The true test of a saint is this—if doing the right thing would lead to lifelong misery for you and your family, would you still do it?
This seems to be based on a false dichotomy: “Either I genuinely want to do good AT ANY AND ALL COSTS, or all my attempts to do good are insincere.”
I would argue that there are other possibilities besides those two. A person can genuinely desire to do good because he truly likes to do good, but he has other likes and goals as well and will sometimes sacrifice one goal for the other.
Fair enough, but I’d still say that most people do “good” (by which they mostly mean culturally approved things) as a strategy to achieve some more basic end. In support of this proposition, I’ll note that “good” is defined by different people in different ways that all generally correlate with cultural approval in common cases but strongly diverge in matters of basic principle. See Scott Alexander’s: The Tails Coming Apart as Metaphor for Life.
This seems to be based on a false dichotomy: “Either I genuinely want to do good AT ANY AND ALL COSTS, or all my attempts to do good are insincere.”
I would argue that there are other possibilities besides those two. A person can genuinely desire to do good because he truly likes to do good, but he has other likes and goals as well and will sometimes sacrifice one goal for the other.
Fair enough, but I’d still say that most people do “good” (by which they mostly mean culturally approved things) as a strategy to achieve some more basic end. In support of this proposition, I’ll note that “good” is defined by different people in different ways that all generally correlate with cultural approval in common cases but strongly diverge in matters of basic principle. See Scott Alexander’s: The Tails Coming Apart as Metaphor for Life.