So… If one were to have control over ones children, what would one wish for? A few things come to mind. You probably want them to have along and meaningful life. High and steady quality of life. Educated and learned so that they could face what you did not fathom they would face. You want hem o live the good life. Some people wish their children are nice people in addition to good people. This includes a lot of things, like not tripping siblings, not pulling chair from under classmates, cleaning up a mess on the side walk just out of the niceness of their person, to things like not being part of a Nazi party, maybe not killing, maybe not causing other people to kill, not hacking computer accounts or networks, not lying or deceiving, not taking property from others unjustly, having no excess powers,… etc. Along these lines.

Honestly, in this day and age, it’s hard to decide what one wants. There are a lot of (apparently) bad and (apparently)nasty(not nice) people who have (apparently) exceedingly high quality of life, learned, and definitely doing very meaningful things. The paradox of orthodoxies arise. Many schools of thoughts regarding what a truly good life should look like from many many aspects of life.

The old ones are still around.

New ones may talk about it like math equastion: being characterizable by certain bounds within which one is good: minimum income, minimum number of sex partners, minimum degree, maximum calories per day, minimum steps, networth, number of kids, donations to charity, amount of social activity and the depth of social relationships, diversity of income and investments, etc… So many views…

If one maintains those metrics, one is good.

For people who think about it, this may be an open problem or it may be a closed book.

It is interesting to think about one in a while. But honestly, it always seems too great a problem when you try to solve it, and it alway seems like the world’s most urgent problem when you encounter nastiness and badness.

So, if we refer to the Moral Hierarchy, one can see that we can perhaps distinguish our desire for nice and good behavior in my own weakness. This does not mean that we necessarily require that we, ourselves, are Strong(within out strength) in a nice/good way. Case in point, let’s have nukes to enforce world peace.

But, in the same breath, to keep peace with the pc-monitor, it is quite conceivable that a practically implementable stable society everyone has largely symmetrical strengths and weaknesses. Meaning, in the real world, if you want others to be nice to you you pretty much have to be nice back.