There is a story of old Chinese man who was living in a farm and had a son. One day, his son got terribly injured, so he couldn’t help his father with farming for a long time. Whole village came to the old mans house to expressed their compassion. “It is so bad what happened. How would you handle farming just by your own?” to which he just replied “We will see.”
Couple of weeks later the Chinese military came, to recruit this young man to military because of emerging conflict. When they saw his injury, they left the young man home.
Now, was it bad that young man got injured? Well, when it happened it probably was and couple of weeks later, it wasn’t. Does it mean, that this event was actually good and also bad? Well, maybe. I leave the answering the question for you :-)
What I’m trying to say here, is that it really depends on your perspective while looking at the particular event. There is probably not a way, how we can objectively say, if some event was good or bad. We would need to have an access to all possible futures, to actually investigate all the positive and negative outcomes of particular event.
Was creation of atomic bomb a bad thing? Well, it killed 100k — 200k people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but it also probably prevented the future global conflict. If we have one, it will be the last one. Everybody is aware of this reality, hence the reason why every nation would think twice to start the global conflict. With high probability it would be the end also for the nation which started conflict at the first place.
Anyway, my point wasn’t to open turbulent discussion on ethics behind creating atomic bomb, rather than application of this framework in everyday life.
You will go through some difficult times throughout the life. You might loose a job. Or find out that your partner is cheating on you. Those are some hard situations. Are you aware of a possibility, that there might be something better waiting for you around the corner?
We simply do not know enough.
I am not going to tell you that it is good thing that you loose that job. Neither that it is bad. It may be good, it may be bad. It may be both. I do not know. Do you?
Thank you for reading.