On Being Good

Why Me?

Dear Reader,

I’m trying to be a good person.

Earlier this summer, I spent an afternoon running around Lake View East, doing the chores I’ve been putting off for months. The errands that a good person would run: donating clothes, glasses, shoes, home goods, and mailing out pill bottles to be recycled. Why did it take me months? The inconvenience certainly played a role, but what ended up being the biggest hurdle was finding organizations to donate to. On and off for those months of putting this off, I found many an organization boasting about their mission… who were also quite vague about the specifics of how they run. Just a few clicks later, I’d find they were some sort of a scam. How did everything become a scam? Why? I want these actions to be worth it, and it’s hard to find organizations who do too. For example, there are big green bins all over the north side of Chicago. Written on them in big yellow lettering, the boxes implore me to donate my clothes, shoes, and books. The organization even has “green” in the title to evoke an image of an eco-conscious organization. Perfect! And yet for months I’ve passed these bins and wondered if it was a good organization. One quick internet search and the demon on my shoulder was right. For profit. Rarely check the bins, if ever. A rouse. Sigh. The next obvious choice was Village Discount, similar to a Goodwill or St Vinny’s, but often so much is brought to these organizations that donations are burned or put in landfills anyway. So I scour the web for a local organization that accepts clothing donations that guarantees the donations will either be distributed or upcycled. Good person. I looked. I gave up. I looked again, got bored, then I gave up. Bad person. I did donate ultimately to a fantastic local organization, Brown Elephant, which provides healthcare, education, and a variety of other resources to the Chicago queer community. But what happens to the donations that can’t be sold there? I don’t know, and maybe they do get recycled - but I don’t know. I gave up. Similarly, the past few months I’ve been saving the orange bottles my prescriptions come in. Long story short, I went through a similar process of finding somewhere to donate/recycle them: Matthew 25 Ministries. Can I trust their work? The website was sparse, vague. I gave up and donated anyway. Bad person. But I did donate. Good person?

Why is finding transparent organizations so difficult? Why don’t I know where the compost I get picked up from my apartment twice a month goes? Is that all a scam? Is it the thought that ever really counts? Is a misguided attempt at charity really any good at all? Am I too hard on myself?

I ponder these questions until the bus gets to my stop.

This all feels especially relevant in light of the chaos of our current administration. Hospitals are closing, millions of people have lost their healthcare, public schools are next on the chopping block, making now a great time for us all to be more neighborly.

I desperately want to do what’s right, and I constantly fall short. I’ll try again tomorrow.

Xoxoxo,

glo

The Intellectual’s Argument Against Goodness

and my rebuttal

I first heard the idea that doing good is ultimately selfish due to the esteem and social perks you gain from it on a podcast a handful of years ago. I was intrigued by the argument, though it never quite sat right, and due to it being stated by a self proclaimed armchair expert, I didn’t give the concept much merit. But I’ve been unsettled by the idea, and similar ones popping up more in online discourse, especially when it’s a step further into a Nihilistic approach coming to the conclusion that since things are so bad, there’s no point in doing good. Hedonism as the answer. An “if you can’t beat them, join them” mentality when it comes to AI, for example. There seems to be a feeling of defeat, perhaps most directly linked to the landslide loss of Kamala Harris in the most recent presidential election, or the increased regularity of climate disasters, or … I could continue on for a while here. Most disconcerting is when I started to hear these ideas leap from the phone and be espoused by my friends.

Manvir Singh explores these ideas in his article, “Are your Morals Too Good to be True” where he takes a scientific approach in his attempt to disprove that morality is inherently selfish.

This began for Singh when he observed burying beetles, hoping to find some answer in the natural world to altruism due to the beetle's “biparental model of care” in which both male and female care equally for their young. When he couldn’t find the answers there, “(he) struggled, unsuccessfully, to construct a new framework for moral behavior which didn’t look like self-interest in disguise (Singh).” In search of a new framework, Singh discovered the work of Moshe Hoffman and Nichola Raihani. Hoffman’s research focuses on the nature of trust in our society, especially as it relates to outward acts of morality. Hoffman explains that “on the one hand, we trust people who are guided by consistent ethical precepts… on the other hand, we’re turned off when people’s commitments seem calculated (Singh).” This is where we see terms like “virtue signaling” come into play, when someone’s actions appear to be thinly veiled attempts at being perceived as good, rather than true altruism. Hoffman argues that these people are seen as less trustworthy because they are motivated by social perks, and when those perks go away, so will they. Nichola Raihani expanded on this idea calling it the “reputation tightrope”. Where it is “ beneficial to look moral but only as long as you don’t seem motivated by the benefits (Singh)”. Singh connects this back to natural selection, stating “appeals to pure selflessness have become harder to defend, while a belief in objective moral truths—existing apart from our minds and discoverable through impartial judgment—has grown increasingly untenable…moral tenets—such as the rightness of loyalty or the wrongness of murder—do not exist unless natural selection produces organisms that value them (Singh).” This skepticism leads to a generally harsh view of morality being inextricably tied to selfishness, self preservation, and social advancement. While true when it comes to social posturing, I don't find it true of the human spirit, nor do I think it morally wrong to feel good when doing good, or for there to be a direct or indirect benefit from doing good. I also don't think the social benefit is necessarily tied to the good work, but rather the likeminded community found in doing so. Social posturing only works if there is an audience, and good can be done in its absence. But we get something in return when engaging with the community, and what's so wrong about that? To conclude we only act out of our evolutionary purpose flattens our true experience engaging in the world, and dismisses when we act directly against what is evolutionarily outlined for us. We are motivated by social status and maintaining an ingroup, but I think we can move beyond that as well.

If you wanted to reduce it to “self-preservation” as Singh says, I’d say it's how I've been able to preserve myself in an increasingly globalized world where tragedy accompanies reality tv. Where an ocean away people starve and I watch it on a phone that was made using slave labor while I eat take out . Being selfish is part of being alive. I think inspecting our motivations overshadows the universal desire to be good, where that desire comes from doesn't interest me as much as I’m interested in engaging consistently in organizations that help people. I'm especially interested in talking about organizations not being transparent about where their donations go, how their money is allocated, how their people are treated, and what their CEO makes. We are so quick to be hard on the individual, I'm far more inclined to be hard on the companies. Ultimately, the conversation around evolutionary motivation and virtue signalling is a great way for people to sound intellectual and appear a real critical thinker while explaining to you that they do nothing to help their neighbors. Yawn.

Bounded Ethicality

I’ll be good when I remember to be

We are faced with hundreds of little decisions every day, in certain instances we may go out of our way to act ethically, other times we do the opposite. What factors contribute to these often unconscious decisions? In 1957, Herbert Simon “enlisted this notion of boundedness to describe the limited information available to decision-makers, the limited cognitive capacity of decision-makers’ minds, and the limited time available for decision-makers, all of which bound the rationality of the decision itself (Chugh)”. Essentially saying that it is because we are both inundated with so many decisions and limited in the scope of knowledge we have regarding these decisions, thus our ability to make a rational choice is bound to our limitations. This concept of “Bounded Rationality” was later expanded upon in 2005, lead by psychologist Dolly Chugh where she developed the concept of “Bounded Ethicality”. Bounded Ethicality is “the systematic and ordinary psychological processes of enhancing and protecting our ethical self-view, which automatically, dynamically, and cyclically influence the ethicality of decision-making” (Chugh). To break that down, she developed a model in 2016 to demonstrate this effect. The model represents ethical behavior and how it hinges on whether or not the individual is in a state of “self-protection” or “self-enhancement”. Self-protection is employed when there is heightened moral awareness, leading someone out of automatic processing and into more conscientious behavior, which often leads to more ethical decision making. Self-enhancement is employed when there is little to no moral awareness, leading to more unconscious processing and moral blind spots. Basically, knowing a decision has an ethical element leads people to act more ethically. But without that knowledge being top of mind, we default to whatever is most salient.

I appreciate this model because it lacks the judgement I was finding in other articles talking about morality. I like to believe that when faced with a decision, people will make the ethical one when they know there is an ethical element to it.

It seems like people, when faced with being good in today’s climate, swing between nihilism and activism before settling in the middle, acting in frustrated indifference and defeat. I find myself most often in that camp, and am working to step out of it. It’s a great way to make sure our communities never get any better, and plays right into the hands of those who benefit from the systems as they are. There is this battle between giving yourself grace, pointing fingers to those with more power and influence, and knowing you are not doing enough in your own community to be pointing those fingers. Lately, I find it unhelpful to extend too much grace to myself when I come from a privileged class of people who, realistically, are always comfortable, always safe. If I, and people in my position, aren’t the ones to help - who should? Who will? But then comes the problem of staying afloat ourselves - and the disconnect sets in between who we are, and who we strive to be. How we define a good person vs how we ourselves act. I don’t know the right balance, I’m still trying to find it. But I think if we value and integrate into our life community service the way we value and integrate eating vegetables and exercise, we would all be better off.

Works Cited:

Are Your Morals Too Good to Be True? | The New Yorker By Manvir Singh

A dynamic and cyclical model of bounded ethicality by Dolly Chugh and Mary C. Kerm