Quote:
Originally Posted by Morrigoon
There's no honor to being good if you never had the option to be bad. Prisoners in solitary confinement are chaste, but we don't admire their commitment to chastity the way we do nuns.
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Perhaps, but the injustice in this system is in degrees. ETERNAL suffering for everything from genocide to rolling through a stop sign?
It's true that virtue untested is no virtue at all. On the other hand, it's also no real virtue if the only reason you have for doing good is to avoid punishment.
it turns out that we humans have a lot of very rational, unspooky reasons to do good. Encouraging a cooperative, compassionate and safe society improves the quality of our lives, reduces costly social imbalances, discourages crime, reduces fear, allows the species to propagate and even (we hope) extend our knowledge and abilities to aid others, including other species and even the planet. Idealistic as heck, yes, but rational. Lots of people want all of these things, and not because they think they HAVE to want them for fear of angering an invisible being, but because we've all seen the benefits and want our own lives to be happy, safe and comfortable.