This qualifies as goodness in my books. No one is free of egoism and selfishness. People are good if they subordinate their egoism and selfishness to a higher principle of care for others, and seek satisfaction of their baser impulses through actions that are socially constructive and beneficial.
It's hard to guess what motivated the grandparent's comment but if I had to guess, it has something to do with the cultural aversion to public philanthropy which traces back to Matthew 6:3
But when thou doest alms, let not thy
left hand know what thy right hand doeth:
As an atheist who was raised Catholic, many of the teachings of Jesus still make sense to me from a moral standpoint. This one does not. Keeping your charitable efforts quiet seems like a bad thing to do if you want to get others involved so that you might actually make a difference some day.
"So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full."
I think what Jesus meant was that letting others know was not the problem, but giving alms for the sake of being honored by others. These good deeds were not done out of mercy for fellow human beings, but to improve their stature in society.
And what people are trying to say is: that may be a bad thing, but it does not cancel out the good thing you did. You now did both a good and a bad thing. Not just a bad thing.
We try to judge people based on their actions. Someone messes up and defends themselves with "I was only trying to help!" - "The road to hell is paved with good intentions."[0] The fact that proverb exists at all, means that our society has at least a partial inclination towards judging people on their actions, regardless of intention.
Well, if that applies in the "mean good, do bad = bad" case, then it should apply symmetrically in the "mean bad, do good = good" case.
Concretely: Bill Gates does some good. Someone says: he's only doing it to atone. So it doesn't count. --- the first part is not the problem, but the second part is. He still did good, and it still counts. Hate his character all you want, but he did good. Don't use his character to detract from his actions.
There is a view that good actions only count if there is sacrifice. As he still has 30+ billion the net impact of his giving at a personal level was Zero. Hell, he said several times he did not like being the worlds richest person. So, arguably he may have been acting in a completly selfish fasion.
Consider a Pimp finds out he can londer money and find new girls by setting up a homeless shelter. Is setting up the shelter a good action?
The analogy is poor. The argument being discussed is whether Bill did something bad and uses the results to fuel the good he does in order to atone for his bad. In your analogy, the pimp does something good and uses it to fuel the bad he does.
For the record, Bill's business practices sucked, but there's no denying that he had better vision for tech than the monster of his day, IBM. Each age has its villain, each of which has been far from what the world considers to be truly evil.
I think you missed the connection. Gates did not want to be the richest person in the world any more. Giving that money to charity was a socially acceptable way of doing so. Thus, it may have been a selfish action with a net positive outcome.
The pimps homeless shelter might also be a net positive impact. It seems far more selfish.
Alternatively it may have started Gates down a different path which changed his mindset. I can't know as this is all internal. The point is some people feel the internal reasoning is just as important as the outcome.
PS: This is one of the reasons the law cares about internal reasoning not just outcomes.
Wow. It's not often you find a situation where straight-up capitalism is morally superior to Jesus. You do charity for recognition and your own ego? Awesome. Rock on, dude.
The important thing is that the charity gets done.
Presbyterian here. We were taught you can't buy your way into Heaven. Yes, donate to charity. But don't publicly congratulate yourself.
I've worked to overcome my WASP reluctance to talk about money. As a geek, we should be comparing salaries. As an activist, to be effective you need resources, which is a nice proxy for buy-in, so you learn how to ask for money.
Yes, donate to charity. But don't publicly congratulate yourself.
Yes, and this is the concept I take issue with. If Bill Gates's continued public dialogue over his charitable actions convinces other billionaires to join the cause, how is that anything other than a net positive? He may yet succeed in wiping out malaria when he might not have succeeded had he kept quiet.
The goal of any charitable act should be to make your charity obsolete. Quiet, private giving in small amounts without a coordinated plan does not accomplish that. It merely serves to feed somebody for another day.
I believe we're in agreement. I only mention my upbringing to note that Protestants had their own reasons for keeping their charity private and just how hard it is change one's early indoctrination.
Well, the point of the teaching is to allow other people, not the person doing alms, to know that money for philanthropy is coming out of the rich guy's "charity" budget rather than his "public relations" budget.
This is misguided, but it's not hard to understand where the idea came from.
