Is the world truly a reflection of human nature? Or is the human being trapped in a cycle of good and bad actions? Let’s explore the complexities of morality, altruism, and corruption that shape our reality. What defines ‘good’ or ‘bad’ for you? Join the discussion!
It’s an indifferent place. It will be very good for some people and very very bad for other people, because the universe doesn’t give a shit about justice or about how you feel.
Some amazing people will live very prosperous lives, and some absolute evil scumbags will live very prosperous lives as well. And all types of people will also live very shitty lives filled with ugliness and suffering and boredom.
"I have abolished the distinction between “good” and “evil”, but not that between “good” and “bad”. Nietzsche
The only things that can be categorized ‘good’ or ‘bad’ are human actions; the world isn’t susceptible to normative description.
Let’s put things together to see if we can answer the question: First, the world is material. Whether it has a real spiritual component is a subject for further discussion, so let’s put that aside for now. Second, the world behaves according to laws of nature only, so good and bad are irrelevant to it since good and bad are subjective. Third, life exists in the world and has very important attributes, such as intelligence in humans. Humans can tell what is good and bad, although there is always the possibility of disagreement since good and bad are subjective. There is, however, a common consensus among humans on whether something is good or bad. The common consensus is either natural, by natural I mean that we know it through our nature, whether something is good or bad, like pain is considered to be bad, but pleasure is considered to be good. We also learn things through either trial and error or a careful analysis of a situation, so we can have a common consensus on certain things about life and whether they are good or bad, this way, too. And finally, good and bad are relative as well, and this is very important since what is good now may be ok or bad in the future. So, now we are in a position to answer your question or to see if it is a good question. Is the world good or bad? I think that is not a good question since life is subject to change, and good and bad are relative in time. The life of humans has been subject to positive change overall. The good question for me is whether we can make the world a better place to live? I think the answer to this question is yes.
The world is a physical container for all the humans and objects. It doesn’t have any quality to be good or bad. The actions of humans and the operations and workings of the human created systems are good or bad.
By posing your question, you are automatically assuming a context of subjectivity. In a context of objectivity the concepts of good or bad are meaningless. If the world, including us, is just an object, then the ideas of good or bad mean nothing. They have a meaning to us because we perceive good and bad not just as mechanisms, but as experiences connected to our experience of the self, of feeling “I”, feeling the uniqueness of each of us in our experience of our subjectivity.
If you smash a computer, we instinctively feel that nobody has suffered inside that computer, in the sense that a computer doesn’t have a self able to experience suffering; there isn’t, inside a computer, somebody who suffers if you smash it. Even if you program a computer with AI and introduce in it mechanisms that make it react and behave like a being able to express emotions and suffering, still we perceive that what is there is just a lot of mechanisms, so that, if you smash it, even if it is able to show a suffering face and even cry with tears, we still think, instinctively, that actually nobody is suffering in that computer.
According to a strictly mechanist and objectivist mentality, this can be applied to all living beings as well, because we know that we are just a product of atoms and molecules organized as DNA, cells, neurons and so on. According to this strict concept, we could say, as a consequence, that if you torture an animal, a plant or a human being, actually nobody is suffering, because in this perspective we are just machines as well.
What makes us speak of suffering, good, bad, evil, and so on, is not only an instinct of empathy that nature has put inside us, but especially our feeling each of us as a self with an instinctive self-consciousness that we perceive as something beyond what can be expressed by words.
In short, our existence is made of subjectivity (which now I am meaning as the inexpressible self-consciousness that each of us can experience), and objectivity.
In this context, authentic desire for well being, happiness, not suffering, comes from subjectivity. A machine can imitate this, but we instinctively perceive that it is not an authentic desire, it is just an imitation.
One essential thing of objectivity is that we perceive it as irresistible, not allowing us freedom to escape. For example, we perceive death as objective, because we experience that we cannot escape it. Death turns us into objects.
As a consequence of all of that, in my personal philosophy I think that the world, which in this perspective I consider a synonym of objectivity, is bad, is evil. On the contrary, subjectivity is a synonym of good, of freedom.
We can perceive other subjects as evil, as Sartre said, Hell is other people. This happens, in my personal philosophy, because each subjectivity is immersed in an objectivity, similarly to the concept of a soul in a body. What makes me perceive another person as hell is the fact that the other person is not just a self, a subjectivity, but also a body, an objectivity. I can be the same for the other person.
According to this scheme, the starting point to favour good in this world is to cultivate our contact with our self, our subjectivity, and try to build some good dialogue with objectivity, although objectivity is not very inclined to dialogue, nor fairness, nor reliability. For example, you cannot build a dialog with a stone that is falling on you: you must move, and this way that stone has been able to turn you into an object, that had just to move away. Fortunately, objectivity is not made just of stones falling on our head, so we have some hope that we can try some dialogue with evil, which, in this philosophy of mine, is a synonym of objectivity and of world.
Good and Bad are human values or judgements that we project onto the events of the world. The universe itself (reality itself) is a process that results in events which we judge to be good or bad in terms of how those events affect our lives. One might better ask is the universe aesthetic, or is the universe creative, or is the universe experiential but good or bad I think is not a term that applies to the universe at large at least as any kind of objective moral or value judgement.