“There is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
It is a notoriously difficult task to delineate exactly what is bad for a human beingA—so difficult, in fact, that the Bard, in Hamlet, gave consideration to the idea that our concepts of “good” and “bad” ultimately may not even hold water in reality to begin with. Given that most of us routinely describe conditions and events in our daily lives as “good” or “bad,” we might look slightly askance at Hamlet’s statement in the epigraph above; after all, isn’t it just obvious, most of the time, whether something is good for us or bad for us? Can’t we make a determination about the goodness or badness of a condition or event quickly and easily by assessing it on an intuitive level—for example, by considering how it makes us feel? Furthermore, why would a literary giant like Shakespeare center one of his works around a character who expresses the opinion that such ordinary, ubiquitous concepts are meaningless?
These are all very reasonable questions to ask, and, fortunately for our investigation, it turns out that they are also all fairly easy questions to answer. After all, most people understand that many conditions and events that at first appear to be bad for us may, in the long run, actually turn out to be good for us.B In other words, long-term goodness is sometimes couched in, or even dependent upon, short-term badness. It follows that we cannot simply use our intuition to determine whether a given condition or event is good or bad. And even if we set aside the ambiguous, necessarily holistic nature of our concepts of goodness and badness, who has the authority to say what’s definitively good or bad to begin with? What’s good for me might turn out to be bad for you; what’s good for Germany might turn out to be bad for Poland; what’s good for Ronald Reagan might turn out to be bad for Jimmy Carter. Who’s to say what’s ultimately good or bad, right or wrong?
Of course, most people don’t really subscribe to this morally relativistic line of thinking; the point of the preceding paragraph is simply to legitimate the notion that Hamlet’s “nothing good or bad” quip is at least worthy of consideration. In fact, now that we’ve arrived at a place of increased ambiguity (and, by extension, increased complexity), I believe it may be helpful to analyze a case in which most people would not rely on a morally relativistic framework to guide their thoughts and actions. While we do so, let’s keep in mind the following question: What can a case like this tell us about the moral framework most people actually use to evaluate the goodness or badness of certain conditions and events?
For the sake of this example, I want you to imagine that one of your friend’s children has just died of a rare disease. Next, I want you to ask yourself: Is there any universe in which, following the death of the child, you would attempt to comfort your friend by saying, “It’s all right, pal—like the Bard said, there’s nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so! Who’s really to say whether this will be good or bad for you in the long run, anyway?” My guess is that, faced with the given condition, most people would never attempt to use this morally relativistic line of thinking as a means of consolation. Moreover, I’d also surmise that most of us would view such assurances as wildly insensitive and inappropriate. Instead of rationalizing the loss of the friend’s child or trying to explain how the child’s death could, within the grand scheme of things, ultimately turn out to be a good or neutral event, most of us would just acknowledge that losing a child is bad.
To me, examples like the one above make it clear that we cannot in good faith argue that no conditions and events are preferable to others;C by extension, there must be some conditions and events that are good for us and others that are bad for us. Throughout the remainder of this essay, I’m going to try to explain the characteristics of the conditions and events that are bad for a human being.D
Generally, I take any form of suffering that can neither be eliminated nor redeemed to be objectively bad. Bearing this in mind, what follows is a list of conditions that I think we can almost certainly take to be objectively bad for a human being.
1. Being constrained indefinitely, with no potential for social, economic, or personal mobility.
To demonstrate why I consider this level of constraint objectively bad, I must explain how it is consistent with my above definition of objective badness. The short answer is that I believe indefinite constraint causes emotional suffering that can neither be eliminated nor redeemed. To some people, this may seem patently obvious; to others, it may demand more explanation. So let’s dig in.
For illustrative purposes, allow me to put a twist on a classic example from the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. Imagine someone who works as a waiter but who, deep in her heart, wants to be something else—say, a professor of history.E Sartre asks us to imagine someone who convinces herself she cannot be anything besides a waiter—that is, he asks us to imagine an individual who acts in “bad faith” because she prioritizes her waiterly duties over her genuine desire to become a historian, even though she has the freedom to put the study of history first. Sartre views bad faith behavior such as this as a betrayal of one’s own humanity, which is rooted in a radical freedom that we all possess by virtue of our mere existence as conscious life forms.
I, on the other hand, want you to imagine someone who works as a waiter and wants to become a history professor but cannot possibly do so on account of social, economic, or political constraints. In my hypothetical subject’s society, once a person has been sorted into the waiterly caste, she can never leave it; she must remain a waiter and prioritize her waiterly duties for the rest of her life. Attempts to leave the waiterly caste will be stifled in some way or another—through force, rejection of applications to jobs in other disciplines, humiliation, state-sponsored behavioral control programs, or whatever other mechanisms of oppression you might imagine.
Perhaps it is starting to become obvious why I take such a scenario to be objectively bad—at the very least, I imagine there are few people out there who would prefer to live in a society that so greatly constrains individual freedom. But what exactly is it about the repression of freedom and the destruction of personal mobility that makes these conditions so bad?
Here is how I view it: As humans, we all ultimately want to spend as much time as we can pursuing freely chosen projects. By ”projects,“ I don’t intend to specify activities like building bridges or conducting experiments for the state science fair; that would be far too limiting. Rather, I take “projects” to include activities like caring for friends and family members, writing, playing music, traveling, engaging in community service, exercising, doing one’s job, starting a company, and so on. The content of the activity is irrelevant to my current exposition; the key insight is that we prefer to spend as much time as possible pursuing projects that we chose freely—that is, projects we chose (a) without compulsion from external forces and (b) because they align with our own interests and values. When external forces prevent us from pursuing freely chosen projects, we in turn experience emotional suffering in the form of frustration. Our hypothetical waiter cannot pursue the freely chosen project (professorship of history) that most aligns with her interests and values; all her attempts to do so are met with resistance. Who wouldn’t be frustrated in her situation?
Recall that I said we can only label a condition or event objectively bad if it causes suffering that can neither be eliminated nor redeemed. When dealing with the frustration caused by constraints to individual freedom, a person can only eliminate or redeem her suffering by either (a) breaking free from the constraints that prevent her from pursuing her own projects or (b) relinquishing the desire to pursue her own projects altogether.
The condition we are examining inherently takes (a) to be impossible—society actively prevents our hapless waiter from pursuing a history professorship, and she cannot break free from the constraints imposed upon her—so we can automatically eliminate option (a) as a potential path to the elimination or redemption of her suffering.
However, digging a bit deeper, I find that we also cannot view option (b)—relinquishing the desire to pursue one’s own projects—as a genuine means by which an individual who experiences insurmountable social, economic, or political constraints can eliminate or redeem her suffering. Again, this is one of those points that may seem patently obvious to some readers (I mean, why on Earth would I want to abandon my own projects? Pretty much any external conditions that force me to do so have got to be bad, right?), but I do not think this insight is completely self-evident. If the waiter in our scenario faces constraints that are truly insurmountable, one might fairly ask, wouldn’t it be better for her to stop wanting to pursue her own projects? Wouldn’t that eliminate, or at least alleviate, her suffering?
At least one major world religion (Buddhism) revolves primarily around this strand of thought: relinquish your attachment to your own projects and desires, and thus make yourself immune to suffering. To my mind, though, this is not a genuine solution to the problem our waiter faces (nor to anyone else’s problems, for that matter). Researching and teaching history are the activities our waiter genuinely wants to pursue, and these activities constitute the project she would pursue if her freedom were not constrained. As long as she continues to care about the study of history, or to believe in its importance, there isn’t even an intelligible sense in which she can genuinely abandon her project. Her society may prevent her from actually carrying out the pursuit of a history professorship, but it cannot make her not want to pursue a history professorship—not in any sense I would consider genuine, at least. Relinquishing the desire to become a history professor would be an act of bad faith, in the Sartrean sense of the term: it would not reflect what our subject actually wants to do with the basic freedom she has as a conscious entity. Furthermore, the act of relinquishing her freely chosen project would not truly eliminate her frustration, nor would it come anywhere close to redeeming it. Instead, relinquishing her project would merely convert her frustration into resignation, the latter being the more melancholy cousin of the former. And though there is something to be said for resignation in cases where a person’s hopes for herself are too high (”ought implies can,“ after all), resignation does not indicate wisdom or maturity in the case of a person abandoning her life’s hopes and dreams after cracking under the pressure of external (e.g., social, economic, or political) constraints. In cases like this, nothing good ever comes of the subject’s suffering; the sickness lasts unto death, and it cannot be redeemed. A society in which an individual cannot pursue her freely chosen projects is, in my terms, an objectively bad society,F and living as an oppressed member of such a society is objectively bad.
Having concluded this argument regarding the badness of constraints to freedom, I now move on to the second condition I consider objectively bad.
2. Completely losing the ability to reason, or to think clearly.
If a person completely loses the ability to reason, or to think clearly, she is almost certain to suffer in such a manner that her suffering can neither be eliminated nor redeemed. Such a condition of mental illness might stem from physical damage to or deterioration of a person’s information-processing organs, deep psychological trauma, an extended case of depression, or other such phenomena.G I take such conditions to be objectively bad for reasons similar to those presented in the previous section. If a person irretrievably loses the ability to reason, or to think clearly, she can no longer deliberate about what she ought to do, and by extension she cannot freely pursue projects that align with her interests and values. Furthermore, she will likely be unable to function within her social and economic context, regardless of what time period or culture she inhabits, since it is hard to imagine a person being able to function normally without being able to reason or think clearly. As a result, the life of someone who loses her mental faculties is bound to devolve into a meaningless and highly constrained set of activities that are not freely chosen—basic actions like eating, drinking, sleeping, and defecating. She will endure all the physical suffering that the average person experiences (and likely much of the emotional suffering as well), but she will never be able to engage in the sort of redemptive project that can make such suffering worthwhile. How much she suffers may depend on her level of awareness of her own condition; nonetheless, her suffering will almost certainly be impossible to eliminate or redeem. As I have said, I believe it is objectively bad for a human being to suffer interminably and without the possibility of redemption.
The third condition I take to be objectively bad for a human being also meets these criteria.
3. Prolonged isolation.
A person may revel in solitude from time to time, but on the whole, human beings are not wired to endure long periods of isolation. It is for this reason that some folks consider prolonged solitary confinement a more severe form of punishment than death. In fact, it seems that in most cases, long stretches of isolation cause people to develop conditions similar to those mentioned under the preceding point about mental illness. Humans are social animals, and without social interaction, our mental health diminishes, and we run the risk of losing our grip on reality altogether. Even if we imagine someone living in complete isolation without ever losing her ability to reason or think clearly, it is hard to think of any activity she might engage in to redeem the commonplace types of physical and emotional suffering that humans are bound to experience simply as a result of being alive. As far as I can tell, all redemptive projects that we engage in depend upon some kind of interaction with other human beings; how, then, can our hypothetical recluse ever eliminate or redeem the feelings of ennui and despair we all experience from time to time? It seems probable to me that she could not; thus, her isolation would be objectively bad.
The case that indefinite isolation is objectively bad for people who do not like to be alone is much more obvious, so I will not elaborate on it here. I now proceed to one final consideration.
4. Death?
I list death here with a question mark because I don’t really believe anything can be said about the goodness or badness of death from the perspective of the person who dies. Does she go on to an afterlife in a better world? Does she rest in eternal peace, free from the strenuous burden of conscious life? I have no idea, dude.
Tentatively, and in keeping with my discussion of the objective badness of constraints to freedom under my first point above, we might say that death is objectively bad because it terminates our pursuit of our freely chosen projects. In truth, though, we know nothing about the experience of death, or “what it is like” to be dead (including whether or not that’s even an intelligible concept), so we can’t reach a solid conclusion regarding its goodness or badness.
Please note that I am distinguishing the concept of death in this section from the concept of loss discussed in my earlier example about a child passing away. The loss of those dear to us is impossible to avoid and either difficult or impossible to redeem, and the same could be said of the suffering it causes—the pangs of bereavement cannot be avoided, and though they may grip us less and less as time passes, they never go away completely. As such, I think it is fair to label loss objectively bad, albeit perhaps in a sense different from the other conditions and events I have described in this essay: loss is an inevitable part of life for anyone who grows old, whereas oppression, irredeemable mental illness, and isolation are not.
All things considered, I take some delight in how splendidly small the list of things I consider objectively bad has turned out to be. Ultimately, it is only the possibility of suffering indefinitely and without hope of redemption that concerns me, and very few conditions and events appear capable of bringing about this objectively bad form of suffering. Nonetheless, wherever such conditions and events arise within the world of human affairs, I believe we have a duty to try our best to eliminate them.
Published: March 21, 2022.
Last edit: May 19, 2023.