Measure of Goodness

How can we measure goodness? Was my Sunday morning question to myself,…to which I have to reply that it’s not so much about how much of it we have, but it’s validity is more to do with the context in which it manifests.

Do we praise someone who is deprived of his or her liberty and incarcerated in prison for not committing acts against society? No, that is of little worth.

By the same rule of thumb, would we praise someone whose religious doctrine prevents them from doing “bad”? Surely not.

A measure of goodness must be directly linked to the possibility of being able to do “bad”, for if someone doesn’t have the possibility of being bad, then being good is no longer a choice it’s an automatism and as such hardly a reflection of goodness.

We have all learnt stories about ourselves and how we are which have been influenced by the pleasing consequences of behaving in a certain way or seeing the consequences of someone else behaving in a certain way and we begin to name ourselves “responsible” or “rebellious”, and we call ourselves that “I´m responsible” or “I’m rebellious”.

But yet again this is a false “responsibility” and a false “rebelliousness”, it has little in the way of authenticity and only becomes real when we can accept the part of us that is “irresponsible” or wishes to “conform”. The same way that being good only becomes authentic when we accept we can be bad, that is to say we have choice and we exercise that choice in favour of doing good.

I’ve heard many a recovering alcoholic state “I cant drink because I have an illness of the soul” and how refreshing it is to hear one state “I can drink, but I choose not to”. It is choice that gives abstinence its authenticity as a sobriety based in dogma is but another candy coated refusal to accept responsibility.