"The greater good" is a quick road to the worst atrocities ever committed by mankind, and that's not a partisan or tribal truth.
The reason is simple: in aiming at an aggregate, you ignore the individual.
Let's say you have a button, and if you press that button, ten deserving people (or one hundred people, or one thousands people, or ten thousand people, it doesn't matter) will immediately have a million dollars added to their bank accounts, and one random people will die.
If you care only about the greater good, then you'd press that button all day every day. After all, ten, one hundred, one thousand, ten thousand people will be made immeasurably better off, and at the low cost of only one person dying.
Alternatively, you could choose random criminals to kill and harvest their organs, and those organs could go to save perhaps 6-10 lives at the cost of just one life. The greater good is satisfied, but to the criminals who are selected it would certainly not feel so good.
The reason is simple: in aiming at an aggregate, you ignore the individual.
Let's say you have a button, and if you press that button, ten deserving people (or one hundred people, or one thousands people, or ten thousand people, it doesn't matter) will immediately have a million dollars added to their bank accounts, and one random people will die.
If you care only about the greater good, then you'd press that button all day every day. After all, ten, one hundred, one thousand, ten thousand people will be made immeasurably better off, and at the low cost of only one person dying.
Alternatively, you could choose random criminals to kill and harvest their organs, and those organs could go to save perhaps 6-10 lives at the cost of just one life. The greater good is satisfied, but to the criminals who are selected it would certainly not feel so good.
Yeah, empathy to the individual is the countermeasure to the greater good, the intersection of the two is important, and in my examples that empathy would see the unfair cost to an individual considered unacceptable.
The other thing that we have to be careful of is the intersection of what is true and what we would like to be true or what we would like to make true. It's another thing that both sides of the political spectrum each have issues with. In some ways you can end up with policies that are entirely too pragmatic and mercenary, and in other ways you can have policies that are so disconnected from reality that they can't work.
There are a lot of intersections we need to take into account in public policy and in our personal lives.
Policies that dramatically fall outside of intersections like these (for example by being too extreme in one direction or the other), or policies whose location along these intersections change as reality or our perception of reality changes tend to be polarizing politically because it causes otherwise reasonable people to seek a correction towards a natural point and the perception is that the way to get that correction is a hard course change for a bit, but you end up with polarization as a result.
The other thing that we have to be careful of is the intersection of what is true and what we would like to be true or what we would like to make true. It's another thing that both sides of the political spectrum each have issues with. In some ways you can end up with policies that are entirely too pragmatic and mercenary, and in other ways you can have policies that are so disconnected from reality that they can't work.
There are a lot of intersections we need to take into account in public policy and in our personal lives.
Policies that dramatically fall outside of intersections like these (for example by being too extreme in one direction or the other), or policies whose location along these intersections change as reality or our perception of reality changes tend to be polarizing politically because it causes otherwise reasonable people to seek a correction towards a natural point and the perception is that the way to get that correction is a hard course change for a bit, but you end up with polarization as a result.
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