Being a Good Person When Life Is Unfair

When I drove in Boston, my primary concern was protecting the rental car.

I consider myself a pretty altruistic person. I care about people. I think about what my actions mean for them. Yet there I was, driving through Boston, thinking about my flippin' rental car.

That ordinary concern became surprisingly useful when I started examining a spiritual teaching that places a numerical threshold on service to others. Was protecting a car I had rented service to myself? Was it service to the owner? Was avoiding a collision also service to everyone nearby? Did I need to divide my attention into morally approved portions while watching the road?

The situation refused to fit neatly into the proposed measurement. Responsibility had several beneficiaries at once, and my own interests belonged among them.

There is a larger question underneath that absurd little calculation. How do you remain a good person when life is unfair, people operate by different rules, and looking after yourself can be made to sound like a spiritual deficiency?

What Do Spiritual Traditions Teach About Being Good?

In November 2024, I began a broad inquiry into sacred texts and spiritual traditions. I wanted to understand what they said about proper conduct, what they imagined humanity was moving toward, and whether their teachings shared a foundation. Compassion, truthfulness, restraint, generosity, belonging, and care for the world appeared repeatedly. So did instructions to surrender, serve, obey, and transcend the self.

I still find those questions compelling. I am now more interested in what the instructions ask of the person trying to live by them.

A moral framework can sound beautiful while leaving something consequential unspecified. Who receives the service? Can the person providing it refuse? What happens when one community's well-being is purchased through another's depletion? Does the goodness being proposed include the person expected to keep giving?

Egyptian Ma’at brings truth, justice, and balance into the inquiry. In the judgment scene associated with the Book of the Dead, the deceased person's heart is weighed against her feather. Spell 125 includes declarations denying particular wrongs, addressed to divine judges. In one older translation of the Papyrus of Ani, they include denials of causing terror, speaking deceitfully, taking food, and refusing to hear truth. These declarations belong to an ancient ethical and ritual setting, with obligations to gods and rulers alongside conduct toward other people. [1]

They give us a vivid image of accountability. A life has effects that matter beyond what its owner says about it.

Can Goodness Be Measured by Service to Others?

Other teachings attempt a different kind of measurement. In Oahspe, published in 1882, a chapter on spiritual ascent assigns grades according to service to self and service to others. Equal service receives grade 50. Three-quarters service to others receives grade 75. Its wider framework also considers knowledge and the capacity to help others develop. The later Law of One material explicitly discusses 51 percent dedication to others as a threshold for positive spiritual progression. These are related discussions, but they are different texts with different spiritual systems. [2]

A percentage can suggest precision without providing a usable method. Are we counting minutes, thoughts, intentions, actions, or consequences? How would we classify caring for a child, taking a nap before driving, earning a living, or returning someone else's car undamaged?

More troublingly, someone can serve a family, organization, or religious community through conduct that harms people outside it. The recipient's benefit does not settle the morality of the means.

Near-death accounts add another perspective. Some experiencers describe a life review in which they encounter events through other people's feelings as well as their own. Research on reported aftereffects also describes increased compassion alongside greater self-worth, changed priorities, and reduced concern for status. These experiences vary, and they do not produce one agreed account of what follows death. What interests me is the possibility that caring more about other people can coexist with valuing one's own life more fully. [3]

I want to retain that possibility. Generosity should have room for a person who can choose it.

When Does Helping Become People Pleasing?

People pleasing complicates the picture because an apparently helpful act can be organized around fear of disapproval, exclusion, or retaliation. The outward act may look like service while the person performing it experiences very little freedom. A demand can arrive dressed as kindness, loyalty, maturity, or devotion.

A chosen commitment can also be demanding. Raising children, keeping a promise, caring for someone, or doing difficult work may require effort that we would rather avoid that afternoon. Discomfort alone cannot tell us whether an obligation is unjust. We need to examine the relationship, the alternatives, the distribution of responsibility, and what happens when the person giving reaches a limit.

The search for shared morality has to confront differences as well as similarities. A study by Oliver Scott Curry, Daniel Austin Mullins, and Harvey Whitehouse examined ethnographic records from 60 societies for seven kinds of cooperation: helping family, helping one's group, reciprocity, courage, deference to superiors, dividing disputed resources, and respecting prior possession. The researchers found broad positive moral recognition of these behaviors and identified them as plausible candidates for universal moral rules. [4]

That is evidence of recurring moral concerns. It does not establish that everyone agrees on whom a rule protects, how it should be applied, or which obligation takes priority when two conflict.

Loyalty can sustain a community and punish a dissenter. Deference can coordinate action and protect an abusive authority. Respect for possession can protect someone's accumulated work while raising questions about how that possession was acquired. A familiar virtue still needs examination.

The Parliament of the World's Religions has proposed a Global Ethic built around shared commitments. International human-rights instruments also articulate standards intended to reach across national and cultural differences. These are substantial efforts to establish common ground. They remain agreements and proposals with particular histories, participants, and limits; calling an ethic global does not give humanity a single conscience. [5]

Even a written law can preserve unequal standing. Hammurabi's judgments assigned different consequences for comparable injuries depending on social status. The order was explicit, but the injured people were not valued equally. A rule can organize a society while leaving us with reasons to question the arrangement. [6]

And life contains more than misconduct. Illness, accidents, aging, grief, and resource limits also alter what is possible. There may be no offender to prosecute and no apology that would change the conditions. An ethical life cannot function as an insurance policy against adversity.

How Do Moral Expectations Affect Our Human Capacities?

This is where I return to the eight vulnerable human strengths at the center of Fredhappy: Attention, Identity, Attachment, Choice, Regulation, Clarity, Purpose, and Expression.

Attention lets us notice, learn, and return to what matters. Identity gives us a sense of ourselves through change. Attachment makes connection possible. Choice concerns meaningful agency. Regulation concerns returning to a workable balance after strain. Clarity helps us examine what is happening. Purpose gives direction to our lives and contributions. Expression allows our inner lives to enter the world through words, movement, work, art, and other forms.

I use these as a map of human capacities. They are not scores of moral worth, and they do not exist in identical forms or degrees in every person. Capacities develop, fluctuate, require support, and can be diminished. Someone may also exercise considerable clarity, purpose, and expression in the service of deception. Ability and ethical conduct are different questions.

My proposed foundation is that these capacities need protection, opportunities to recover, freedom for chosen use, and room to deepen. PROTECT, RECOVER, EMBODY, and EXPAND each address a part of that ongoing relationship with life.

What Does a Healthy Range of Capacity Mean?

A healthy range, within this model, means that a capacity remains usable and responsive to circumstance. Attention can engage and disengage. Attachment can accommodate closeness and separation. Expression can include speaking and chosen privacy. Purpose can accommodate sustained work, rest, and a changed direction. Constant output would tell us very little about whether a person was living well.

The capability approach associated with Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum offers a useful neighboring idea: examine people's real opportunities to do and be what they have reason to value. A permission on paper may be unusable in practice. Having a voice matters differently when speaking carries a threat to your livelihood or belonging. [7]

My interest is in what that means for morality. Honest dealing supports clarity and choice. Reciprocity can sustain attachment without requiring identical contributions from people with different abilities and needs. Care makes recovery possible. Proportionate restraint can protect people from harmful conduct without making punishment an unlimited permission to injure. Repair asks the person responsible to address consequences that remain after the event.

These are commitments I would defend, rather than a discovery that every culture has already settled the question. Their value has to be examined through what they make possible and what they cost.

Where Does Personal Freedom Meet Responsibility to Others?

The person receiving protection also deserves scrutiny. A protected class can preserve its own opportunities while leaving others to absorb the burden. The benefits of an arrangement cannot be assessed honestly if we stop counting at the boundary of the favored group.

I would also resist deciding that an arrangement is good merely because it benefits the greatest number. A majority's convenience is insufficient justification for making a smaller group expendable. We have to include the people whose losses are easiest for everyone else to overlook.

There is a necessary limit on chosen use, too. Your right to swing your arm ends at my nose. Someone's purpose cannot automatically authorize coercing another person's participation. Expression cannot automatically justify threats or fraud. Attachment cannot confer ownership of another person's attention.

Disagreement, disappointment, and being refused are part of living with people who have choices of their own. An ethical framework must leave room for those experiences as well as address actual injury. Otherwise, protection can become another means of control.

How Do Organizations and Platforms Shape Our Choices?

That distinction reaches beyond individual intentions. Organizations design reporting lines, workloads, incentives, and access to information. Public decisions shape services and material opportunities. Digital platforms design the conditions in which people direct their attention and seek connection.

The youth platform-design litigation against Meta illustrates the question. The multistate complaint alleged that Facebook and Instagram features were designed to induce harmful excessive use among young people while the company misled the public about safety. Those are the plaintiffs' allegations. The moral issue I am examining is whether a system helps people exercise their capacities on their own terms, or makes those capacities increasingly available to its own objectives. [8]

A person can appear active and engaged while having less freedom to redirect attention. A community can appear harmonious because dissent has become too expensive. Visible activity and orderly conduct are incomplete measures of what life within an arrangement is costing.

What Can Bees Teach Us About Injustice?

I chose bees for the book Injustice: What Work Becomes — From Field to Honey because their lives are sufficiently foreign to loosen our attachment to familiar human sides. We can encounter the work before deciding which religion, workplace, family, or political group we think it represents.

In the story, honey is accumulated labor that can sustain a future season. Robbing transfers those stores from one colony to another. The taking also forces the robbed colony to redirect workers into defense, leaving less capacity for the other work that keeps it alive.

The robbers return home and feed their own brood. Within their own colony, that provision supports life. The benefit is real, and so is the depletion elsewhere. Serving one's own does not make the cost disappear.

That is the moral difficulty I wanted the bees to let us see. We can examine where work goes, whose reserve is consumed, and what becomes harder after the taking. We do not need to assign an entire human tradition to the role of villain to recognize the relationship.

The book also contains a colder observation: “There is no fairness in this. Only sequence.” Consequences follow conditions. They do not reliably distribute themselves according to effort or virtue.

How Can We Recover From Injustice Without Giving Up Our Values?

For a person recovering from injustice, that distinction can be painful and useful. You may have acted carefully and still lost something. You may be doing substantial work that produces little visible progress because so much of your capacity has been redirected into preservation. An account of your character is insufficient to explain the whole situation.

Recovery asks what remains available, what needs care, and what conditions would allow another kind of work to become possible. In the book, the movement toward new comb and honey gives that question a material form. Work can become structure, nourishment, and reserve. More of what is made can remain available for life.

There is no percentage I can assign to that. I can ask whether a commitment allows honesty, whether belonging leaves room for a real no, whether burdens are shared fairly, and whether someone's flourishing depends on another person remaining depleted.

I can also ask those questions about my own conduct. My need to protect myself does not settle every competing claim in my favor. Other people's lives enter the calculation, and mine belongs there too.

That is a workable place to begin being a good person when life is unfair: care for what makes life possible, examine the effects of what you do, and remain willing to change an arrangement when its costs become clear. Some disagreements will persist. Some losses will remain losses. There can still be room to contribute, receive help, enjoy something, and make more of a life.

PROTECT

INJUSTICE: What Work Becomes

From Field to Honey

What happens when the energy for making must go into defending? Told from within a honeybee colony, this work of literary nonfiction explores how pressure changes work, revealing the hidden labor of preservation, adaptation, and building something that lasts.

$2.99Learn More Buy Now

I began this inquiry thinking about how much of a life should be devoted to others. I keep returning to whether the people involved have enough freedom and provision to live at all. That includes the person giving, the person receiving, and the person outside the arrangement who may be paying for it.

And yes, sometimes it includes taking care of the rental car.

Sources and further reading

UCL Digital Egypt, Book of the Dead Chapter 125A, and E. A. Wallis Budge's public-domain translation of the Papyrus of Ani, Plates XXXI–XXXII. The historical wording varies across manuscripts and translations.

Oahspe, Book of Judgment, Chapter VI, and The Law of One, Session 17, questions 31–34.

Bruce Greyson, Near-Death Experiences and Claims of Past-Life Memories, page 215; An Overview of Near-Death Experiences; and University of Virginia, typical NDE features and variation.