Encourage Good
Thoughts in progress on people doing good, recognizing it, encouraging it.
Most people want to be good, and do good, even if/when they accidentally do good. Most people, when offered the opportunity to do good, will accept.
Thus if we "lower the barrier to entry for good behavior" (tweeted 2008-08-20), we encourage good, we effectively cause good.
Related: InterpretPositively.
positive feedback reinforcement
There is a lot of potential for recognizing people for accidental good, people feel good about doing good, and if they didn't think/know they were doing good, but later are recognized as such, it's like a retrospective boost.
Such positive feedback may make them remember/recognize what they accidentally did, and attempt to explicitly repeat it in the future, thus learning how to do more good.
Developing a habit of doing good is more important than any one act of doing good, and thus obviously whether or not a particular act of good was intentional or accidental.
positive sum game
It is nice to do good. When a person does good, it gives them hope and increases their sense of and self-worth, and most likely benefits the recipient(s) as well.
Thus it's a win-win positive sum game.
scaling good
By lowering the barrier to entry for good behavior in a distributed, decentralized way, we encourage distributed, decentralized good, which scales far better than individual acts or even individual encouragement of acts of good.
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