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I've wondered something for some time now... It has a lot of bearing on everything I do, and yet nobody seems to have a clear answer.

What exactly IS good and bad?

On a mereological level, what composes good? Does the opposite combination compose bad?

What, mereologically speaking, composes opposites to begin with?

I don't plan on answering any of these questions to satisfaction in the thirty minutes I have to write the rest of this, but I do want people to walk away with a question to chew on.

Maybe it's a vain attempt to fire a question out into the void, in the hopes of some expert catching it and throwing their answer back at me, but it might work somehow.

So, with that preface, let's begin...

A vain pregnant woman chooses to take a pill that disables her gestating child, all so that she gets more attention from giving birth to a disabled child. Meanwhile another vain woman, getting sober from intoxicants, is told that if she concieves in the next month her child will be disabled, but if she waits until all the drugs clear out of her system then her child will come out normal... she doesn't wait and thus gives birth to a disabled child. Are both women bad for the way they brought life into this world?

In the first case, considering the host, it's likely the only way the life would have happened. In the second case, the same argument could be made. It could be basically deterministic that, like a double pendulum position, the pendulum dropped from a spot of vanity and formed that specific scenario. Should each woman be considered guilty, or even wrong, for doing what they did? If it really was decided by something else, then was that something else predetermined by something?

It's infinitely recursive, like turtles all the way down, if we say that everything was predetermined by something. That means at some point, logically, there had to have been something that caused all the determinism for no reason whatsoever. In such a case then all of us would be God's sock puppets, only observing more God as God dissociated every time we'd look at one another. It would be a bit like every character in a novel, relative to the author. Every tiny little minor detail and action being, actually, how the author decided to live within their fictional world.

But if I just suddenly realized that we're all God, I guess I could just decide to arbitrarily not be in that scenario. So now, arbitrarily, we're all in a world where we can all decide things, and we're all not just puppets for some kind of necessary being. We're all thinking and multifaceted people that are here for seemingly no reason whatsoever, and now we get to decide on what we think good and bad are. Where do we begin if we're already here for seemingly no reason... Is the first woman worse than the second woman? Why?

The second woman, if she waits, would ultimately make a completely different kid. A full cycle would probably happen in the sperm donor's testicles, making a whole new batch of different sperm. Even down to the day the sperm donor might have, how excited they might be, would all play into the angle and trajectory that would help decide a person's first race. Just a tiny little thing being off, and suddenly it's a different person that exists. Is it wrong that they exist and not someone else that doesn't exist? Can we perform a slight against what doesn't exist?

I'm not sure if that's even possible. This whole thing's called "The Non-Identity Problem", and a lot of people have dedicated some more eloquent words to it, but I want to throw my hat in the ring for the hell of it. Say I imagine everything I do is causing everything to turn out perfectly good, in a butterfly effect kind of way. I tap my finger, and suddenly everything's guaranteed to turn out just fine. Say someone walks up to me slapping the elderly, pushing them into traffic even, and shouts "Hey, stop that! You're being a bad person!"... are they actually the bad person?

I could believe that everything I do is actually the most good thing one can possibly do, and that would make my intentions completely pure. And yet the results, aside from intentions, would be catastrophic. If my intentions are the good thing, then that means that the person telling me I'm wrong is making less good in the world. That means I could stop believing that what I'm doing is perfectly good, see, so there would be less good intentions in the world. Meanwhile if it's all Utilitarian... we're all not omniscient, so we don't know how everything might butterfly effect into the perfect outcome or not.

And so I rest my case; it's all subjective. Pure vibes.