Better Is Not Always Good

Murdering one person, if murder is immoral, is objectively far better than murdering nine people--but murdering anyone at all would not be good or excusable in the slightest if this is indeed the case.  Better is not always good, and less erroneous is not the same as true.  There are numerous ramifications of this spanning epistemology, ethics, art, politics, as well as the comparative qualities of individuals and companies.  Never once is being better than something else enough to make an idea true or a behavior or motivation good unless it is already true or good because of its own nature.  Unsurprisingly to any rationalist with a extensive experience conversing with others, many people are still perfectly content to at least say, even if they at least selectively realize why this cannot possibly make something logically or morally valid, that something being better than another thing makes it good in its own right.

Even though comparisons are not themselves invalid, many things could be misunderstood if a person makes assumptions or lets preferences dictate how they go about comparing things.  That one person is not as cruel as another does not make them righteous; the first person is still cruel and likely unwilling to change no matter what reason and justice demand, clinging to meaningless subjective preferences instead.  If America is in some ways a country with a superior quality of life to that of many other countries, this does not make America a good country, just one that is in some ways better, and perhaps even then one country is better than nother by accident.  That one false concept is not as foundational in its error as another or that one epistemologically invalid belief involves fewer assumptions than another cannot make either of the former things valid.  A lesser degree of error, stupidity, or evil is still error, stupidity, or evil.

There are many examples of ideologies, workplaces, nations, and individuals who are better than some other example from their own categories, and yet mere superiority does not mean something is true, rational, or good.  It only means one thing has less falsity or injustice than something else.  For people to sometimes seem to genuinely think that one thing is good only because it lacks some of another thing's negative qualities or has them to a lesser extent, they completely ignore the nature of something itself by focusing not on what it is actually like, but on what something else is like by comparison.  While irrational people could do this with everything from epistemologies to art and beyond, one of the most common specific contexts one might find this backwards priority on comparison in America would be politics.

The earlier example of America is one that might come up over and over as conservatives in particular assert that being better than a country like North Korea or China makes America a shining light on a hill, when being superior to some of the worst nations of the era does not mean America possesses its own genuinely positive qualities.  This means such conservatives are too lazy to try to even understand the country they claim to love or it means that they might be aware that there is little to wholeheartedly praise about America, but they are stupid enough to base that praise on meaningless subjective approval.  Politics in general is a great arena in which one can see this fallacy ensnare minds, since so many people allow political assumptions instead of more foundational philosophical truths to dictate their general philosophical stances, personal priorities, and treatment of others, just not the only one.

There are many ways that someone might fall into the fallacies of thinking that just because one thing is better than another, it is good in itself, and there are just as many ways that thorough rationalists will avoid this breed of error.  A rational person will never think highly of conscience-based moral epistemology just because it does not immediately contradict itself like relativism and anti-realism do (anti-realism would still have to be true, and if truth exists, it cannot be true that nothing at all exists).  A rational person will never think that a company is good just because the pay, conditions, and leaders are worse somewhere else, just better by comparison.  A rational person will never think an individual or a nation is righteous just because someone else is or could be more cruel, more hypocritical, more arrogant, more emotionalistic, or more apathetic towards truth.  Better is not always good, and when it comes to people, being better than others is not the goal of a rationalist; it is a byproduct of sincerely, consistently pursuing rationalistic and moral perfection.