what is the point of doing good?

I am editing the book I have been writing, and mentioned in the prior to last post. It has been both been exhaustive, and exhausting. While editing and writing it, I have been listening to the Batman Arkham City soundtrack, and watching all of the Christopher Nolan Batman Trilogy movies. I also saw The Odyssey a few weeks ago courtesy of a freshly funded startup.

The collision of all of this means I've been thinking a lot about the point of doing good, and the futility of it all. How it is constantly seen as a response or something that should be undertaken in the face of evil. You open social media to people begging for good. People I know personally are exhausted, and seem deeply burned out. It's no secret that since COVID, things socially in the US have taken a turn for the darker. Especially with how hyper-precarious our economy is, and with what is happening in the tech industry, I've been thinking more often (than I usually do which is quite often) about what we owe others in the world and the defining role that good plays in that.

(Spoiler for Batman Arkham games & Christopher Nolan trilogy ahead)

My favorite album when it came out in 2013 was Batman the Arkham City Soundtrack. Panic! At the Disco wrote a song called Mercenary, and in all of my emo superiority, I found it and promptly clung to it. Surprisingly as an adult revisiting it, my now favorite song is "Deranged" by Coheed and Cambria. It's written from the perspective of the Joker, who in the Arkham City game, suffers the effects of poisoning and dies.

The Joker's taunting of Batman, and constant scheming to push him away from goodness (or reveal the "truth" behind it) is an evergreen presence in the franchise. Batman is also hit from all angles: Selina Kyle, or Catwoman often shows up as the Joker's seductive foil. She does not use violence, but the truth of needing to choose survival in less than ideal circumstances. They both, in effect, have the same message to Batman: doing good is not enough. Even if it could be, it is not warranted or deserved by the people that you want to give it to. Your quest is futile, and those who you are questing for are not worth the fight.

I bring up 'Deranged' because there's a line in the song that immediately shot it to my favorite songs list.

"When I'm gone, your world will prove empty".

While writing this book, I've been throwing myself deeply into social good projects and the end goal that they have. Like most of you, I have also spent time wondering if this will at all, affect our world.

We are, without question, living with much better quality of life and with unimpeded access to things that 10, 20, or 50+ years ago would have been unimaginable. We have also come face to face with the torment nexus that powers most of our world. Constantly, there is war and newly discovered horrors and existential threats piping directly into our dopamine-cracked out brains.

I think in such overwhelm, it seems so natural to imagine a world beyond it all. A world where we are free from the pain brought on by social issues and what they entail. Most messaging of social good projects is rooted in this radical re-imagining. It makes sense, of course. For re-imagination is enlightening, and brings the chance of a clearly cut salvation. On the other side, remodeling our world is much more annoying and harder won, with no clear delineation.

Thus, we do not say "we can get child kidnapping under control but be cool with a few falling through the cracks", or "we will reduce the suicide rate to a reasonable and fiscally responsible degree." We create missions of salvation through eradication and through using good as a weapon to protect our eyes from the harms of the world.

What we instead say is "we are building a world where no child will ever be taken from their parents", or "we will make a world where no one decides to take their life". I understand the purpose of a large goal is motivation and not linguistic absolution, for what it's worth. Let me elaborate dramatically for my essay.

Therefore, armed with good and our large goals, we go out to attack the harms and evils of the world. We do sometimes win. We sometimes do not. We look around at all of the evil that still swirls in the atmosphere above, and wonder how we could ever breathe well enough to survive through it.

You have to wonder if good will ever be enough. As if good is a limited resource that we must convince people to do and to apply, or something we actively need to conjure in the right amounts as a salve to the evil of the world. Here, I'll make an important distinction. There is evil, which is the act of consciously or unconsciously yet negligently doing harm. There is harm, which is a negative event that causes pain. And there is good, which is the act of consciously, or unconsciously trying to stop or avoid harm or to create benefit. There is also a tertiary state: neutrality.

Neutrality is the natural state of the world, where things do not happen consciously. There is no moral assignment to the actions, it is just the actions as they happen. Most animals and most of the natural world lives in a state of neutrality, since most animals and parts of nature cannot really conceptualize morality or harm as humans can. Therefore, the idea of animals having a shared ethical framework or value system that enacts or conceptualizes mortality doesn't track entirely. Are orcas evil for charging at boats? I would argue no.

Good and evil are a yin and yang. They have opposition intentions, but are both ultimately attempts (whether consciously or subconsciously) to act on the environment to create the impacts of harm and benefit. Back to Batman: the idea that our boy Bruce is somehow wasting his autonomy or time by choosing something that will never be worth the choice he has made. That good is an energy that can be wasted.

There is even an argument to be made about the fact that similar to kindness, evilness is an evolutionary factor that enabled people to use deceptive means to gather further resources and dominate nature more. As such, given the world acts as a forcing function to make its' living occupants choose a method of survival: Being kind and evil are both methods of survival. And as such, we will never eradicate either.

To the title of the essay: what is the point of doing good? If it never truly un-does all of the evil in the world, if it is never enough to upset the moral justice arc of the universe properly for good, why would we do something like this? Is good a maintenance task that we must continually undertake? Will it occur naturally as we need it through social contagion?

Perhaps the point of doing good is so it exists at all.

Doing good is active, is hard to choose and hard to continue doing. It also is the more sustainable option. We cannot discuss doing good and doing evil as a philosophical motion without looking at the true impact on the world. Evils, like [abuse / racism / being unhoused] directly correlate to worse health outcomes to people. Nations where women have less rights are less economically advanced, and families are unhappy when the mother is unhappy. Evil does not just stay contained, it spills out to and impacts all.

When we are cruel to others, we are not just enacting that moment of cruelty in isolation. We are weaving a line of destruction that embeds itself into people. Harm as a byproduct of being alive with others happens all of the time, even justified harm. Harm will always exist as a function of human survival and free will, but evil does not have to. Kindness operates from abundance, and evilness operates from lack of belief in such abundance.

In my last essay, I mentioned how a lot of donations and charitable causes are formed based on what is the least morally complex thing. Animals, children, and humanitarianism are easier entities to fund because they often have morally beloved causes. There is no nuance, or moral judgements needed when providing care to animals or kids. This is not the case with harm reduction: it is often the people who are doing direct harm to themselves or others. These are people who have made bad choices, who are being judged and who do not have a straightforward case for why they should receive charity.

This is why to me, the most touching form of philanthropy is harm reduction. It's the exact opposite of most forms of charity.

Philanthropy comes, as it always does, with strings. Donors want to make the most impact they can. They often want to serve morally uncomplicated people, and to understand that something is directly good. These are fine in and of itself. But, is it true goodness to provide good to others as much as they can to whoever the best candidate is? I would argue in some ways, no. I would say true goodness exists out of the context of its impact, in some ways.

True kindness is always about the possibility for good. It is not about the certain presence of good. It is nice to be kind to everyone you meet, because you have an abundance of hope that they will receive your kindness as well, or you have availability to provide it regardless of its' landing.

It is not nice to be an asshole to others, although it is definitely advantageous. You are an asshole because you do not have an abundance of hope for others: sometimes people are weird and you don't want to deal with that. When the promise of abundance or availability is not fulfilled, kindness cannot happen.

Let me also clarify that by abundance, I am not talking specifically about fiscal resources (although that is the context in which most philanthropy happens). This is ironic, because poor people that I know give way more, and of a greater percentage of their personal assets (overall), than most wealthy people. Abundance means a surplus of a resource to give. Kindness is a small giving of action (or inaction), and so is evil.

That abundance can come from actualized availability in the form of additional resources, or in your belief of those resources despite the odds. We are mean when we are lacking: internally, in time, in love to ourselves or others. Evil rarely occurs by abundance, but in the space where there is fear of losing abundance of availability.

By only optimizing good for moral clarity and scale, don't we lose something? There are many small things that impact people greatly. There are also big moments and efforts that do not actually have the impact required. Is doing good about perfectly calibrating the care that we have to further our agendas in some ways? Or is doing good about giving what we have, when we can? Is kindness not a mindset of availability? By working to put structure and limitations on it, we undermine the thing that gives it its' potency.

However, this creates the implication that to receive good, you must be good. This is morally simple, but logistically backwards. Wouldn't the most impact, in some way, come from providing good to others who do not merit it or deserve it, yet who have the option of it anyways? I think often of a quote when I was religious saying the devil is the one who should receive the most prayers of all. How a true form of good and care comes from wanting care and kindness for the people who get it least, and deserve it least. Of course, I know this is a moral argument with limitations. In that same vein, you can make a case for giving billionaires more money because they are disliked by a lot of people.

What is the point of doing good? Well, simply to do it. So it is here with us. It feels nice. I personally enjoy doing it because I experience a lot of benefits from the world, and I want to contribute to that pool of benefits. We will never eradicate or truly defeat evil, but perhaps that was never the job of good anyways.

Good and evil are not opposite forms, but a spectrum of one form. Offshoots of survival mechanisms often gone awry, not separate motions but the same motion in different forms. We are going to do the motions to survive, anyways. We may as well choose the kinder option when we can, regardless of how 'good' and 'optimized' our goodness is.