I encountered a question recently which has stuck in my craw and will not come out. It is a question so incredibly irritating that it simply refuses to go away unless attempts are made to answer it. It also dove-tails nice into those series of posts which Horse has previously written about that grand question of Eudaimonia. Simply put, that question is:
"Why be good?"
I love the elegance of this question. In just three words it takes a sledgehammer to the egg that lies at the very heart of the issue. This is the beauty of "why" on full display.
I think that we can all agree that a theoretical reasonable person, our Billy Brown from Sydney Town or Jilly Mavis from Brisvegas, will be carrying around in their heads some basic imprint of the underlying planks of common law. Don't kill people. Don't steal from people. Don't hit people. Invariably this will be then backed up by some variant of "the golden rule" which is "Do to others as you would have them do to you" or, "do not to others what you do not wish to have done to you." Variants of this exist across a whole host of cultures, religions, and law systems, and this can even be found in the Code of Hammurabi. However just because this is practically universal and reasonably reasonable, does not make this so.
The Golden Rule I think implies that cultures, law systems, and religions, have all reasonably agreed that some kind of reasonable standard of universal justice exists. However, I still do not think that even The Golden Rule arrives at answering the question of why anyone should be good. The Golden Rule and justice itself can only last as long and as far as there is some authority big enough and powerful enough to enforce it. All forms of justice, be they restorative, retributive, or equitable, still rely upon that very brittle plank of "fairness" and immediately we run into a problem.
"Fairness" although a useful overlay from which to explain the word, is ultimately bunk. The reason for this is that humans are very much not impartial players in the game. Every one of us, has as the centre of the observable universe, a point which is roughly 19mm behind our corneas. When you then attach a personality, a mind, a soul, whatever, to observe and explain the kosmos from that centre of the observable universe, "fairness" devolves into a mere extension of relative selfishness. Considering that what is fair and just is always coloured by that viewpoint, it is a truly awful standard. Remember, 'tragedy' is when I cut my finger whereas 'comedy' is when you fall into an open pit and die.
If even the most readily agreeable rule immediately crumbles upon inspection, then it has to be thrown out. What if you inspect the authority by which cultures, law systems, and religions, assume to derive their reasonableness from. Again we have a problem. When you have self-interested cultures, and law systems, even the destruction of people who are not you, can be made acceptable. Granted that you may have to invent some convenient cultural assumption or legal fiction or religious reason to enable that to happen, but if the underlying basis of the authority to determine what is and is not fair, just, or good, it itself not fair, just, or good, then even the plank of authority is itself bunk.
If we then interrogate that central authority which lies at the centre of the universe, a universe with no god has no inherent reason for being good, and a universe with one central all-powerful god also has no inherent reason for being good. Why should they? If you are that central all-powerful god then literally everything in the universe is answerable to you. Anyone and anything that questions your authority can be arbitrarily destroyed for the simple reason that might makes right. To be honest, I find the reason to be good because god is good, to be faulty because all this does is shift the question back to an already crumbled plank of authority, which is itself bunk.
Consistently, the question of "Why be good?" under those circumstances falls back to the opinion and choice of someone. History is littered with cases where cultures, religions, and law systems, have had to choose that other people have inherent dignity and are worthy as being accepted as objects to be good to. Questions of storge, agape, eros and philos, including civic philos are all dependent on a choice which has been made by someone and especially in the case of civic philos where the state has been forced to make that choice because people have demanded it for a very long time. However, the question of "Why be good?" when it is dependent on choice, fails to be answered. Whilst someone may choose that the other is a worthy object to be good to, it still does not adequately arrive at answering of "Why be good?" in the first place.
If I have brushed aside The Golden Rule, the concepts of fairness and justice, and even seemingly explained that goodness is not necessarily dependent on authority itself, then what's left? It seems to me that the answer to the question of "Why be good?" is that it is good to be good. It is good to do good. Goodness is its own end. The telos of goodness is goodness. The kosmos has no problem with atomic concepts like this which are indivisible. Existence exists. 1=1.
It is as if the kosmos actually does contain a priori elements, that there are unmovable movers, that there really can not be turtles all the way down. The fun thing is that my conclusion which is reasonably possibly wrong, because just like our theoretical reasonable persons of Billy Brown from Sydney Town or Jilly Mavis from Brisvegas, who carry around basic imprints of how the kosmos works in their heads does not make this so, was also arrived at a long time ago:
But goodness, since it has the aspect of desirable, implies the idea of a final cause, the causality of which is first among causes, since an agent does not act except for some end; and by an agent matter is moved to its form. Hence the end is called the cause of causes. Thus goodness, as a cause, is prior to being, as is the end to the form.
- Summa Theologica, Prima Secundae, Thomas Aquinas (1274)
Since as a reasonable actor, I can only come to a reasonable conclusion, then I think that it is reasonably reasonable that the the question of "Why be good?" is answered "because it is good to be good and that is the end to itself", is itself good enough.
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