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.

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?

🤷‍♂️ 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.