Plenty of monsters with support systems, plenty of decent people who have been beaten down by life and left to fend on their own.
this post was submitted on 01 Mar 2026
10 points (63.9% liked)
Showerthoughts
40907 readers
681 users here now
A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Plot twist: op was ironic, meaning that with a large enough support network, even mosters can manipulate the public opinion to appear as decent people, while without such network, even decent people can be unjustly flagged as monsters and will be helpless to prove their innocence
I wasn't ironic but you make a very important point: "even mosters can manipulate the public opinion to appear as decent people,"
This, or, "monsters" can manipulate the public to the point that what their opinion of what is "good" is accepted as a fact. See: religious extremism. See: fucking TRUMP.
Which then leads to: "even decent people can be unjustly flagged as monsters and will be helpless to prove their innocence"
‘Plenty of monsters with support systems’ - so were they inherently monsters? If yes, then they couldn’t help it, like a polar bear can’t help hunting. We don’t call polar bears ‘monsters.’ We call them predators, which is what humans become when their ‘support’ teaches them cruelty, not care.
‘Plenty of decent people beaten down by life’ - same logic. No inherent goodness, just luck: someone, somewhere, showed them ‘don’t be cruel’ before it was too late.
I don’t believe in inherent good or evil.
You don't have to be shown. All it takes to be a good person is empathy. All it takes to be a bad one is its lack.
That statement dangerously oversimplifies human behavior and stigmatizes neurodivergent individuals, particularly those on the autism spectrum, who may experience empathy differently but are not inherently "bad."
omg thank u!!!!!!!!!!!
i was bullied for being "evil witch" when i was in school cuz i was autist and there was the meme that autists "can't feel empathy". i was like... watching cartoons and saw the "bad guys" and i thought i wasn't like them... but then at school they told me i was?? it was awful
thank u for saying this
Yeah I have read on empathy and mental health issues. Good vs. Evil aside, it's a terrible and ableist lens to view people through. Sorry you had to go through that.
They may experience it differently, but if they can act on it, they will be good people. Without being able to act on empathy, no matter how you perceive it, you cannot be good, and refusing to act with empathy towards people and other lives on earth is bad.
So if someone literally cannot "act" in some way, you get to decide if they are good or evil?
How else can you judge someone’s character if not by their actions?
How about not judging? How about just asking if they cause harm or not, and how to prevent that harm.
I think the point they were making is that a decent support system is not the sole determining factor as your post suggests.
Even your counterarguments rest on the assumption that this is true. You suggest that if it's not a support system they must be "inherently" good or evil, completely ignoring the more likely possibility that there are countless other variables that could factor into what kind of person someone becomes.
Even your counterarguments rest on the assumption that this is true. You suggest that if it’s not a support system they must be “inherently” good or evil, completely ignoring the more likely possibility that there are countless other variables that could factor into what kind of person someone becomes.
Like what? You have inherent factors (genes) or environment (the support network, "the village that raises the child" etc.).
A lot of this comes down to people’s free will. If you could perfectly analyze the reasons for every decision a person makes then those decisions would hardly be free.
You'd have to now prove that free will is real.
I can’t prove that to you. And you can’t prove it’s not real, either. This debate has been at a standstill since the Ancient Greeks started discussing it. I just took it for granted in my previous comment because the vast majority of people, including professional philosophers, see here) believe it to be real.
That's not how burden of proof works. Just because a lot of people (particularly those with culturally Christian backgrounds...) "believe" it's real, doesn't make it so.
Like I said in my previous comment, I can’t prove anything to you. And if it wasn’t obvious, I’m not trying to prove anything to you. I’m certainly not saying that free will is real because people believe in it. I’m not saying you have the burden of proof. I’m not trying to persuade you and I’m not looking for a debate.
All I was saying that, in casual conversation, it’s probably fine to speak as if it’s real because very few people will actually take objection to that.
And that has nothing to do with Christianity either. You’ll notice from that survey that the majority of professional philosophers are actually atheists too. In fact, one of the philosophers who is responsible for popularizing atheism in revent decades, Daniel Dennett, someone who is literally one of the founders of the new atheism movement, is a big proponent of free will and has written entire books on it.
Dennett is just a determinist who really, really doesn't want to admit he is one (probably because he'd have to admit he's wrong and everyone hates doing that, particularly white men at the top of their fields). I've read him and watched his debates.
I said "culturally Christian". You can't just shake off the centuries of Christian philosophy that has informed Western thought by just "not believing in God". One of the symptoms of that specifically is the belief in free will, as Christianity requires there to be some kind of a pure, untarnished essentiality to people that can choose to be evil or good. It's been hammered into us in media since we were kids, baked into everyday language.
Dennett openly admits he’s a determinist, you’d know that if you actually read his books. He’s literally the world’s leading proponent of compatibilism (determinism being compatible with free will). Determinists can believe in free will.
Edit for clarification
He's a compatibilist. Which I admit we can then break down into compatibilist determinist, which is a different thing from a (hard) determinist.
Which I characterize as a determinist who really doesn't want to admit to being one.
Which I characterize as a determinist who really doesn't want to admit to being one.
This is not very charitable of you. Its also simply inaccurate. If they didn’t already openly admit to being determinists then they would, by definition, not be compatibilists
Alright, you win the argument.
Okay. Sorry if I seemed a but harsh in my earlier messages. After I sent those I was thinking about it and realized I probably went a bit too hard.
I see you’re from lemmy.ca. It’s good to see another Canadian on here. Thanks for contributing to the fediverse. I hope you feel welcome here
LMAO this thread is a case study in short circuiting people's sensibilities.
I'm pretty sure I'm a decent person and I've never had a support network. Kind of had the opposite, really but at very least I try to be a good person and I feel remorse when I fail.
load more comments
(8 replies)
Idk I'm a shit person and I have a great support network. Honestly they're the only reason I haven't killed myself yet.
I think there's a thin line between monster and hero. Like most human behaviors, I think the divide is much smaller than we might like to think.
Personally, I think we just have weird brains that tend to want to explain everything, even if it there may not be one. And we like to fill in those gaps with imagination, rather than accept ignorance. I forget the name of this scientific fallacy.
Anyways nice showerthought
First of all, please don't kill yourself.
Second, if you think you're a shit person and want to kill yourself... how are you a shit person? I mean I'm merely assuming here that you think you're shit because maybe you sometimes do shitty things, and because of that you should kys. If you at least recognize that you can do harmful things, you aren't irredeemable, you can start taking steps to avoid doing that.
Everybody does shitty things sometimes, some more than others. I don't think anyone deserves death but in terms of just shittiness, people who don't even recognize that in themselves are way more unpleasant to be around. And if you have a great support network, maybe they don't entirely agree with your self-assessment.
What is a decent human to you?
What is a monster?
Indeed.
Indeed what? That's not an answer.
Do you want me to regurgitate my views on "decent person" or a "monster"?
Think for yourself. Starting with questioning if such categorizations are even useful or justified.
Lol it's your post, so yes
Have fun reading that wikipedia article. My OP is specifically an argument against essentialism.
Yeah so many underprivleged rich assholes who got no support throughout their life. musk, trump, kennedy, etc. all just victims of an unfair system. they are not truly monsters.
This is close to the "if people were educated they wouldn't be evil" fallacy, as if people like Henry Kissinger didn't exist, lol.
No, as Hume brilliantly pointed out: shoulds and ares are fundamentally disconnected. You can be extremely smart and knowledgeable about the world and still conduct yourself viciously (at times, monstrously so). What's the name of that physically disabled physicist that cheated on his wife and was just chilling with/close to Epstein?
Anyway, sticking more to the topic at hand: the only real difference between a moral person and a monster is that the former 1) believes that, for every occasion and decision, some acts are visibly, objectively more moral than others; 2) believes they should always privilege righteousness before vice, and do the moral thing. That's it. One of my closest male friends is literally illiterate and he's an excellent dad who chooses virtue regularly, my dad was a lawyer and that didn't stop him from being abusive to his family and from cheating on his wife, lol.
So no, stop it, that's not how it works. Good people are good because they decide to be good (which is easy to see, you don't need degrees, you don't even need to know how to read or write!), every day, and even when they slip they still know that they DID slip, they don't just rationalize their mistake as something virtuous (because they believe in objective morality and etc etc.).
You’re mixing up two things: knowing right from wrong and having the capacity to act on it. Hume’s right: you CAN be brilliant and still vicious. But that’s not an argument for inherent morality; it’s proof that knowledge alone doesn’t shape behavior. Your literate friend ‘chooses virtue’ because he can. His life gave him stability, models, and the luxury of slip-ups. Your dad, the lawyer who cheated? He had power without consequences, which is its own kind of support system: one that rewards harm. The difference isn’t ‘moral vs. monster.’ It’s who had the tools to practice what they preached. and who didn’t. You’re arguing that ‘good people’ are the ones who succeed at morality. I’m saying morality is a skill, and skills require resources. No resources? No skill. Just survival.
He was raised in the streets and used to sell drugs, which is why he ended up in jail for 7 years. To this day, he doesn't know his mom or dad. The man had no support. Fair enough, "morality is a skill" as in the more you choose right over wrong, the easier it gets, it becomes a part of your identity you're proud of, but I don't think it requires resources the way you see it. Also, people can be and have been self-sacrificial, even in the absence of resources. The poorest people are the ones that give more to charity, there's more union and prosociality in Gaza amongst the bombs than in any American neighborhood... Idk man, I'm not buying this. I think that it's a variable that can affect your decision making, especially if your moral framework is flimsy, but not the main variable behind moral decision making.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding your point, TBF.
You're seeing a "self" or an "identity" where there are only conditions. My point is that your friend didn't "choose" virtue in a vacuum; he finally encountered conditions - perhaps a moment of stability or a specific mentor - where pro-social behavior wasn't actively punished by his environment, or it was even rewarded in ways that aren't immediately obvious.
In places like Gaza, prosociality isn't a miracle of "free will"; it’s a survival requirement. When the external world is hostile, the internal community must be hyper-cooperative to survive. That is a reinforced behavior.
If you put a "good" person in a system that rewards predation and punishes kindness with death or starvation, that "virtuous identity" eventually collapses into survival. We aren't essentially "good" or "bad", we are reflections of the resources, safety, and reinforcements available to us. Character is just the name we give to a long chain of causes and conditions that happened to go right.
view more: next ›