Good Actions? Or Good Feelings?

My most offensive idea comes when people come to realize I don’t believe in good.

But I do think there can be times of goodness. A big meal with friends and everyone feels satiated and is sitting by the fireplace. We all are feeling good,

So I do believe in good as in good feelings, times of contentment. And I do believe the goal in life is to have good feelings, but not necessarily as pleasures. Good feelings that come from the moment of joy that is shared with others; not the pleasurable individual experiences I might have. Of course it was pleasurable when I would ski, but there was no goodness in my skiing, although there might be, later in a rented cabin after a meal with my companions around the fireplace and we felt content.

The good feeling is not a singular pleasure, it is a group satiation. Or at least that is how I find it.

On the other hand I don’t know how to be good. Many times I thought I was trying to be good only to find I had severely offended someone.

I can’t “see” good. And it isn’t necessarily an absence of bad. I can’t define a quality or action that is good. And it isn’t always because the quality or action was supposed to be better.

And I’m abscessing now without any ability to understand what quality might have even though at least since Plato, we have often tried to make good into some type of formulated qualities.

So good actions are not visible; or might not be visible; or there may be differences of opinions of what actions are good.

What we can observe, and quite easily,is what is bad. If it harms it is bad. If it leads to bad feelings it is a bad. It’s pretty easy to observe evil. We’re all very addicted to observing evil and we all want to punish it or stamp it out in some way.

I could not concur more.

But now we enter into the crux of the opposition to evil as formulating a good to oppose it.

Believing in childbirth may be good but that doesn’t mean forcing childbirth upon a woman is also therefore good. So maybe believing in childbirth as a good alternative is not necessarily good.

But a right to not have a child may not be good either. The childless (might) feel more lonely. And while I don’t see any great danger in a declining childbirth rate at our current world populations rates, others are alarmed that there won’t be enough workers for tomorrow?

But while having enough workers may be good, working may not be good.

Also the reasons to have workers may seem good to some and not to others.

Most of us will say taking a life is bad; i.e., no one thinks it is good. But then we redefine taking a life and sometimes to some people we can do good to take a life from someone else who might have done bad.

If I steal money from your wallet I have done bad. But if the reason I took money from your wallet is the profits taken by charging me more than I could afford for what I needed, then my bad is mitigated less bad even though the profiteer that created the situation that mitigated my bad deed to being a lesser bad deed will never be seen (at least legally) to be bad for the accouterments of stealing from me by charging me so much I was forced into stealing from you that by mitigated badness says was a justifiable circumstance for my suffering a lesser punishment, but not no punishment.

The only one who may suffer no punishment is the profiteer, because “making a profit” is good, even though it takes more than it should, which is the very definition of, and reason for, stealing…to make a profit from another. The goodness and badness of stealing becomes itself completely mitigated to be good if it is redefined as profit.

Good actions therefore exist no more (definably) than good qualities. Both are matters of perception.

And while I can’t shape the qualities another person may have, I can disqualify their influence from my perspectives.

And while we might not always agree on what actions are harmful we can see very easily when someone is being harmed. And we can attempt to refute or disqualify those actions from taking place.

Obviously others may feel I was acting badly in trying to prevent another bad action. “Two wrongs don’t make a right.” But if a bad action is not prevented while occurring the harm has been done; and encouraged to be done again since it was not prevented. “Got away with it.”

So even if two wrongs don’t make a right; uncorrected wrongs never lead to a right.

And even if you never define what is right or what is wrong, it seems we should what makes us have good feelings with others, and correcting wrongs doesn’t always do that.

But if we leave it all to the judgement day the judges will be those who got away with being wrong.

So stop bad actions when they occur and perhaps (probably) naive, but I seem to think if we tried to construct a society that shunned bad actors' participation and otherwise encouraged actors who embedded good feelings into the community, bad actors' desire to participate would tend to conform them from attempting to act maliciously.

Well it might not end all evil, but it just seems if we quit trying to define good we might have a clearer route to eliminate evil.