Considering the fact the doing good will not earn you anything in anyway and that if you are not a millionaire or billionaire your good acts won’t matter at all.
What’s the point?
I had seen with my own eyes good people being manipulated and fucked because they did something good, on the other hand it’s pretty rare for evil people to face any consequences.
Why should I restrict my free hands with ethics and why should I think about it?
Just a note: I am a deist, so I don’t believe that doing good will get you anything in the after life.
Most people here are taking the moral high road or talking about the current state of society. Lets look at game theory instead to get some fundamental understanding.
Consider a game with 10 players. Each player has two options: be charitable or be selfish. If they are charitable, they add 3 points to the collective score. If they are selfish, they add 2 points to their own score. All players decide at the same, and afterwards the collective is evenly divided among all players. So if all players are charitable, everyone ends up with a personal score of 3. If everyone is selfish, everyone ends up with a score of 2.
If you are the only selfish person in the game, you score a jackpot. You get a total score of 4.7.
Now consider the idea that you play this game over and over with random players, accumulating score in each game. If everyone is always selfish, no-one will score higher than 2. But if you, individually are never selfish, you never score higher than 3.
If we consider all players to follow the same strategy, then we get an optimization puzzle for individual score. How often do you randomly choose for selfish? Instinct and DNA, but also culture and social norms create a common recipe in humans for how to make this decision. So while reality is more complex, we still act anough alike to get some wisdom when applying this assumption.
But it turns out that we don’t play these games with random people, but we are grouped by our strategy for choosing selfish or charitable (e.g. grouped by culture). And the groups also compete. If a group does particularly bad with their global score, they will be removed from the game (conquored, culture changed, etc). So not only does your choice for selfish or charitable need to optimize for personal gain to get a survival edge within your group, it also needs to optimize for survival of the group. A group with only selfish people will never thrive.
Hence, in this simple example, randomly doing good can be good for the survival of your DNA and culture. Real life is much more complicated, but a similar balance of interests may be at play. After all, evolution means that life is constantly competing with itself, yet it also benefits from working together with itself.
Whether you feel survival of your DNA and culture are relevant, is up to you. But when entire groups exist that don’t feel like that, they tend to go extinct.