Why Do We Want to be the Good Guys?

So I’ve been reading Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason”, and while I don’t entire agree with his approach to morality, he raises an interesting point as a bit of an aside, which I will paraphrase (I’m too lazy to look up the quotes). Basically, he comments that when it comes to wanting to live a moral life it’s only philosophers that can question whether or not someone should want it (tying it to my oft-mentioned discussion over what motivates us to act morally). The reason he says this is that he notes that when we look at our stories and the sorts of people that even children most desire to emulate or be, it’s the good guys. The heroes. The pure and the moral. The purer the hero, the more morally pure their motives, the more children and others tend to admire and aspire to be them. Now, this does often seem to change, at least in modern times, as we get older. We will often find pure moral characters naive, and often find ourselves most drawn to more morally grey works than to the pure “fairy tales” of our youth. But nevertheless, children’s stories tend to be filled with characters that go out from morally pure motives and succeed, and children tend to see their rewards at the end — true love, a kingdom, and so on — as following from their heroism — thus being the rewards that heroes should earn for being heroes — rather than as the motive for doing it. We seem, then, to have a natural inclination to admire and aspire to be morally pure. In some sense, then, we have an inherent motivation to be moral.

Someone might object that the reason children think this way is because our society conditions them from a young age to do so, with the precise stories that I’m citing here. This doesn’t seem convincing, though, because we all know that if you try to get children to enjoy things they don’t enjoy, they won’t enjoy it no matter how much you try to condition them. Moreover, it wouldn’t explain why those stories gained prominence in the first place. One could argue — as my long-time debate opponent Coel might — that these were formed through evolutionary or social evolutionary forces to encourage us to act in a pro-social manner, and then the stories were deliberately crafted to reinforce that, but the fact would remain that we have an inherent desire to be good and to be selfless. Which would also explain why, outside of a philosophy classroom, we are so bothered by a suggestion that we can only justify morality on the basis of what it can do for us and how we can benefit from it, and how we are so offended by people who suggest that they are only moral because of how it benefits them.

We can also look at comic books to see the base appeal of the pure hero and also how, as we go along in life, we start to become a bit more jaded. It’s no surprise that the major figureheads of both Marvel and DC are, in fact, the “Boy Scouts”, Captain America and Superman. And yet often — especially in movies — they can be dismissed as being naive or out of touch, especially if handled incorrectly. Spider-Man is probably Marvel’s next most notable character, and while he is someone who acts out of duty and responsibility, he also has a fairly bad life and his life is filled with angst. And yet, despite that, he continues to be good, and we admire him for that. If we then turn to more grey superheroes that are nonetheless popular like Batman and Wolverine, we can see that while their methods can be more grey, the most popular incarnations of the characters also have a strong moral core. Wolverine’s most memorable and popular storylines occurred after he went to Japan and learned the ways of the samurai, tempering his rage with a strong moral core. Batman is well-known for his strict moral code that will not allow him to deliberately kill his enemies. The more grey characters, then, satisfy our experience of the world that tells us two things: being good does not necessarily lead to a good life, and sometimes you cannot stop bad people by acting exceptionally good. We find the “Boy Scout” character stories naive because they seem to portray life in precisely the way that we’ve learned life is not like.

But we still admire heroes, not villains. We still admire and want to be like the heroes and the pure heroes, not the villains. We are drawn to the stories of the grey heroes because they are heroes who are more “realistic”, who act in a way that we at least believe we would have to in the world we live in and get the rewards that we think that people on our world would receive. For the “Boy Scout” works, we feel that they are lying to us, making it seem like the heroes will get the rewards and be able to stop all the evil just by being really, really good, but that’s not how we believe the world actually is.

But we want it to be that way, though, and we want to be heroes. We just don’t think we can get away with it in this world without it destroying us.

So this is the answer to the question of why we should want to be moral. It turns out, we all inherently do want to be moral. And it’s only the influence of philosophy class or the realism of a world where not everyone — and even not most people — are heroes that make us question why in the world we’d ever want to be a hero ourselves.