Lucky, because to be labeled as such would be dependent on some form of positive outcome. You can be good but still have things just never pan out.
Looking at the current sofubi landscape and seeing who is having success, seems like luck is doing much better.
Good. at least I have some say in the matter. Even when things are down, if my mind is in the right place and I'm doing right by myself and the people I come in contact with, then life is alright. When I think "good" I think that it means I have a soft heart and the courage to act on it always. feet on are the ground. A good nobody vs a lucky asshole. the world could use more of the former. You can be lucky, but if you're not good, then you'll do no good with it anyway.
Maybe too UKcentric, but his reminds me of the 'Would sir like egg or pineapple with his Gammon?' question I get asked every time I order. I want BOTH, and anything less is unacceptable!
I’d rather be lucky. I’ve been good and I’ve been hardworking; but there is no guarantee that it will amount to anything. The vast majority of the good or fortunate in my life has come down to serendipity or luck.
Some great discussion here. This is something I've been thinking about a lot since I discovered the writing of Aaron Rabinowitz, a philosophy lecturer at Rutgers. I heard him on a couple of podcasts talking about the concept of moral luck, as outlined by Thomas Nagel, and it has started to influence the way I think about the concept of free will as well as the way I look at my own life. For example, I would like to think that my personal success in my career as a technical writer at a software company was solely due to the quality of my work (the "good" part). However, getting this job and the ones before that certainly relied on a degree of luck. The recruiter managed to get my resume at the right time, submitted it to the employer at the right time, etc. However, the circumstances of my birth and the first ten years of my life likely had even more to do with that success. That I inherited the right genes from my parents for pattern recognition. That my mother had good prenatal care, and that she lived in a time where environmental factors like lead were becoming less of a concern due to regulation. That I lived in an area with a good school system that helped hone my reading and writing skills at an earlier age. That I grew up in an time where computers truly were "bicycles for the mind" and was exposed to them at an early age. After listening to Aaron for about a year I think I'm pretty "luck pilled." I like how he deals with the question of, "if there's no free will then what's the point of anything?" He always stresses that even if we don't have free will, it's good to pretend that we still do. He also acknowledges that while societies can accept the concepts of moral luck and the absence of free will and govern accordingly, it still makes sense to have a system of laws with the aim of ensuring a good life for its citizens. Here are a couple of articles by Rabinowitz about moral luck and free will: https://www.skeptic.org.uk/2021/09/...r-when-we-consider-it-in-terms-of-moral-luck/ https://www.skeptic.org.uk/2020/12/skeptical-about-free-will-prove-it/ This is a worthwhile listen, a podcast he appeared on a couple of years ago about the topic: https://dollemore.com/2022/06/02/80...-the-void-and-philosophers-in-space-podcasts/ And a different podcast featuring a neuroscientist's take on free will. I definitely want to check out this guy's book: https://www.carasantamaria.com/podcast/robert-sapolsky-ii
@Roger I don’t know that philosopher but really like Robert’s work! Kind of keeping pulling the thread you started: I think thinking of us as good (how you and most of us starts) is a peculiar delusion of our time. I think it makes us selfish and stupid. On the other end, thinking of us (or most of us) as wanting to be good, having little to no clue how to but having particular capacity for it and needing caring guidance to get there as a guiding principle, understanding that being good alone is a lie, would make our way of living unbearable. It’s a fun way to think, especially if we look at history. Telling ourselves we had free will and therefore individual rights could be seen not as an obvious statement we were bound to say eventually but as a clutch to try and course correct how some of us were already animated by the unbelievable believe that they were better than others. So we all became better than others, individuals with free will and rights as if everyone being the king of their home could lead to anything else than disaster. Instead of fighting to make anyone better than annyone else impossible. Instead of remembering that monkeys and birds and snails and fishes are our cousins and we all depend on each others at a cellular level, all co creating live in ways we will never understand cause we are all animated by something we call god or life or energy or hunger and pheromones and we have no clue about what it is about. Anyway. We’re funny pretentious monkeys is what I’m saying. And I guess the most we know it the better we become is what I m suggesting. Edit: pushed wrong button. Finished my thought.
Yeah, that's interesting, when I posted this I wasn't asking about "good" in terms of "you are a good person," I was asking in terms of "what you do is considered high quality." A person's character certainly does owe a lot to the circumstances into which they were born and raised, but there is now research to support that many personality traits are hereditary. In light of this, I don't believe that people are automatically "born good," but I do think any negative personality traits can be controlled through self-reflection and taking action. (That is, of course, if one's moral luck allows them to accept these things as possibilities.)
