Have fun reading that wikipedia article. My OP is specifically an argument against essentialism.

Do you want me to regurgitate my views on “decent person” or a “monster”?

Think for yourself. Starting with questioning if such categorizations are even useful or justified.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essentialism

Alright, you win the argument.

He’s a compatibilist. Which I admit we can then break down into compatibilist determinist, which is a different thing from a (hard) determinist.

Which I characterize as a determinist who really doesn’t want to admit to being one.

Yeah I have read on empathy and mental health issues. Good vs. Evil aside, it’s a terrible and ableist lens to view people through. Sorry you had to go through that.

I agree that treating people with empathy is beneficial for their well-being.

Dennett is just a determinist who really, really doesn’t want to admit he is one (probably because he’d have to admit he’s wrong and everyone hates doing that, particularly white men at the top of their fields). I’ve read him and watched his debates.

I said “culturally Christian”. You can’t just shake off the centuries of Christian philosophy that has informed Western thought by just “not believing in God”. One of the symptoms of that specifically is the belief in free will, as Christianity requires there to be some kind of a pure, untarnished essentiality to people that can choose to be evil or good. It’s been hammered into us in media since we were kids, baked into everyday language.

My capacity for empathy has nothing to do with anything.

Again: I just happen to value human well-being, and as literally everybody in the universe, I will seek to act in accordance to my values, which usually easily puts me in the same camp as other people who value human well-being.

There are people out there who value “the word of the lord” or something like that more. Like they would prefer to kill wrong-believers because they value their religious text more than human life. They think they are “good” too. I don’t agree with them, but if MOST people did, then they would get to decide what “good” is.

That’s not how burden of proof works. Just because a lot of people (particularly those with culturally Christian backgrounds…) “believe” it’s real, doesn’t make it so.

That’s a lot of text, sorry, but it was therapeutic to type it out.

Actually I’m really glad if so. Thank you!

My point is that you don’t have to have a perfect support network that’s always there. Sometimes even indifference is better than actively having one’s teeth kicked in for trying to be kind.

I always got good grades

The fact that you had an education at all is also a support network.

I don’t mean to belittle your own efforts at all, but it’s easy to overlook a lot of environmental factors that help shape who you’ve become.

My OP on “support network” was vague on purpose. I’m seeing a lot of people take it to mean wildly different things.

How about not judging? How about just asking if they cause harm or not, and how to prevent that harm.

First I can look at my own values and discover that I happen to value human well-being. I like it when people are happy, healthy and free of suffering. It doesn’t make me a “virtuous” person, I’m a human too so I could be purely guided by self-interest.

Then I can look at science and reason and conclude that by those things, I can generally figure out what kind of things impact human well-being and how.

Then I can look at someone’s behavior and conclude that it’s either beneficial or detrimental to human well-being.

Then I can look at science and reason again to find out how to address that behavior in order to reduce (or even entirely prevent) harm.

I don’t need a moral framework for any of that, and I certainly don’t need to judge people as essentially “good” or “evil”.

You’d have to now prove that free will is real.

First of all, please don’t kill yourself.

Second, if you think you’re a shit person and want to kill yourself… how are you a shit person? I mean I’m merely assuming here that you think you’re shit because maybe you sometimes do shitty things, and because of that you should kys. If you at least recognize that you can do harmful things, you aren’t irredeemable, you can start taking steps to avoid doing that.

Everybody does shitty things sometimes, some more than others. I don’t think anyone deserves death but in terms of just shittiness, people who don’t even recognize that in themselves are way more unpleasant to be around. And if you have a great support network, maybe they don’t entirely agree with your self-assessment.

It takes incredible resilience to consciously choose a different path when you haven’t been shown a healthy one. My point is that a support network acts as a buffer against radicalization or becoming an abuser yourself. Without that, it requires extraordinary mental effort to not pass on that pain, effort that not everyone has the capacity for. And if they inherently don’t have the capacity, I don’t see the grounds to judge them as monsters: they literally cannot do otherwise.

I wasn’t ironic but you make a very important point: “even mosters can manipulate the public opinion to appear as decent people,”

This, or, “monsters” can manipulate the public to the point that what their opinion of what is “good” is accepted as a fact. See: religious extremism. See: fucking TRUMP.

Which then leads to: “even decent people can be unjustly flagged as monsters and will be helpless to prove their innocence”

You’re seeing a “self” or an “identity” where there are only conditions. My point is that your friend didn’t “choose” virtue in a vacuum; he finally encountered conditions - perhaps a moment of stability or a specific mentor - where pro-social behavior wasn’t actively punished by his environment, or it was even rewarded in ways that aren’t immediately obvious.

In places like Gaza, prosociality isn’t a miracle of “free will”; it’s a survival requirement. When the external world is hostile, the internal community must be hyper-cooperative to survive. That is a reinforced behavior.

If you put a “good” person in a system that rewards predation and punishes kindness with death or starvation, that “virtuous identity” eventually collapses into survival. We aren’t essentially “good” or “bad”, we are reflections of the resources, safety, and reinforcements available to us. Character is just the name we give to a long chain of causes and conditions that happened to go right.

Even your counterarguments rest on the assumption that this is true. You suggest that if it’s not a support system they must be “inherently” good or evil, completely ignoring the more likely possibility that there are countless other variables that could factor into what kind of person someone becomes.

Like what? You have inherent factors (genes) or environment (the support network, “the village that raises the child” etc.).

So if someone literally cannot “act” in some way, you get to decide if they are good or evil?

That statement dangerously oversimplifies human behavior and stigmatizes neurodivergent individuals, particularly those on the autism spectrum, who may experience empathy differently but are not inherently “bad.”