Yeah, it works better seeing it as a goodwill meter rather than a personal morality meter. I actually like roleplay game systems like VtM because they have the dual thing where you have humanity and masquerade breaking as measuring both what you do and how people view what you do. Though granted, the kind of thing you mention isn't too far off from reality in some ways - big well known faces of the community who do a lot of charity work can be dicks in their own home and get clean away with it, like the Texas judge who was beating his daughter - that wasn't a one off incident.
Anyway, as someone who is pretty self interested and doesn't see themselves as good, if you want to get in a position where there are more options for you to enrich yourself, doing a couple of good things here and there certainly does help. It doesn't mean you should always pick the good option, but just be smart about it. Also, what is viewed as 'good' is totally relative to the kind of community or culture you're in. It's like honour killings! You net a lot of understanding from your own cultural group, but if that cultural group happens to be in the minority and they don't understand why you see that as the good and right thing to do...
I think like in order to have any good (heh) discussion on this, OP - or whoever - needs to define exactly what they mean as 'good'. Is it 'selfless'? Something like being willing to take on the disapproval of the wider community to kill your child because they were dishonored by having sex before marriage could in theory be seen as selfless. And no doubt the person doing it would see it as good. See: Abraham and killing his kid, totally viewed as a 100% good thing by tons of people, just extend it out to modern times and you can understand where that kind of thing comes from. But at the same time loads of other people wouldn't view that sort of action as a good thing, so we're left a little confused as to just what that means anyway.
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Anyway, as someone who is pretty self interested and doesn't see themselves as good, if you want to get in a position where there are more options for you to enrich yourself, doing a couple of good things here and there certainly does help. It doesn't mean you should always pick the good option, but just be smart about it. Also, what is viewed as 'good' is totally relative to the kind of community or culture you're in. It's like honour killings! You net a lot of understanding from your own cultural group, but if that cultural group happens to be in the minority and they don't understand why you see that as the good and right thing to do...
I think like in order to have any good (heh) discussion on this, OP - or whoever - needs to define exactly what they mean as 'good'. Is it 'selfless'? Something like being willing to take on the disapproval of the wider community to kill your child because they were dishonored by having sex before marriage could in theory be seen as selfless. And no doubt the person doing it would see it as good. See: Abraham and killing his kid, totally viewed as a 100% good thing by tons of people, just extend it out to modern times and you can understand where that kind of thing comes from. But at the same time loads of other people wouldn't view that sort of action as a good thing, so we're left a little confused as to just what that means anyway.