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Comment by dakiol | Hacker News Reader

You can be both good and bad. Like, it's not an impossibility.

Yeah, doing shitty things while “donating” a bunch of money to make your legacy look really good is a classic move throughout history.

These guys don’t want to be remembered for the awful behaviors they had in their personal and business life. They’re extremely conceited and concerned with their image.

"But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?".

Earning a tremendous amount of money and then amusing yourself by spending it on "charity" for the rest of your life doesn't make you a good person.

It's just one more method of buying good feelings and trying to buy good will while being in control of large numbers of people.

He wants to feel like he's doing good and using money to give him that feeling.

It's like you're allergic to subtlety. Yes, saving untold numbers of children from malaria is a good thing. You can do bad things and good things and while everyone else is arguing about morality, the thing that matters is the end effect. Did Bill Gate's time on earth result in a better world when he's gone or a worse one? I won't pretend to know enough about his life to answer that, but he has prevented a lot of really, really brutal suffering.

Nope. I'm not weighing "good deeds" that amount to his entertainment against the aggressive selfish business destroying greed that got him the money to spend and everything else he's clearly done in his personal life, shrugging my shoulders, and saying "who knows! maybe him doing all this is all for the best"

I'd rather have better men had that money to spend and his victims both personal and business leave him penniless and alone at the end.

"A good act does not wash out the bad, nor the bad the good, each should have its own reward"

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