Virtue Surplus

[rowyn]

That's a term ceruleanst used when I was talking about the protagonist in Ghost several weeks ago, to describe the concept that "enough good deeds will offset a certain amount of evil ones".

I don't think many people subscribe to this idea at any kind of extreme. No one's going to say "Well, you saved 50 people from certain death during a disaster last month, so it's okay that you murdered that one guy today for cutting you off in traffic".

Yet it's still an interesting idea, in some ways. It reminds me of various other sayings, like "the ends justify the means" or "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one". Or an Ursula LeGuin short story, "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas".

Usually, people accept a certain amount of negative consequences in return for desirable things. One could assign a portion of the blame for the deaths from every airplane crash to the Wright Brothers, or hold Henry Ford partly responsible for the tens of thousands who die in car accidents each year. But we don't look at airplanes or cars in terms of the damage they do: we look at them for their benefits instead. And those benefits can be measured not just in convenience, but in human lives, too. Famine in the modern world is not a matter of food production, but of transportation: improving technology in this area has helped tremendously.

It's easier to forgive unintended consequences, though. Plane crashes and car accidents aren't an essential part of faster transportation: indeed, people make changes to them all the time to make them safer. Which is one of the benefits of the drive and ambition of modern society: we're never satisfied.

But it would be different if the negative consequences were not unintended, or if they wasn't even an apparent connection. Rapists aren't the price we pay to have an effective military, and to say that they are is an insult to every man in uniform. The two don't go hand in hand .... necessarily.

But what if it happens that they do? What do you do with someone who is mostly good, who has done great things that few could match -- but who's also done something terrible?

At what point does the hero become a villain? Which flaws can you overlook? Is it okay if the firefighter who's rescued hundreds of people from burning buildings cheats on his wife? What if he beats his children? Maybe he's a chronic shoplifter. Maybe he got a co-worker killed once, by accident, and then covered up his part so he wouldn't get blamed or lose his career. Does the good that he's done make the evils more forgiveable, or less?

What if the events really are correlated? What if that cop really did need to torture his captive in order to find the location of the bomb that would otheriwse kill hundreds?

Or is that a hypothetical case that never matches reality? Does evil ultimately beget evil, even if the intentions were good, so that truly no good comes out of a sinister act?

Sometimes when I think about all the horrible things we hear about people in power, the way no presidential candidate can escape attacks upon his character, and I wonder if they're all true. If that's the way everyone would look if they were put under a microscope to be viewed by 300 million prying eyes. All those flaws, amplified and expounded on and presented in the worst possible light. How would I look, under such scrutiny?

Is the problem with stories that they only present a tiny portion of the whole? We ascribe such weight to the things we know, but in every person we judge, there's a lifetime of experience we do not know.

I don't know where I'm going with this. I don't have any answers, only more questions.

Comments

[krud42.livejournal.com]

To grossly oversimplify my stance: Doing a crapload of good doesn't give you a Get Out Of Jail Free card.

If [insert some major philanthropist whose name I won't use so as not to even hypothetically besmirch their name] were to end their life by blowing up a facility full of innocents, to me that would be their legacy.

And conversely, if a horrible person changes their ways and dedicates the remainder of their life to helping everyone as much as they can, that too would be their legacy, even though one couldn't necessarily "overlook" their previous atrocities.

As for scrutiny, one's opinion should take one's own life into consideration by comparison, which I think is the basis for that whole "judge not, lest you be judged" scripture that even non-religious folk enjoy quoting. The problem there, however, is that most people are incapable of giving themselves the sort of honest scrutiny that countless outside sources could. But conversely, no amount of people can actually "see" what's going on in someone else's psyche, no matter how many brain scan's, lie detector tests, and hypnosis sessions the person undergoes. All they can do is extrapolate.

Not sure what my point was, either...

RYN: In that case, you might not like "Wicked." I think I benefitted from not being able to hear it clearly. I worry that if I did, I would be annoyed by it. (It would probably help to think of it as a totally unrelated entity. And yes, that sort of storyline tends to annoy me, too.)

[rowyn]

There is this sense that one's last acts are the most important ones. It doesn't quite seem fair to disregard the previous record, though, whether it's good or bad. All of it is a part of who the person is.

[krud42.livejournal.com]

I suppose I either didn't think it through all the way, or worded it properly, as I didn't mean to imply that final acts are the most important ones. But to me life should be (in part) about learning, progressing, and improving one's self. And though there's never an "age" where a horrible deed is acceptable, maturity is often considered. I've known people who did awful things as a teenager but who later matured into kind, responsible adults who had other people's best interests at heart. (I've been friends with such people.) And I've known good, upstanding people who've later turned into utter jerkwads. In those two situations, I think the former is better than the latter. It's a matter of "old enough to know better", or "knowing then what you know now." Or however you want to word it. Case in point: I made some very politically incorrect jokes when I was little. I don't make them now. If you transplanted them from then and put them into now, it would be far worse, because I'm more educated and mature than I was then, presumably. Can you fault my childhood self just as much as you would my older self? I would hope not.

I guess it depends on the scale of what you're talking about. Because I agree that if you were to punch someone in the gut and then offer them some ice cream, it's no better than if you were to offer them some ice cream and then punch them in the gut. (Though even in that bizarre scenario, the first example would probably leave a better impression, if only marginally.)