The only thing left to do is to steer in the right direction: make things around you better instead of worse, based on your intrinsically motivating discernment of what is better/worse. Don’t try to be a good person, just try to make nicer things happen. And get more foresight, perspective, and cooperation as you go, so you can participate in steering bigger things on longer timescales using more information.
FWIW, this is roughly my viewpoint.
I don’t think being a good person is a concept that is really that meaningful. Meanwhile, many of the systems I participate in seem quite terrible along many dimensions, and not-being-complicit in them doesn’t seem very tractable. There were points in the past where I stressed out about this through the ‘good person’ lens, but for the past few years I’ve mostly just looked through the frame of ‘try to steer towards nicer things.’
I realize this may seem in tension with some of my recent comments but I don’t see it that way.
I do feel like there’s still some kind of substantive disagreement here, but that disagreement mostly doesn’t live in the frame you’ve laid out. (Some of it does, but I’m not sure whether those particular disagreements are a crux of mine, still mulling it over)
I think individual people should do their best not to see things in the lens of ‘am I a good person’ or ‘are they a good person?‘, but engineers building systems (social or technological) need to account for people’s tendency to do that. (Whether by routing around the problem, or limiting the system to people with common knowledge that they don’t have that problem, or building feedback loops into the system that improve people’s ability to look at critiques outside the lens of ‘bad person-ness’)
I don’t think being a good person is a concept that is really that meaningful.
My not-terribly-examined model is that good person is a social concept masquerading as a moral one. Human morality evolved for social reasons to service social purposes [citation needed]. Under this model, when someone is anxious about being a good person, their anxiety is really about their acceptance by others, i.e. good = has met the group’s standards for approval and inclusion.
If this model is correct, then saying that being a good person is not a meaningful moral concept could be interpreted (consciously or otherwise) by some listeners to mean “there is no standard you can meet which means you have gained society’s approval”. Which is probably damned scary if you’re anxious about that kind of thing.
My quick thoughts on the implications is something like maybe it’s good to generally dissolve good person as a moral concept and then consciously factor out the things you do to gain acceptance within groups (according to their morality) from the actions you take because you’re trying to optimize for your own personally-held morality/virtues/value.
FWIW, this is roughly my viewpoint.
I don’t think being a good person is a concept that is really that meaningful. Meanwhile, many of the systems I participate in seem quite terrible along many dimensions, and not-being-complicit in them doesn’t seem very tractable. There were points in the past where I stressed out about this through the ‘good person’ lens, but for the past few years I’ve mostly just looked through the frame of ‘try to steer towards nicer things.’
I realize this may seem in tension with some of my recent comments but I don’t see it that way.
I do feel like there’s still some kind of substantive disagreement here, but that disagreement mostly doesn’t live in the frame you’ve laid out. (Some of it does, but I’m not sure whether those particular disagreements are a crux of mine, still mulling it over)
I think individual people should do their best not to see things in the lens of ‘am I a good person’ or ‘are they a good person?‘, but engineers building systems (social or technological) need to account for people’s tendency to do that. (Whether by routing around the problem, or limiting the system to people with common knowledge that they don’t have that problem, or building feedback loops into the system that improve people’s ability to look at critiques outside the lens of ‘bad person-ness’)
My not-terribly-examined model is that good person is a social concept masquerading as a moral one. Human morality evolved for social reasons to service social purposes [citation needed]. Under this model, when someone is anxious about being a good person, their anxiety is really about their acceptance by others, i.e. good = has met the group’s standards for approval and inclusion.
If this model is correct, then saying that being a good person is not a meaningful moral concept could be interpreted (consciously or otherwise) by some listeners to mean “there is no standard you can meet which means you have gained society’s approval”. Which is probably damned scary if you’re anxious about that kind of thing.
My quick thoughts on the implications is something like maybe it’s good to generally dissolve good person as a moral concept and then consciously factor out the things you do to gain acceptance within groups (according to their morality) from the actions you take because you’re trying to optimize for your own personally-held morality/virtues/value.