Why is it Hard to be Good?!

Christmas is giving. Christmas is sharing. Christmas is the time to do good. Christmas is good.

But what if this great season end? Will giving end? Will sharing end? Will doing good end? Simple and elementary questions, right? But the reality is, it needs tough answer!

Why does some man "good" only when this season come? You might be one of them...or I might be one of them...he he he...I don't want to exclude myself. Why is it really hard to be good?!

Man is hedonistic by nature (you might be arguing me he he he). PLEASURE IS THE MOST IMPORTANT PURSUIT OF MANKIND (hedonists philosophy)! Do not deny! Because of this, man thought that pleasure is the only thing that is good for person. But also, hedonists believed that people must be equal, and the way to achieve that, is through allowing much more personal freedom.

Through this philosophy, more individuals ended up in a wrong direction. They do want they want to do. They do want they think is right just to satisfy their needs and pleasure. And more so, they desired to achieve more even they have enough in order to attain the greatest satisfaction shall I say their greatest happiness.

A lot of debates and arguments arose because of hedonism. In order to ease the confussions, hedonism can be conjoined by psychological and ethical egoism.

Psychological egoism is the theory that humans are motivated to pursue what is good for them - to make psychological hedonism: a purely descriptive claim which states that agents naturally seek pleasure; while ethical egoism claims that individuals should seek their own good - to make ethical hedonism the claim that we should act so as to produce our own pleasure.

You might not understand these things for they express deeper views. And it is really hard to understand (whew!) Anyway I will leave this quote that I got from Wikipedia, from the book of Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness, "The Objectivist Ethics". He still viewed pleasure as the proper end of ethics:


"To take "whatever makes one happy" as a guide to action means: to be guided by nothing but one's emotional whims. Emotions are not tools of cognition. . . . This is the fallacy inherent in hedonism--in any variant of ethical hedonism, personal or social, individual or collective. "Happiness" can properly be the purpose of ethics, but not the standard. The task of ethics is to define man's proper code of values and thus to give him the means of achieving happiness. To declare, as the ethical hedonists do, that "the property value is whatever gives you pleasure" is to declare that "the proper value is whatever you happen to value"--which is an act of intellectual and philosophical abdication, an act which merely proclaims the futility of ethics and invites all men to play it deuces wild."