If someone does an act of good - perhaps is kind to a stranger, that will be fairly clearly of immediate benefit to that one person who receives the kindness.
However, the effects may flow further. The person who has received the kindness may be in a better mood and thus may also lift others, the person who did the act of kindness may feel better about themselves and thus continue to be kind (or kinder) through the day, and so on. Although the impact of these subsequent effects may be less than the original event, the total accumulated effect of the act of good (kindness) may be several times stronger than the original act.
Unfortunately, that also applies to acts of harm – nonBPM (unbalancing or out of balance and/or spiritually immature) acts.
But there are also situations where one has a choice of what to do, and in judging those, what might be needed is to compare the net total good and total harm for each of those options.
As an example, suppose a coastal city is facing severe water shortages. The options being considered may be:
· educate people about water conservation, and encourage them to do so;
· build a dam and divert river water to the city;
· implement a cloud seeding programme;
· provide a seawater desalination plant;
· reduce water demand.
The first of these will result in reduced water demand and a better informed and engaged population, and all for relatively little effort.
Dams cause a great deal of harm where they are built and by the flooding of their storage, and can have adverse impacts downstream – both environmental and human. On the other hand, provide droughts are so strong that they prevent water accumulation, they are likely to provide the water required - if properly designed.
Cloud seeding doesn’t involve the damage caused by a dam and water impoundment (storage), but the water that falls as rain where the seeding is would otherwise have likely fallen as rain elsewhere, and there may be harm in that “elsewhere” similar to the harm downstream of the dam.
Seawater desalination will provide extra water and is unlikely to have a major impact outside the immediate construction zone (I have read conspiracy rubbish saying the brine discharged from desalination is comparable to the Deda Sea, which is utter bloody rubbish: the Dead Sea salinity is around 34% or 340,000 ppm, whereas normal seawater salinity is around 3.5%, or 35,000 ppm and desalination brine is around 7% or 70,000 ppm).
As written, all the last three options do not specifically include anything to reduce the demand, but that could be done, which would increase the benefit and, by reducing the demand, reduce the damage.
It may be possible to reduce demand further – for instance, by not building data centres, which is a further benefit.
So … the options are:
· reduce demand by education:
o benefit: reduced demand, which may or may not be enough + more informed and engaged population
o harm: minor effort for education
o total: good option, but question about whether will be good enough
· build a dam and divert river water to the city;
o benefit: provide desired water, unless droughts become excessive (and droughts will be worse and more frequent from climate change)
o harm: population not educated so unaware + damage at dam & impoundment + harm where water would have gone to
o total: with climate change and increased awareness, large dams are no longer being built
· implement a cloud seeding programme;
o benefit: provide desired water, unless droughts become excessive (and droughts will be worse and more frequent from climate change)
o harm: harm: population not educated so unaware + harm where water would have gone to
o total: less harmful than dam, but the population remains relatively unaware
· provide a seawater desalination plant;
o benefit: provide desired water, even with climate change
o harm: population not educated so unaware + disruption from construction + higher salinity near discharge of brine pipe
o total: the water supply will be provided, with less harm than a dam or cloud seeding, but the population remains relatively unaware
· reduce water demand.
o benefit: reduced need for construction of something new
o harm: depends on how this is accomplished
o total: may not be enough, and the population remains relatively unaware
To make a decision based on the Greater Good, the needs of and impacts on the people and places in the city and elsewhere need to be considered, which would suggest demand reduction by education and any other means and desalination may be for the Greater Good overall.
For more on this, see:
· https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/the+greater+good, https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/greater_good, and https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/greater-good;
· https://theconversation.com/explainer-the-greater-good-and-why-it-matters-more-than-ever-40643;
· https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/202004/the-greater-good;
· https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/; and
· https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Common_good&oldid=1368369997.
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