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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kahuna Burger" data-source="post: 3535469" data-attributes="member: 8439">Hrm, the "nice /= good and good /= nice" discussion.... In my expereince, a lot of folks enjoy the archetype of the Good (or even exalted) Jerk. Niceness is usually conflated with politelness and meanness with being plain spoken, and niceness is claimed as a fake facade. "I'm too busy saving your life to worry about your feelings!"I'd like to suggest a different aproach. A long term pattern of Good behavior is inspired, at its core, by compassion. Its about not wanting people to suffer. Good people don't want to hurt other people, and don't want to see other people hurt. Evil on the other hand is about a lack of compassion. Evil people either don't care about the suffering of others, enjoy the suffering of others, or consider their suffering in some way unreal and irrelevant.How does this relate to niceness? Emotional suffering exists. In the grand sceme of things it isn't as important (usually) as physical suffering or world wide evil plots, but it is real and a Good person should, in the overall, want to avoid or alieviate it. So while there are many reasons a Evil person could pretend to be nice, a Good person should, imo, generally be nice unless there is a compelling reason not to be. They should not seek out excuses to be mean "for a person's own good", they should not be hurtful when a kind approach would be just as effective, and they should not be proud of their hurtfullness under the guise of "plain speaking". So my veiw is, Good does not always = nice and nice does not always = Good.... But they go together more often than they don't and meanness is always a taint on good action. Niceness - that is, making an effort to aliviate emotional suffering or reduce it - is usually a good action. Meanness - causing or increasing emotional suffering - is usually an evil action. Just like in any other case, good people can take evil actions when neccassary and evil people can do good things for their own purposes, but that doesn't make mean and nice irrelevant to good and evil - it just makes them not exactly the same.</blockquote>

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