Reflective Essay about Good and Bad

Good and bad, right, and wrong, how are these determined? Who decides what is good or bad? The answer is you; everyone’s views of right and wrong are different and determined by the things that have happened in their life, everyone thinks differently about good and bad as well. These different experiences are what makes the world work, without them we would all be the same and there would be no individuality, no need for laws and no jail. We as humans all have some sense of good and bad but it is not the same for all of us, some of the things that make out definition of good and bad different are religion, the way we were raised by our family and the rules or laws around us. 

Family is a massive influence on what is right and wrong for kids because they are the first ones to teach you about it. The way kids are raised has changed a lot with the times, but so has good and bad. Meaning that these two things could be related, in the article life isn’t fair deal with it by Mike Myatt, he states that “we clearly have no choice about how we come into this world, we have little choice early in life, but as we grow older choices abound” (paragraph 2). The way your parents or guardians raise you has a lot of impact on the rest of your life in the article do juvenile killers deserve life behind bars by Nina Totenberg, a lot of the young kids that go to jail had bad childhoods and one of them even was beat as a kid. This is not an excuse for him killing someone, but it was an influence on why he did it. 

Religion is another thing on what can make good people do bad things or the other way around too, in morality as anti-nature by Friedrich Nietzsche he goes on to say, “To be fair, it should be admitted, however, that on the ground out of which Christianity grew, the concept of the “spiritualization of passion” could never have been formed” (paragraph 2). He is saying is that the church helped form the world today because without them there would be no passion and with no passion there is no good or bad, right, or wrong. in the article what makes good people do bad things by Melissa Dittmann, it says “that line between good and evil is permeable” (paragraph 3) and “I argue that we all have the capacity for love and evil- to be Mother Theresa, to be Hitler or Saddam Hussein. It’s the situation that brings that out” (paragraph 3). These are two very good quotes hinting at the fact that no one is good or bad and that people change all the time. The church can be one of those situations, back in 1889 when Nietzsche wrote his article it was bad to go against the church, going against the church was like going against life. Nietzsche says that “the practice of church is hostile to life” (paragraph 2) in his time this would have been seen as the worst thing anyone could possibly say, but he was not wrong the way churches were run at that time was basically church or death.

The rules are the biggest influence on good and bad because the person the highest up get to decide them, therefore deciding what is good and bad. The only downfall to this I that people do not always listen to people of authority; this is where problems start. If someone speeds, are they immediately a bad person because they broke a rule? No, what makes them bad is if they break the rule of killing someone or one of the worse laws, rules and laws are important because even though people break them without them the world would be pure chaos, with rules and laws the world still is not a good place, imagine it without them. Going back to Nina Totenberg’s article of juvenile killers she talks about brain development coming into play and how young people don’t realize the consequences of their actions, they should know not to kill anyone but they don’t realize why they shouldn’t kill anyone, or what will happen when they do kill someone.