Good post because it’s so relevant to this kind of forum. I also really appreciate your initial admission that actually niceness or kindness may have some degree of logical irrelevance in a forum of this nature.
Your list of positives associated with being nice I find a little bit unsatisfactory because I’m not sure how much the core idea really stands up to rational argument. For example, your list is quite un-axiomatic. Many of the items could be categorized or framed under one of the coexistent items, for example, 4 into 3, 1 into 5, and so on. As another example, it seems like niceness in popular society largely derives from religious influences and cultural tradition. IMO this is an indication of the kind of morality philosophy which goes into niceness, which has very little to do with any kind of hard rationalistic analysis. Of course it’s good to be nice… I think this is obvious to most human beings, and forms a kind of staple ingredient for all cooperative societies. But if you can’t see that, is it really the sort of thing that can be logically justified?
It’s a bit like logically justifying that evil is bad… it’s more a matter of moral philosophical definition and interpretation, not as much of an empirical or rationalistic justification.
Good post because it’s so relevant to this kind of forum. I also really appreciate your initial admission that actually niceness or kindness may have some degree of logical irrelevance in a forum of this nature.
Your list of positives associated with being nice I find a little bit unsatisfactory because I’m not sure how much the core idea really stands up to rational argument. For example, your list is quite un-axiomatic. Many of the items could be categorized or framed under one of the coexistent items, for example, 4 into 3, 1 into 5, and so on. As another example, it seems like niceness in popular society largely derives from religious influences and cultural tradition. IMO this is an indication of the kind of morality philosophy which goes into niceness, which has very little to do with any kind of hard rationalistic analysis. Of course it’s good to be nice… I think this is obvious to most human beings, and forms a kind of staple ingredient for all cooperative societies. But if you can’t see that, is it really the sort of thing that can be logically justified?
It’s a bit like logically justifying that evil is bad… it’s more a matter of moral philosophical definition and interpretation, not as much of an empirical or rationalistic justification.