Just Trying to Do Some Good
I started Some Good in the middle of the third week of my first semester as a philosophy student.
Before you immediately click away from this publication to avoid debates about consciousness or the true nature of dinner tables, please know that I was not always a philosopher.
I came to philosophy from the real world, with a purpose in mind defined by my own real-world experiences.
Put simply: I want to do some good with the remainder of my career.
Due to a variety of real-world circumstances, I never thought that studying philosophy was a viable option for me. After earning an undergraduate degree in economics (the first bachelor’s degree in my family), I went straight to work. Eight years later, I knew that I wanted “doing good” to be my focus going forward… but I didn’t know exactly how to orchestrate that pivot.
Honestly, I still don’t.
So I quit my job, sold everything I owned, and moved to Scotland to pursue a graduate diploma in philosophy.
Why I Want to Study Philosophy
About two years ago, I discovered an area of philosophy called effective altruism. This is how I, a real-world non-philosopher, would summarize the core of the EA argument:
If you value doing good, then doing more good is better than doing less good.
This leads to an obvious question: how do we know which action results in “more good”?
One thing I like about effective altruist philosophers is that they don’t walk away from this question.
They work to promote doing more good not only in theory, but also in practice. To evaluate how much good we’re doing, we need to be able to measure the effectiveness of different actions (how much are we actually helping people?) We also need to define some general metrics to help us compare different types of good deeds. I find this work fascinating and important.
There is another behavior of effective altruist philosophers, economists and public figures that I appreciate: they’re willing to be wrong. Publicly. This is essential, because attempting to build a framework to compare and maximize good in the world is inherently divisive.
But we have to start somewhere.
Or do we?
We Should Try to Do Some Good
Trying our best to do good is better than not trying.
One of the reasons I wanted to start this publication is that after only three weeks of studying philosophy, I can feel some temptation to reject this statement. Wouldn’t it be easier to say that we can’t really know anything, so why bother?
Frankly, yes.
Coming from a non-philosophy background, I find the fact that nihilism even exists as an option quite fascinating. If only we could get out of every other difficulty in our life by simply giving up on the problem, right? Jokes aside, finding some agreed upon universal definition of “good” and some agreed upon universal reason we should do good are both difficult problems. Maybe I’ll eventually read every word ever written about morality and come to the conclusion that we simply can’t solve these problems.
Until then, let’s try to do some good.
