What is it that defines a good person? Or an evil person, for that matter. What is the value of a conscience? Does it make someone a decent person? What is being nice? Is it the same as being kind?

I have a theory.

In the pure extremities of perception of the world, pessimists say the world is a horrible place, everything sucks and everyone's to blame because we all suck, too. Optimists say the world is beautiful, there's joy in every person and we are surrounded by nothing but opportunity. Personally, I believe both sides of the coin are truths. We live in a world that I believe is falling apart, and most of us are probably making it worse. In first-world countries, we make victims out of ourselves through affluenza, and in third-world countries we're dying of causes that in the first-world, we'd shrug off and cure with a diabetes-inducing cheeseburger. The world and the people in it are full of pointless tragedies. Life sucks. And yet, I love life. I love this world.

I'm getting to my theory, hold your horses.

There's a very typical explanation to why the world sucks: people suck. Good people seem non-existant. People have no conscience. We've heard it all before, to the point that I tune it out when others say it. I recently had a thought, though, one that takes this bland observation and takes it a little deeper. It surprises me that this didn't click before. I'm drawing this theory from a few different factors. Firstly, the only people I've encountered who don't think that they're good people seem to be bitchy and proud of it. I have my own opinions on them, but that may be going into a different story altogether. Second, I recall once observing a "personality test" used for a psychological study. No matter how you answered every question, you got the same result. Basically, it said something to the effect of: "You are a generally good person, but sometimes make bad decisions." The phrase in the rigged results that was burnt into my memory is "generally good." The rest is just my attempt to roughly reconstruct the sentence. Lastly, when I was in high school, I did martial arts. After a few weeks training my group, the instructor gave us a lecture on morals. He asked "What are morals?" No one gave a solid answer. He gave a list of 8 specific morals, and asked us to explain what each means. No one gave a solid answer.

Okay, so here's my theory. People, on the whole, have a conscience. There's an assumption that seems to go around that thieves, murderers, rapists, sadists, psychopaths and sociopaths have no conscience. I beg to differ. I believe that almost all people have a conscience, maybe even all people. In short, we accept a "conscience" as being able to discern right from wrong. The problem with society, I believe, is that people lack morals, ethics and most importantly values to allow them to put their conscience to good use.

What I believe is that the majority of people think they are good, moral people without any strong reason to support this belief about themself. I used to be the same. This is not me sitting on my high horse thinking I'm better than everyone else [even though I totally am better than everyone else]. The way I saw it once upon a time could be summed up as: "I don't think I do bad things, and I route for Superman instead of Lex Luther, so I must be good, right?"

Maybe it’s time to put a definition on good and evil. As far as I’m concerned, good is in the desire or action of doing something to increase the quality of life for someone else without an ulterior motive. Evil is in the desire of action of doing something to decrease the quality of life for someone else. Talking Yin and Yang, there are elements of good and evil in everyone. “Generally good,” in my bluntest of opinions, is a weak way of saying: “You have some good in you, but you’re not that great.” I have done good things in my life, and I will openly admit, I have done some very evil things, too. I don’t know anyone who hasn’t done at least one good thing, and one evil thing.

Next we need to define morals, ethics and values. Morals and values are a concept, and go hand in hand, but are not the same. A moral is an idea. Respect. Honesty. Loyalty. Turning these morals into values requires, quite simply, valuing them. They have to be more than an idea, they have to be a belief. Then ethics are the actions that support the belief. People often break ethics down into a billion little actions, like lawyers. Personally, I subscribe to taking a one-word moral, making it a value, and making it an ethic. To me, integrity is a moral, a value and an ethic. Loyalty is a moral, a value and an ethic.

The purpose of morals, values and ethics is to allow us to use our conscience. Hopefully, people would use it for good, but in some cases, these morals, values and ethics may be used for evil. There are three categories of morality that I would group people into: Moral, Amoral and Immoral. A moral person uses his or her conscience and specific ideals to strive for good. An immoral person understands morals, and chooses to go against them. An amoral person simply does not have morals, even though they probably have a conscience.

I have recently put together a short questionnairre, and posted it on a variety of internet forums and MySpace. The questions are simple, but the answers are not. Here are the questions I asked:

1. Do you consider yourself to be nice? Why/why not?


2. Do you consider yourself to be good? Why/why not?


3. Do you consider yourself to have morals, ethics or values? If so, what?

So far, I’ve received responses from 11 people. The majority said yes to all three questions. Two people said no to the first 2 questions but yes to the last question. One person said yes to the first and last question, and no to the second question. One person said no to all three. Two people gave examples to support every question. Those two were also the only two to give examples of the third question. That adds up to 9/11 people claiming to have morals, ethics and values, but not showing evidence of any strong beliefs that they stand by on how to be good people.

Does this prove my theory? No. But it does show a very unsurprising result. There is definitely a great potential for good in all people, and a great potential for evil. Unfortunately, as I see it, we live in a society that claims to be built on a backbone of moral fibre, but the majority of individuals within this society are amoral themselves.

End rant.