Niceness as a prerequisite to morality

Far too often, people like to get hung up on the minutiae and the edge cases of moral conundrums. Stuff that is obviously important but doesn’t apply to morality in the real world in 99.9% of the cases. To be fair, the remaining 0.1% of the cases do come up fairly often when it comes to an equitable distribution of scarce resources which policy makers grapple with fairly often. But for the rest of us, acting nice, to whatever we personally define nice to be will get us through most of life’s decisions. Of course, the big ones like what to do for a living, and which charity to donate to, is something people will have to think about but by-and-large, the first necessary step to any conversation about morality is the acknowledgement that Nicety is a virtue and not a vice.

The problem is that all but a small minority disagree with this fundamental principle. They would only very rarely come out and say so outright (although that is becoming more common in the recent times), but the prevailing vibe that being nice is a suckers game, the blatant everyday hypocrisy, stuff that a grade schooler could tell is Wrong, stuff that no moral philosophy could ever justify is said and done by normal people day after day. It’s not possible to use arguments for morality or ethics against these people because they haven’t accepted the fundamental prerequisite, namely that being good is good, and being bad is bad.

It seems extremely salient these days with the continuous attacks against Niceness itself, where being blatantly, unapologetically, capital E Evil is considered admirable, let alone defensible. To be clear, I don’t have any real solution to this issue. I’ll leave that to folks smarter than me. But it seems like the most pressing moral issue is the erosion of trust in the concept of niceness itself which would render any argument grounded in that notion (which is basically all arguments) untenable.