Imagine yourself as a person with moderate wealth, a reasonable household and well-rounded morals. One day you come across a person on the street with none of this except the well-rounded morals. After conversing you decide to take him in for the night and you learn more about them that evening. By the morning they are dead and the doctor claims it to be tuberculosis. You are moved by the person’s death, but would you have cared as much if you had never met them?
Whether there is free will or an ineffable plan has always been an argument between philosophers and theologians for thousands of years. The question of whether we have free will or not has been an argument between philosophers and other philosophers for the same time. But the proposal of whether we would show the same feelings or actions towards a person or thing without being affected by it is something completely different.
“Good nature, or what is often considered as such, is the most selfish of all virtues. It is nine times out of ten mere indolence of disposition.” – William Hazlitt
Hazlitt stated that our good nature is proven actions to our want to be seen as good people rather than pure good actions. If the outcome were not to benefit the provider, then why would somebody choose to undergo a task? This is what a protest is. A group of people who would not have outrightly fought for a cause out of their morals, but will if it provides their vanity and enhances their ego.
This is Good Nature in its finest, those who protest something soon have moved on: despite the problem still occurring.
And is it this Good nature that we feel when somebody we know passes? without knowing them, or benefitting from them, would we still have cried at their end? The same outcome would have occurred and our person would have died regardless, but is it in knowing that we grieve and would we still fight for them?
“A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths are a statistic”
-Joseph Stalin
Our will, be that free or not, is fueled by our vanity and compassion for the others which may permeate our existence. The question of whether we would fight in the same way for these people without knowing them is either a result of vanity, ego or the 1/10 good nature as determined by Hazlitt.
And imagining that we are beings of free will, what would compel us to help in other circumstances? But also what is there to keep us from doing what we have determined as evil, or at the very least, the opposite to good? Both sides of the coin have a near equal chance of being flipped as the game continues. It seems though that our conditioning to the nature of good and evil comes more from the viewpoints of others. Our impulse, no matter how holy, to create evil and seek chaos is as human as it is to find love; it is our foresight to the reactions of the surrounding people that compels us to halt and reconsider our actions. But since everybody has these thoughts, it is only the silent agreement of it being wrong that is stopping the world from undertaking these urges. Silence keeps us free and safe.
Free will ties in with the nature of good and evil as it is our free will that determines what is and is not good and allows us to make the choices of our actions that make us humans. One must work with the other and vice versa. Imagine a world without these morals of evil. A purely good world as we would put it. Now scale all the actions undertaken by a person on a certain day. Even on a scale of good to not so good, none are inherently evil but the actions on the end of not so good are in this new world, considered the new evil. So no matter how the rules or ethics change, the sides of good and evil remain, the only variant is the level of inherent good and inherent evil.
When we begin to think about whether our free will is used for good, our inherent understanding should tell us yes, as we are good people. But the subject of opinion is one that, no matter how tyrannical a country, we solely have dominion over. This is the power that allows others to view us as either good or bad people.
