Considering the fact the doing good will not earn you anything in anyway and that if you are not a millionaire or billionaire your good acts won’t matter at all.
What’s the point?
I had seen with my own eyes good people being manipulated and fucked because they did something good, on the other hand it’s pretty rare for evil people to face any consequences.
Why should I restrict my free hands with ethics and why should I think about it?
Just a note: I am a deist, so I don’t believe that doing good will get you anything in the after life.
Because helping others around you and “doing good” helps build community, which you are a part of.
If you want to look at it from a selfish perspective, doing good and helping others builds goodwill towards yourself, and sooner or later, you may need to rely on others doing good for you. It’s much easier to get help if others think highly of you.
As far as being manipulated, you probably shouldn’t just blindly help people who request it. Keep your eyes open and your guard up when dealing with people you don’t know or trust.
I spent my current age doing good and that earned me zero returns and some losses and I know a lot of people who had a similar experience to me.
No one even feels greatful for the good I do.
Respectfully your argument does not hold up for me.
Do good to the right people !
Upvoted your post since this is a good question :) !
No one even feels greatful for the good I do.
Who, exactly? Be specific. You are most likely helping the wrong crowd. Even Jesus said to not give pearls to swine, therefore implying that not everyone is swine. Spend time and efforts wisely.
I’m an atheist. I do good things because I have a conscience. I have a legacy. Being a good person feels better than being greedy and spiteful. I pity the rich—never knowing which of their friends and family are true and who would abandon them if they weren’t rich.
I mean of course I wish I had more than I have but I have enough to be fulfilled. So why not do good things? Being kind to people is its own reward.
Because doing good isn’t supposed to be with the goal of being rewarded, it’s supposed to be to help make other people’s lives better. When you help someone by giving them a ride somewhere, it doesn’t make much of a difference to the universe but it makes a difference to that person in that moment
Why religious people think atheists are bad. Because if there isn’t a big reward then why would you ever be good? I don’t know, empathy? Which they clearly show they don’t have much of if they need to be rewarded for doing things as simple as not judging others
“Considering the fact the doing good will not earn you anything in anyway”
This simply isn’t an accurate statement.
I treat my co-workers well, help them out, and one of them bought me a pin that says “Hello, My name is Inigo Montoya, you killed my father, prepare to die!!!” because they know I like that movie.
I help people, people help me. Do they sometimes not help me, sure, but on balance everyone is better off for helping. It’s not a zero sum game.
What you’re describing is a common or free kindness - it’s a social kindness that costs nearly nothing and delivers many times its value. The problem is more with economic kindness and selfishness and in that regard your coworker is (mostly, unless you unionize) irrelevant… the question is whether your boss, if looking at a 20 million dollar payout for a company of a dozen people will take half that and make you all rich or take it all and tell you plebs to get fucked.
The story of recent history is that plebs are getting fucked pretty much without exception. Social norms have shifted to the point where fucking over your employees is “cool” and there’s not much we can do about it except slowly try and turn back the social compass and, of course, fucking unionize.
“any good”
Because peace of mind and your own view of self worth are priceless.
You can’t buy morals and being happy with yourself. What makes material gain or whatever ends you think would be better chased amorally worth losing that that you can not buy back?
This is a struggle I find myself in now. I was very politically active in my youth, and I’m currently looking back on everything I did thinking “wtf was the point of any of it? Should I have just focused on college/employment the whole time? If I did, would I have been in a position to escape?”
In the past, the big thing that kept me going was my local community. Sure, I never accomplished anything that reached a further stage, but I was at least making my local community better. Eventually though, I was given the opportunity to leave my shitty local community, and I immediately took it. Now I live somewhere great, that fully represents me, to the point that I started taking a step back from politics. No reason to campaign for an opposition mayor if I like my mayor, right? I still go to the monthly town hall meetings, if only to assure myself that things are going well locally, but I’m less vocal. I don’t really need to be, and that’s wonderful, but it’s pushing me to be even less active.
I’m sure my hometown has gotten significantly worse in my absence though, since visiting family feels like visiting a corpse. Did I even make a difference there, or was it a temporary mirage? What was the point of any of it?
Because your evolutionary heritage tells you to. You’re part of a social species, we’re hardwired to be altruistic because it’s helped us survive (some people’s wiring is faulty).
Right now in society grifting is the sole way to make a comfortable living. I refuse that path because I believe that this is a reflection of a deeply broken society and work to support those people around me that I can.
This isn’t a case of “if more people act selfishly it’ll become the norm” because it is the norm - the time for that thinking was in the 80s, 90s and maybe the 00s - but I will still stubbornly reject it and be economically kind when I have the option.
I do it to feel good about myself. Sometimes I fail or miss the mark, which is okay. At the end of the day I want to be able to be okay with my deeds.
Doing good feels good. Our brains are wired for cooperation. I think most evil people are miserable.
Why do anything? Every goal is a value choice. Pleasure? Money? Leaving a legacy in children or added knowledge or whatever? Learning? Improving your community? Improving the world in general? Raging against the absurd?
If self-centered hedonism is the way you want to spend your brief meaningless time in this meaningless world, go for it! Just go for it with the same full knowledge of its pointlessness and your mortality as you would anything else.
Possibly because the consequences ‘evil’ people get is effectively more like living in their own shit than external punishment. If you only look at direct repercussions it looks like they’re making it pretty well, and even by their own estimates it might seem like that, but they’re really just rising to the top of a story social scale. If you value that it will be frustrating.
One should do good because seeing good done to world, or to others, is itself a source of satisfaction. If it is not, then I don’t know what anyone can tell you.
You were born into a highly social species. The basis of human society (and that of many other social species) is co-operation and mutual aid to increase the individual’s chance of survival and reproduction, make life for group members easier and, at least since Neanderthals and Denisovians, longer, rather than, as Thomas Hobbes opined “nasty, brutish and short”. While it is quite true that there are those who game the system to reap more than their share of the benefits while giving less or nothing back, overall, those who give more are more likely to ‘earn’ the respect of their fellows and gain the help they need to live as well as possible within whatever circumstances they find themselves.
Don’t be too sure that the evil face no consequences. Until their book is finished and closed, you cannot know they will not wish once more to ride down the slope on Rosebud. I knew a woman who was the head nurse on a terminal ward for years – to this day, I don’t know how she did it. She told me one evening that, in all those years, no one had ever died wishing they’d made more money or achieved greater power, but many of the elite that passed through her ward died alone.
