Diego Schaps

28 February 2014
MORALITY AND ITS EFFECTS
As a child grows up they are constantly reminded to be good.
This approach to general morality works well until the child goes of
into the world and returns to their teacher with the following question:
Why should I be good if sometimes I do not profit from being good?
This question has plagued people since Adam and Eve decided to eat
the forbidden fruit. The query itself can be boiled down to the following
two questions: (a) what does it mean to be good? (b) Is being good
always, sometimes, or never good for you? By examining the writings
of Plato, Rachels and Haidt I will be delving into the nature of goodness
and its benefits all the while supporting living a moral life in order to
propagate the mind.
To begin, I will tackle the difficult notion of what it means to be
good. Rachels ofers us a paper that defines and examines Ethical
Egoism. Simply put, Ethical Egoism is the philosophy of basing ones
moral code of of ones self-interest. As Rachels states, there are four
main premises associated with the support Ethical Egoism: (1) We do
not know the interests of others as well as we know ours and therefore
should not help them (2) If we help others, we are often intruding on
their own self-will (3) Making other people the object of charity is
degrading (4) Self-interest leads to the propagation of the individual.
Rachels, however, criticizes and discredits Ethical Egoism stating that it
has a poor implied premise. This premise that she presents is that it is
based on the assumption that other peoples interests are less
important than our own. She draws a parallel to racism and states that
Ethical Egoism is essentially comparable to being racist toward
everybody that is not oneself. I believe that although Ethical Egoism is
quite a selfish philosophy it does have some poignancy. Ethical Egoism
presents the idea of the importance of self-respect. In my opinion, one
of the most important facets of morality is the reverence of the
individual. As the Buddha has been credited with stating, You yourself,
as much as anybody in the entire universe deserve your love and
afection. If a person loves everybody else and not themselves, I
believe that they cannot be fully moral because they are neglecting
the person whose experience they understand best: themselves. In
addition, if we use the Greek form of the word love, philo, we will
understand that to love something means to actively love it. Therefore,
from Rachelss definition and critique of Ethical Egoism and the Greek
notion of love we get one aspect of morality: to be good one must
actively love oneself.
In continuation, I will examine what it means to be good when it
comes to interaction with others. In the Crito Plato is confronted with
the question that I will be delving into in a moment: is it better to be
good or to be bad? In order to discuss this point, Plato and Crito

establish the common ground on what it is to be good. They agree

upon the notion that to be good means to be fair and just toward
others even when nobody is watching. When Plato writes about
fairness, he means to abstain from the sort of cheating that would give
one an advantage over another at a cost to them. Versions of this
cheating would be stealing from a peer or accusing another in order to
remove accusations from oneself. Platos version of goodness deals
with being empowering and fair to others. I agree with Plato here and
would like to add another clause to this definition: being truly good
involves a certain degree of altruism. This degree of altruism as Haidt
points out in The Felicity of Virtue involves treeting strangers kindly
and those that have scorned you with indiference. To put it simply,
Haidt finds it beneficial to treat people the way they treat you and to
give them the benefit of the doubt the first time that you meet them.
In conclusion, after analyzing Haidt, Plato, and Rachelss contributions
to the definition of being good it can be stated for the rest of this
argument that being good encompasses the following: To be good one
must practice self-respect and self-love, one must treat others fairly
and justly, one must treat strangers kindly, one must treat those who
have scorned them with indiference, and one must treat those who
have treated them kindly with the same kindness.
Now that we have defined this version of kindness, we will begin
to analyze if being good is in fact good for you. In order to delve into
the question we must first state that there are two types of good that
can come from acting morally: good for the capital S Self and good for
the lower case s self. In this context the lower-case s self is the body
while the upper-case S Self is the soul inside the body. Think of it as if
the lower-case s is the car while the upper-case S Self is the driver.
To begin we will analyze the common mans definition of good
presented by Plato in the Crito. In the dialogue, Crito brings up the
point that a man should be good when people are watching, good to
his friends, and unfair when nobody can see in order to empower their
self. I agree with Crito on this point. If people cheat through life and are
never caught then they will live to be prosperous. This prosperity will
therefore lead to their physical wellbeing and the ultimate
empowerment of their self. If we are to agree with the common man in
this argument then we would define goodness as the empowerment of
the self and would therefore state that it is not good to be moral as I
have defined it earlier.
Now we will analyze Socratess opinion of the goodness that
comes from being good as a counterexample to the common man. In
the Crito Socrates states that we must be good in order to empower
our Self. He describes the Self eloquently and states that it is made up
of three components: Man, Lion, and Beast. The Beast is comprised of
all of the evils and animalistic tendencies, the Lion is comprised of all
of the noble and courageous tendencies, and finally the Man is

comprised of the rationality that controls the Lion and the Beast.
Socrates states that we must be moral because being immoral
indulges the Beast. If we continue indulging the beast it will grow to
such a size that it will overpower both the Lion and the Man. Socrates
therefore believes that we should be good in order to keep an internal
balance and an overall healthy Self. This notion is an honorable one
and depends on what ones goal in life is: to empower the Self or to
empower the self. I personally believe in the empowerment of the
former and therefore agree with Plato and disagree with the common
man. We must be moral in life in order to empower our Self and keep it
healthy. I will bring up the metaphor of the car and the driver once
more: would it be more important to protect the driver or the car? In
more relatable terms: is it more important to maintain a healthy Self at
the expense of a healthy self or vice versa? If we think as the body as a
vehicle that moves our Self around the world and allows it to have the
human experience, then it is more important to be moral in all
circumstances because being immoral damages the driver while
damaging the car. I will argue with this camp because without the Self,
the self is nothing. If we alter the Self slightly, then we would not even
exist because we would be somebody else. The self, however, can be
changed and we would still conserve the same Self although the
experience would be slightly altered. The Hindus agree with this
notion and believe in the concept of reincarnation as to why they
should propagate their Selves and not their selves. They literally
believe that their physical body is not important because at the end of
life their Self will be transferred to a better self if they are good. I agree
with the Hindus opinion because life is an experience that the Self has
while using the self as its vehicle. In conclusion, one must be moral
because it keeps the Self healthy and I believe that the propagation of
the Self should be more important than the exaltation of the self.