Hello. So last week I went to a school reunion for the 20th anniversary of my hometown school. I’m not the kind of person who enjoy this kind of social events, but for this time I made an exception. My old friend from that time asked me to go and I thought I would be funny (spoiler alert: it wasn’t funny). After the event and speeches, all my classmates and I went to a restaurant. I sat in front of a girl that I had a bit of a crush on when I was a kid. During the dinner I was mostly in silence, they were talking about gossips, old memories, relationships, comparisons… At some point she talked about a boyfriend she had. She said that she cheated on him like 10 or 20 times, she didn’t know the exact number. The thing is… She was laughing about it, and so the others. “I told him I cheated on him, I don’t know how many times…” She said, like nothing happened. My ex girlfriend told me that she also cheated on his fiancée some time before the wedding. She always said that infidelities are always there, like it is normal… But is it? I’ve been thinking about it for some time now, because I know some other cases. But I don’t understand… There is no sense of morality ot loyalty or empathy?
IIRC it’s like a half or a third of the population that cheats, when research has been conducted. So, it’s normal in the sense of common. But, like others have said, your reunion people sound like were trying to convince themselves it’s normal in the sense of acceptable. And anecdotally it does tend to be the same people over and over again.
Polyamory is also getting mentioned, but that’s a different thing, and poly people are a couple percent of the population at most with far fewer actually living the lifestyle.
That’s always what I have estimated the percentage of assholes or bad people from personal sampling throughout my life.
I’d actually go way higher. The ones that seem nice are the easiest to externally pressure into doing bad things, which counts as being a bad person.
What does it mean to do a bad thing? (I don’t belive in good/bad people, so I’m curious on how you construct that worldview)
I mean, there’s all kinds of ethical philosophy out there. I don’t really deviate too far from it.
In practice, there’s a lot that most people can agree on without too much thought, too. For example, the classical case study for how being agreeable can work against doing the right thing is how ordinary and nice a lot of Nazis were, when not being ordered into atrocities.
First off, thanks for answering. I’m a bit obsessed with this kinda stuff.
So vaguely western ethics? I mean some ethics frameworks are quite incompatible.
This is a theme I see. It’s fair to not think through it, especially when it feels obvious.
This is consistent with the above statements. I sorta agree, but obviously I have a different worldview.
So my best guess given all that is that doing a bad thing from your perspective is: Doing something you consciously know will bring harm to others.
Which I think requires:
Does that sound right?
Yes, I just meant I don’t have much to add that hasn’t been said already. I lean pretty consequentialist, if that’s relevant.
I guess I should say I don’t really believe in judging people either, per se. OP said the world is 1/3 assholes, which implies 2/3 are off the hook. 2/3 are not off the hook, pretty much everyone is part of one problem or another, and should do better (but won’t).
Drop “consciously know”. People who can rationalise things really well are common, and I wouldn’t distinguish in any sense between a bad pair of shoes and a bad person. Both are obstacles to the world being how I (and most people) think the world should be.
I guess I will include local causality, as a sort of distinction between internal and external. A human being as a subsystem can’t respond to information it doesn’t have as input. That goes for a computer or ordinary rock too.