discussion. You never hear people say, "Well maybe he was justified because all he was trying to do was better the situation of his people". Correction, you never hear sane people saying that. While quite often, in some of the other blogs in this project, you hear (see) people talking about charity and volunteer work as a selfish act; that charity is done to make yourself feel good or get a tax break. While good can sometimes seem relative, questionable because of differing motives, evil is not so. Evil is evil.

The main interaction between these two ideas is "the battle between good and evil". Captain James T. Kirk versus KHAN!!!; G.I. Joe versus Cobra; Beowulf versus Grendel, capitalism versus communism (which one is the evil one there?); Batman versus The Joker; Ash versus Team Rocket, Roosevelt versus Hitler ; the list is endless. And although most of those examples are fictitious, the idea is real. It has to be real. Evil is real and yet we do not live in total anarchy, with violence and chaos everywhere. Something has to work against evil, what is a more logical choice than good?

If good did not exist, then all that would be left is evil.

Good has to exist.