When we ask questions of moral 'good' or 'bad,' we are missing the point

What makes a person good or evil? For many, the answer lies in intent and individual responsibility. Today, I’m going to tell you why it has little to do with either. At least, not in the way you think.

Western society has had a long love affair with dichotomy. Choices are put to us as “one or the other.” This is comfortable, it is easy, and it draws clear lines between right and wrong. When former President George W. Bush said “Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists,” he deliberately created a dichotomy for Americans to declare which side was theirs and which was wrong. While most people understand that the world is not this black and white, we continue to behave as though it is.

When it comes to morality, our principle concern is addressing another dichotomy: Is so-and-so a good person or a bad person? Even when the issue is less clear, we tend to treat people as though they are one or the other. Odds are, someone in your circle of friends has done something you disagree with. For a while you feel what is called cognitive dissonance; the conflict between the belief that your friend is not a good person and the behavior of continuing the friendship. After a time, you either let the incident slide, or you stop being friends. You resolve this dissonance by sorting the person into one camp or the other: bad or good; friend or not.

Our biggest concern, though, is not with our friends’ moral status, but with our own. “Am I a good person?,” or “What would a good person do?” This way of framing moral questions is a pillar of what I will call “puritanical morality.” Puritanical morality in religion is chiefly a concern for the state of one’s soul, but as a way of looking at morality it has become pervasive in Western culture as a concern with one’s status as “good” or “evil.” Because puritanical morality derives from a belief in judgement after death, where one was believed to receive either absolute punishment or absolute paradise, it requires that morality be reduced to two opposites.

This reduction creates two problems for puritanical morality. First, it is concerned only with the sum of our actions. If a person is mostly good, then we treat them as wholly good. This approach means we overlook many small evils and believe that evil actions can be outweighed by unrelated good actions (or, more strangely, by suffering as penance). We see this in fiction constantly. At the end of “Return of the Jedi,” Darth Vader, the villain, rescues the protagonist, Luke Skywalker, in what is meant to be a redemptive moment, and we forgive his reign of fear and violence. Of course, this action hasn’t changed the past. Vader still killed countless innocents, and he has made amends to no one he actually harmed. Whether he was “a good person” is irrelevant: his actions and their effects remain.

This brings us to the second issue with puritanical morality: its concern with intent. If being a bad person means knowingly doing harm, then we cannot be evil if we don’t understand the harm we are doing. This is why we avoid seeing documentaries like “Food, Inc.” and “An Inconvenient Truth.” So long as we refuse to learn, we can plead ignorance. When facing judgement, we can say we are still good because we didn’t know our actions were bad.

The problem is, the harm exists whether you know it or not, whether you atone for it or not. Whether you are a good person is irrelevant, intent makes no difference, and ignorance is no excuse. Every person reading this paper has the resources to make informed decisions: from libraries to the internet. What you don’t have is an excuse.

David Billig is a UF linguistics masters student. His column appears on Wednesdays.