You’re seeing a “self” or an “identity” where there are only conditions. My point is that your friend didn’t “choose” virtue in a vacuum; he finally encountered conditions - perhaps a moment of stability or a specific mentor - where pro-social behavior wasn’t actively punished by his environment, or it was even rewarded in ways that aren’t immediately obvious.
In places like Gaza, prosociality isn’t a miracle of “free will”; it’s a survival requirement. When the external world is hostile, the internal community must be hyper-cooperative to survive. That is a reinforced behavior.
If you put a “good” person in a system that rewards predation and punishes kindness with death or starvation, that “virtuous identity” eventually collapses into survival. We aren’t essentially “good” or “bad”, we are reflections of the resources, safety, and reinforcements available to us. Character is just the name we give to a long chain of causes and conditions that happened to go right.
You’re seeing a “self” or an “identity” where there are only conditions. My point is that your friend didn’t “choose” virtue in a vacuum; he finally encountered conditions - perhaps a moment of stability or a specific mentor - where pro-social behavior wasn’t actively punished by his environment, or it was even rewarded in ways that aren’t immediately obvious.
In places like Gaza, prosociality isn’t a miracle of “free will”; it’s a survival requirement. When the external world is hostile, the internal community must be hyper-cooperative to survive. That is a reinforced behavior.
If you put a “good” person in a system that rewards predation and punishes kindness with death or starvation, that “virtuous identity” eventually collapses into survival. We aren’t essentially “good” or “bad”, we are reflections of the resources, safety, and reinforcements available to us. Character is just the name we give to a long chain of causes and conditions that happened to go right.