Wolfy Chai

Each night, across highly developed countries, people go to bed lulling themselves to sleep with the notion that they are “good people”. Further, they often contemplate their day, reciting to themselves that they did the best that they could and the and there is nothing more that they could do. Their entire lives—and perspective—squarely limited in scope to the superficial minutiae of those day-to-day operations that they see immediately in front of them at any one given moment. “I held the door for that lady”. “I volunteered at a homeless shelter on Saturday”. “I treat everyone with kindness”.

Overwhelmingly, most people think of themselves as “good people”—and it could not just be for no reason. The questions I am interested in asking are what is a “good person” anyways, and, does such a person actually exist?

According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, “good” is defined as “Things that are morally proper or correct”.

Why having an intention to do good is sometimes not good enough

Some people might argue that one is a good person if that person is intending to only do good and not intending to inflict harm or to do bad things. This sounds good on paper right? Everyone can only “do better when they know better”.

The problem with this framework is that it does not take into consideration the unconsciousness that subtly hibernates in the background; things that people take for granted in order to jump through the hoops of every day life. A simplistic but ten times people will see someone say that x is a good person because she volunteers every week at an animal sanctuary and is an amazingly caring friend. But are those things enough to say that she is a good person? What about everything else she does or is? How much of her do you see? Perhaps more importantly, how much does she see?

You see, this conventional model of defining a good person also does not take into consideration that people can intend to only do good while knowing that there is a possibility that what they’re actually doing isn’t good. This applies especially to these situations of unconscious acts. Unconscious

How does one maintain their status as a “good person” in this post-industrial capitalism world?

I argue that immorality is merely a side effect of our hyper-exploitative society and a moral person cannot exist within that structure.

Let me explain. An exploitative society—like all post-industrial societies—relies on benefits for those who live in the society, and suffering or exploitation for less fortunate groups in the same society or people in different nations. If you want the new sneakers you were dreaming of, someone somewhere else will likely not be paid what they should be, the work conditions are likely to be far less than ideal, and the collective environmental consequences, potentially catastrophic.

For example, leather suppliers in Colombia frequently dump a cornucopia of chemicals—including extremely toxic ones like cyanide—into watersheds and sometimes directly into rivers which are often used for water supplies. Waterways such as the Bogotá River, has become extremely toxic from a combination of urban runoff, leather refinery chemicals, and the dumping of raw sewage from the city which fails to supply enough sewage treatment plants to sustain its residents.

This is just one tiny example, the list of consequences of “negative externalities” in economic terms, is potentially endless. Some times there is just no way around contributing to that.