this post was submitted on 01 Mar 2026
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Showerthoughts
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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
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Plenty of monsters with support systems, plenty of decent people who have been beaten down by life and left to fend on their own.
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"
A person cannot control their reputation, but they can control whether it's true or not.
‘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.
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.
Like what? You have inherent factors (genes) or environment (the support network, "the village that raises the child" etc.).
You'd have to now prove that free will is 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.
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.
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.
Alright, you win the argument.
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?
🤷♂️ Yeah, kinda. What metric are you using?
First I can look at my own values and discover that I happen to value human well-being. I like it when people are happy, healthy and free of suffering. It doesn't make me a "virtuous" person, I'm a human too so I could be purely guided by self-interest.
Then I can look at science and reason and conclude that by those things, I can generally figure out what kind of things impact human well-being and how.
Then I can look at someone's behavior and conclude that it's either beneficial or detrimental to human well-being.
Then I can look at science and reason again to find out how to address that behavior in order to reduce (or even entirely prevent) harm.
I don't need a moral framework for any of that, and I certainly don't need to judge people as essentially "good" or "evil".
But why is it a beneficial for other humans to be happy? Why do you like that? That is empathy.
My capacity for empathy has nothing to do with anything.
Again: I just happen to value human well-being, and as literally everybody in the universe, I will seek to act in accordance to my values, which usually easily puts me in the same camp as other people who value human well-being.
There are people out there who value "the word of the lord" or something like that more. Like they would prefer to kill wrong-believers because they value their religious text more than human life. They think they are "good" too. I don't agree with them, but if MOST people did, then they would get to decide what "good" is.
Nah. That's bad. I don't care what most people think. Treating people with empathy is good. Treating people as objects is bad.
I agree that treating people with empathy is beneficial for their well-being.
How about not judging? How about just asking if they cause harm or not, and how to prevent that harm.