Something I was pondering today. While I've tried to phrase it so that it's more universally applicable, I'm afraid my roots are still showing:
Self-control and "good"ness are often associated with each other, the conventional wisdom being that human beings are not naturally "good" and we need to apply self-control in order to be "good". (For the purpose of this example "good" means precisely whatever the reader thinks it does.)
Suppose for a moment there is a person who requires no self-control whatsoever to be "good". They simply wander through life, doing whatever it occurs to them to do at any given time, and the results are entirely, without exception, "good". There's no self-control, no self-discipline, no self-denial, no effort. Everything they do is "good" because it simply does not occur to them to do anything that's considered less than perfectly "good".
Now suppose there's another person who is also "good" for their entire life, every word and every deed. However, this person has to make a continuous, concerted, deliberate, conscious effort to be "good". If they did whatever it occurred to them to do - like the first person does - everything they did would be completely "bad". However, they want, for whatever reason, to be "good", so they exercise self-control, self-discipline, self-denial at every turn, and as a result their actions all end up being "good".
So which of these two people is ultimately more "good"?
2 comments:
Clearly the second person because in addition to all the good actions etc of the first person which are likewise carried out by the second person, the second person has to try to be good.
If 'trying to be good' is itself good then the second person has 'more' good than the first.
What's interesting about that is when you think of a literary/mythical archetype of the Most Entirely Good Person Ever (and, for me, the first example that comes to mind is the Virgin Mary in Catholicism, although we also have minor versions in fairy tales on occasion), they are more along the lines of my first example. There is never any struggle or effort, they just are good.
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