Trigger words: good person (2) good people good (3)
Indicator sentences: Hmmm... I feel like this is kind of just playing word games over your definition of "good".
Negotiation parts: Based on your definition of a "good person", you've basically defined a good person such that anyone who commits an atrocity is automatically disqualified from being a good person. Which is fine, but I don't think this is really saying anything different from those who say "even good people are easy to corrupt and manipulate into evil." You just disagree over the definition of "good". But this doesn't really say anything different about the state of the world. Bob might say "most people are good", and "sometimes good people do bad things", while you say "most people are average", and "sometimes average people do bad things". But I would say both statements are equally unsettling. So to the degree that I find it worthwhile to change your view, I think your criteria for "good person" is FAR too strict. From your definition of a good person, parts #1 and #2 necessitate a certain level of education or intelligence. Figuring out the "correct" set of ethical first principles and being able to reason an ideal state of the world from them is no small intellectual task. But I'd argue that this *is* an intellectual task, not a moral one. I think its often unreasonable to call a well intentioned person who fails at #1 and #2 "not a good person". Or at least I think this conflicts with the way normal people talk. You may disagree, but its a pretty standard human convention to call a friendly good samaritan that is polite and tries to help people a good person, even if they don't have the philosophical chops to figure out the right choice in really difficult ethical problems. You can defend your definition, but I think its hard to dispute that its non-standard. I'm a little more concerned with part 3 of your definition, because I think that's what really gets to the root of what people mean when they say "even good people are easy to corrupt and manipulate into evil". A person can fully know everything it means to be good, and can try very hard to live up to the high standard you've described. But the whole point is that many people are skeptical that *any* such person is truly uncorruptable. Even the best, wisest, most moral person imaginable is still human, and given the right set of circumstances may not be strong enough to hold to those principles. You even admit that "very few people are good in any meaningful sense". Are you confident that there are *any* such people? And if not, then maybe that's not the most useful definition of good. And its certainly not the definition used by the people you're arguing with. I can appreciate why you might think I'm playing a semantic game with my definition of "good person", but I'm not, and here's why: I consider a necessary but not entirely sufficient condition for being a good person is acting out of philosophical purity, rather than mere obedience to social consensus. Why? Isn't this an arbitrary restraint? Not really. Take a modern person, who is by all normal judgments a "good person", and send them back in time to a place where unconscionable wrongs like colonialism or slavery were commonplace. Ask yourself, based on your knowledge of this person's character and predispositions, "how will they act, knowing that their actions will be socially accepted or even sanctioned?" The answer for most normal people is that they would have no issue with slavery if not for the fact that societies have learned of its immorality as a practice, and this is impressed upon all of us. It is no thanks to the normal person that this is true, but rather, it is attributable to a small percentage of people who achieved moral excellence and worked to make it recognised. Empathy is weak and paltry as a defence against immorality. It is so easily subverted and applied selectively that it is insufficient- one must first answer the substantial questions as to what that empathy indicates ethically- Is my empathy appropriate in this situation? Are there other logically identical situations or persons that *don't* trigger my empathy? Should they? I should make a distinction between being a moral agent and being a moral patient; the former is restricted to those with the minimum of intelligence required to reason from ethical principles, whereas the latter group is not. We may have duties to infants, psychopaths and dogs, but they lack the faculties that, if present, would render them similarly indebted to us. As to concerns about whether such a standard is so high that no human has ever reached it, I can offer counterexamples of people that certainly have. Thích Quảng Đức self-immolated in protest of the vietnam war, an ethical declaration made at the cost of his life. Zell Kravinsky has donated his kidney and raised millions through smart investments, all of which he donated to effective charities. Philosophers like Bentham and Mill have created the foundation for egalitarian political thought, and people such as Martin Luther King Jr have tirelessly and effectively promoted their conception of the good in the face of public apathy, contempt and anger.
Indicator sentences: Is that to say that one cannot be inherently good but much achieve goodness through a systematic process of reasoning and justification for one's ethical beliefs?