Is Being a Good Person Enough?

I remember growing up I was often told, "It's not enough to be a good person." Presumably what this meant was that being a good person, as defined by my peers, or society, or the world, was not going to get me into heaven--at least not goodness alone. No, you had to have the right beliefs to get into heaven. In fact, I remember one particularly cringe-worthy song that members of my church sang that listed all the other religious faiths that weren't going to get you there.

Of course, this idea of being good not being good enough was coupled with the idea that no one was truly good, except God, of course. As a child, it was definitely challenging to try to navigate how to be good, while knowing that being good wasn't good enough--and was ever out of reach.

I started thinking about this today, because I was daydreaming about a possible future in which I am an esteemed writer. In my self-glorifying narrative, I become a respected commentator on religion and ethics in American history/society. I have ideas that people want to hear. I provide deep insight into the polarity that drives American religious belief and politics. I'm interviewed by John Stuart (who magically still hosts the Daily Show in his early 40s by the time I'm actually important enough to be interviewed). Basically, I'm contributing to society and people care about what I think. (I know how arrogant this must sound, especially to people who don't know me. I promise I don't actually believe myself to be the next Immanuel Kant, Bertrand Russell, or Karen Armstrong! It's just my fantasy.)

Then, I stop and think, "Who am I to contribute to the ways that people think about and live out ethical values?" (And you know I've been to graduate school because I don't ask myself, "Who am I to tell people what to do?" Or I do ask myself that way, but then I annoyingly rephrase it as the above.)

I often feel that I'm not doing enough for society, for the earth, for the world. I currently don't volunteer for anything. Beyond being a vegetarian who (mostly) recycles I don't do much that is obviously humanitarian. Sure, I teach, but I mostly teach some of the most privileged students in the world. And my hope is that I will influence them to be better people by grading their blue book exams?

This made me think about what it means to be a "good person." It seems to me that when people usually refer to someone as "good", they mean someone who is likable, pleasant to others, and generally doesn't do immoral, unethical things. However, is that what goodness really means? If it is, I find that I've returned to the same question that my religious teachers asked (and answered) when I was young: Is being good, good enough?

This seems to be a question I keep returning to in various ways. My crisis of faith in college had a lot to do with my assessment that there was goodness outside of the narrow constraints of the Christian belief system I was raised in.** My favorite graduate school seminar paper was an exploration of whether we should use saints as ethical models.

From a religious standpoint, for the present, I've accepted the idea that being good IS good enough. I don't believe in life after death anymore. I also think that if god exists, it isn't what we think it is, and so life after death isn't what we think it is either. [Nevertheless, I clearly haven't got the indignation that Meursault had in The Stranger when he told the priest to stop wasting his time. I keep thinking about and studying religious beliefs anyway. (But, I guess I also don't believe that the making of meaning is entirely up to the individual. We make meaning together--hence my continued interest in religion.)]

Regardless, I still care about what it means to be good and what kinds of standards we should set for ethical behavior. Maybe in the case of thinking about whether or not my particular list of activities is good enough, I need to step back a bit and think more broadly. For instance, is there a point at which I would be good enough? Is there some golden mean of goodness at which I am doing exactly the right amount of good things for the world that I could and should be doing? My sense is that these are ridiculous questions. But the Christian girl inside me--and she's still there, loss of faith notwithstanding--wants me to be sure to say that even if there isn't a clearly defined set of good things a person must do, that doesn't let us off the hook. We have a responsibility to think about what's good and to do good, even if we know we can't do it all. ("Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means...")

Additionally, is goodness linked solely to actions or deeds? Or, is action necessarily the primary gauge by which we measure a person's goodness? I imagine that most of us understand goodness to amount not only to what we do with our lives, but also who we are in a general sense, or how we are in our day-to-day lives. So maybe being good is good enough, but it's not about arriving at a destination or a fixed point of goodness?

I'm not the first person to ask these questions. And many people have asked them more eloquently than I have. I won't be the last person to attempt to ask and then answer them either. I suppose that's what makes me prone to history: we keep asking questions about the past, because the answers change as we do. Perhaps we keep asking questions about goodness because those answers change as we do too?

**I should also add that I don't meant to pick on Christians or start a fight with any of you. I owe a lot of my own ethical consciousness to my Christian upbringing, and I think that Christianity has done some good in the world.