SenKThe only difference between a monster and a decent human being is the privilege of a support network.
TrackinDaKrakenThe worst monsters are made by power. Power breeds apathy and boredom, and provides protection.
TheReturnOfPEBpower yields nothing without force.
force is the not just the tip but the spear itself.
I think that a support network can help people be better. But that is relative to reality of the support network.
TheDoctorDonnaI’m pretty sure I’m a decent person and I’ve never had a support network. Kind of had the opposite, really but at very least I try to be a good person and I feel remorse when I fail.
If he’s American like me, TV probably.
I had no support either and I’m ok. Not everyone is strong enough without support though so I’m just lucky I was smart enough to recognize bad behaviors. (Not including the self destructive kind sadly)
So you thankfully was able to live in a place where the only media you were exposed to wasn’t fascist propaganda?
Not all of it lol. I grew up mostly watching cheers rerurns and family ties, family matters, stuff like that. I’m sure there was plenty of propaganda, thought not at the level we have today, but my parents were very young when they had me and spent a lot of time partying. Not paying attention to news or anything beyond the sports. They were never supportive of me but instead had numerous amounts of adults at the house all the time. I grew up around mostly adults who lived to get fucked up so I spent a considerable amount of time letting the TV be my support network. I knew from tv that the way my parents and their friends behaved was not typical of a normal family and I be l quite literally had my TV family to take care of me. I always got good grades, never in trouble, and lied constantly about my home life. I have no doubts it’s why I grew up to be, amongst things, a great father/husband. I was smart enough to use my parents as a sort of D.A.R.E. program of living. Don’t do this, do the opposite sort of thing. I’m also extremely good at manipulating people around me but never to cause them harm. Anymore. I had to learn that one the hard way lol. That’s a lot of text, sorry, but it was therapeutic to type it out.
That’s a lot of text, sorry, but it was therapeutic to type it out.
Actually I’m really glad if so. Thank you!
My point is that you don’t have to have a perfect support network that’s always there. Sometimes even indifference is better than actively having one’s teeth kicked in for trying to be kind.
I always got good grades
The fact that you had an education at all is also a support network.
I don’t mean to belittle your own efforts at all, but it’s easy to overlook a lot of environmental factors that help shape who you’ve become.
My OP on “support network” was vague on purpose. I’m seeing a lot of people take it to mean wildly different things.
She, Canadian, and not from TV. Most of my growing up we didn’t have TV. I just didn’t want to make other people the way people made me feel.
By knowing how shitty it felt to be treated badly and not wanting to make others feel that way, unfortunately.
It takes incredible resilience to consciously choose a different path when you haven’t been shown a healthy one. My point is that a support network acts as a buffer against radicalization or becoming an abuser yourself. Without that, it requires extraordinary mental effort to not pass on that pain, effort that not everyone has the capacity for. And if they inherently don’t have the capacity, I don’t see the grounds to judge them as monsters: they literally cannot do otherwise.
Plenty of monsters with support systems, plenty of decent people who have been beaten down by life and left to fend on their own.
‘Plenty of monsters with support systems’ - so were they inherently monsters? If yes, then they couldn’t help it, like a polar bear can’t help hunting. We don’t call polar bears ‘monsters.’ We call them predators, which is what humans become when their ‘support’ teaches them cruelty, not care.
‘Plenty of decent people beaten down by life’ - same logic. No inherent goodness, just luck: someone, somewhere, showed them ‘don’t be cruel’ before it was too late.
I don’t believe in inherent good or evil.
I think the point they were making is that a decent support system is not the determining factor as your post suggests.
Even your counterarguments rest on the assumption that this is true. You suggest that if it’s not a support system they just be “inherently” good or evil, completely ignoring the more likely possibility that there are countless other variables that could factor into what kind of person someone is.
Even your counterarguments rest on the assumption that this is true. You suggest that if it’s not a support system they must be “inherently” good or evil, completely ignoring the more likely possibility that there are countless other variables that could factor into what kind of person someone becomes.
Like what? You have inherent factors (genes) or environment (the support network, “the village that raises the child” etc.).
ageedizzleA lot of this comes down to people’s free will. If you could perfectly analyze the reasons for every decision a person makes then those decisions would hardly be free.
I can’t prove that to you. And you can’t prove it’s not real, either. This debate has been at a standstill since the Ancient Greeks started discussing it. I just took it for granted in my previous comment because the vast majority of people, including professional philosophers, see here) believe it to be real.
That’s not how burden of proof works. Just because a lot of people (particularly those with culturally Christian backgrounds…) “believe” it’s real, doesn’t make it so.
Like I said in my previous comment, I can’t prove anything to you. And if it wasn’t obvious, I’m not trying to prove anything to you. I’m certainly not saying that free will is real because people believe in it. I’m not saying you have the burden of proof. I’m not trying to persuade you and I’m not looking for a debate.
All I was saying that, in casual conversation, it’s probably fine to speak as if it’s real because very few people will actually take objection to that.
And that has nothing to do with Christianity either. You’ll notice from that survey that the majority of professional philosophers are actually atheists too. In fact, one of the philosophers who is responsible for popularizing atheism in revent decades, Daniel Dennett, someone who is literally one of the founders of the new atheism movement, is a big proponent of free will and has written entire books on it.
Dennett is just a determinist who really, really doesn’t want to admit he is one (probably because he’d have to admit he’s wrong and everyone hates doing that, particularly white men at the top of their fields). I’ve read him and watched his debates.
I said “culturally Christian”. You can’t just shake off the centuries of Christian philosophy that has informed Western thought by just “not believing in God”. One of the symptoms of that specifically is the belief in free will, as Christianity requires there to be some kind of a pure, untarnished essentiality to people that can choose to be evil or good. It’s been hammered into us in media since we were kids, baked into everyday language.
Dennett openly admits he’s a determinist, you’d know that if you actually read his books. He’s literally the world’s leading proponent of determinism. Determinists believe in free will.
He’s a compatibilist. Which I admit we can then break down into compatibilist determinist, which is a different thing from a (hard) determinist.
Which I characterize as a determinist who really doesn’t want to admit to being one.
This is not very charitable of you. Its also simply inaccurate. If they didn’t already openly admit to being determinists then they would, by definition, not be compatibilists
Okay. Sorry if I seemed a but harsh in my earlier messages. After I sent those I was thinking about it and realized I probably went a bit too hard.
I see you’re from lemmy.ca. It’s good to see another Canadian on here. Thanks for contributing to the fediverse. I hope you feel welcome here
You don’t have to be shown. All it takes to be a good person is empathy. All it takes to be a bad one is its lack.
That statement dangerously oversimplifies human behavior and stigmatizes neurodivergent individuals, particularly those on the autism spectrum, who may experience empathy differently but are not inherently “bad.”
They may experience it differently, but if they can act on it, they will be good people. Without being able to act on empathy, no matter how you perceive it, you cannot be good, and refusing to act with empathy towards people and other lives on earth is bad.
So if someone literally cannot “act” in some way, you get to decide if they are good or evil?
How else can you judge someone’s character if not by their actions?
🤷♂️ Yeah, kinda. What metric are you using?
First I can look at my own values and discover that I happen to value human well-being. I like it when people are happy, healthy and free of suffering. It doesn’t make me a “virtuous” person, I’m a human too so I could be purely guided by self-interest.
Then I can look at science and reason and conclude that by those things, I can generally figure out what kind of things impact human well-being and how.
Then I can look at someone’s behavior and conclude that it’s either beneficial or detrimental to human well-being.
Then I can look at science and reason again to find out how to address that behavior in order to reduce (or even entirely prevent) harm.
I don’t need a moral framework for any of that, and I certainly don’t need to judge people as essentially “good” or “evil”.
But why is it a beneficial for other humans to be happy? Why do you like that? That is empathy.
My capacity for empathy has nothing to do with anything.
Again: I just happen to value human well-being, and as literally everybody in the universe, I will seek to act in accordance to my values, which usually easily puts me in the same camp as other people who value human well-being.
There are people out there who value “the word of the lord” or something like that more. Like they would prefer to kill wrong-believers because they value their religious text more than human life. They think they are “good” too. I don’t agree with them, but if MOST people did, then they would get to decide what “good” is.
Nah. That’s bad. I don’t care what most people think. Treating people with empathy is good. Treating people as objects is bad.
Anuttaraomg thank u!!!
i was bullied for being “evil witch” when i was in school cuz i was autist and there was the meme that autists “can’t feel empathy”. i was like… watching cartoons and saw the “bad guys” and i thought i wasn’t like them… but then at school they told me i was?? it was awful
thank u for saying this
mimic_kryIdk I’m a shit person and I have a great support network. Honestly they’re the only reason I haven’t killed myself yet.
I think there’s a thin line between monster and hero. Like most human behaviors, I think the divide is much smaller than we might like to think.
Personally, I think we just have weird brains that tend to want to explain everything, even if it there may not be one. And we like to fill in those gaps with imagination, rather than accept ignorance. I forget the name of this scientific fallacy.
Anyways nice showerthought
First of all, please don’t kill yourself.
Second, if you think you’re a shit person and want to kill yourself… how are you a shit person? I mean I’m merely assuming here that you think you’re shit because maybe you sometimes do shitty things, and because of that you should kys. If you at least recognize that you can do harmful things, you aren’t irredeemable, you can start taking steps to avoid doing that.
Everybody does shitty things sometimes, some more than others. I don’t think anyone deserves death but in terms of just shittiness, people who don’t even recognize that in themselves are way more unpleasant to be around. And if you have a great support network, maybe they don’t entirely agree with your self-assessment.
This is close to the “if people were educated they wouldn’t be evil” fallacy, as if people like Henry Kissinger didn’t exist, lol.
No, as Hume brilliantly pointed out: shoulds and ares are fundamentally disconnected. You can be extremely smart and knowledgeable about the world and still conduct yourself viciously (at times, monstrously so). What’s the name of that physically disabled physicist that cheated on his wife and was just chilling with/close to Epstein?
The only real difference between a moral person and a monster is that the former 1) believes that, for every occasion and decision, some acts are visibly, objectively more moral than others; 2) believes they should always privilege righteousness before vice, and do the moral thing. That’s it. One of my closest male friends is literally illiterate and he’s an excellent dad who chooses virtue regularly, my dad was a lawyer and that didn’t stop him from being abusive to his family and to cheat on his wife, lol.
So no, stop it, that’s not how it works. Good people are good because they decide to be good (which is easy to see, you don’t need degrees, you don’t even need to know how to read or write!), every day, and even when they slip they still know that they DID slip, they don’t just rationalize their mistake as something virtuous (because they believe in objective morality and etc etc.).
You’re mixing up two things: knowing right from wrong and having the capacity to act on it. Hume’s right: you CAN be brilliant and still vicious. But that’s not an argument for inherent morality; it’s proof that knowledge alone doesn’t shape behavior. Your literate friend ‘chooses virtue’ because he can. His life gave him stability, models, and the luxury of slip-ups. Your dad, the lawyer who cheated? He had power without consequences, which is its own kind of support system: one that rewards harm.
The difference isn’t ‘moral vs. monster.’ It’s who had the tools to practice what they preached. and who didn’t. You’re arguing that ‘good people’ are the ones who succeed at morality. I’m saying morality is a skill, and skills require resources. No resources? No skill. Just survival.
He was raised in the streets and used to sell drugs, which is why he ended up in jail for 7 years. To this day, he doesn’t know his mom or dad. The man had no support. Fair enough, “morality is a skill” as in the more you choose right over wrong, the easier it gets, it becomes a part of your identity you’re proud of, but I don’t think it requires resources the way you see it. Also, people can be and have been self-sacrificial, even in the absence of resources. The poorest people are the ones that give more to charity, there’s more union and prosociality in Gaza amongst the bombs than in any American neighborhood… Idk man, I’m not buying this. I think that it’s a variable that can affect your decision making, especially if your moral framework is flimsy, but not the main variable behind moral decision making.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding your point, TBF.
You’re seeing a “self” or an “identity” where there are only conditions. My point is that your friend didn’t “choose” virtue in a vacuum; he finally encountered conditions - perhaps a moment of stability or a specific mentor - where pro-social behavior wasn’t actively punished by his environment, or it was even rewarded in ways that aren’t immediately obvious.
In places like Gaza, prosociality isn’t a miracle of “free will”; it’s a survival requirement. When the external world is hostile, the internal community must be hyper-cooperative to survive. That is a reinforced behavior.
If you put a “good” person in a system that rewards predation and punishes kindness with death or starvation, that “virtuous identity” eventually collapses into survival. We aren’t essentially “good” or “bad”, we are reflections of the resources, safety, and reinforcements available to us. Character is just the name we give to a long chain of causes and conditions that happened to go right.
Yeah so many underprivleged rich assholes who got no support throughout their life. musk, trump, kennedy, etc. all just victims of an unfair system. they are not truly monsters.
PosiePoserAnd what if they had been surrounded by people who actually care about human well-being?
What is a decent human to you?
What is a monster?
What is a monster?
Indeed what? That’s not an answer.
Do you want me to regurgitate my views on “decent person” or a “monster”?
Think for yourself. Starting with questioning if such categorizations are even useful or justified.
Lol it’s your post, so yes
Pinetten