why are we good?
I belong to a book group. This month we read A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini. This is the same guy who wrote The Kite Runner. To summarize, this is a story about two women in Afganistan, before during and after the Taliban period. They are both treated brutally by a variety of people, most importantly, by the same husband (they are co-wives). They become unlikely best friends and when the husband attempts to kill one of them the other one protects her with the result being the death of the husband. Eventually, the “murderess” is killed (death penalty) for this act while the other woman escapes.
In our discussion of this book, the topic of what motivates people to perform acts of kindness, charity and selflessness was raised. Essentially, why do people do good things? A couple of our members argued that a belief in a supreme being was necessary along with a belief that one will be held accountable for one’s behavior in the afterlife. The majority of the group seemed to be surprised by this premise. I was one of them.
Does one have to be able to anticipate a reward in order to behave well? To many of us (including several in my book group) the behavior itself and, perhaps, the response it elicits in others is enough of a motivator. It even seems logical that the assumption that people will only be “good” if they can expect reward or judgment must be preceded by the assumption that people would naturally be more likely to behave badly if they thought they could get away with it. I don’t think this is true. I believe most of us desire to be better than we are, no matter how “good” we may seem to others. And this is just as true for atheists and agnostics as it is for Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists and all the other religious preferences we can find.