I for one absolutely distrust self-styled altruistic do-gooder organizations, with good historical reasons, and always will. One fundamental problem is their d

I for one absolutely distrust self-styled altruistic do-gooder organizations, with good historical reasons, and always will. One fundamental problem is their desire to project that image of 'goodness', which leads to their own internal corruption, as they don't deal with internal problems transparently, because exposure of such corruption tarnishes their image, and protecting that image then becomes their central goal. The Catholic Church is a controversial example (as there are many Catholics, mostly nice decent people), with its legacy of child abuse of many forms. Exposure of this activity, conducted largely by individuals within the Church without official Church sanction, would clearly tarnish the image of this altruistic organization, so the leadership covered it up, thereby allowing the abuse to persist. Image rapidly becomes more important than substance. Secondly, the members of such organizations, convinced of their moral rightness, tend to seek to seize political power in order to enforce their vision of goodness on the overall human population. Many just hop on the bandwagon because they see it as a route to wealth and power - as long as they sing the song of moral purity, they can become rich and influential, and live lives of luxury and pleasure. Thirdly, their 'moral stance' is typically influenced by low-quality information. The author mentions the Nazis as an extreme example, but they had indeed absorbed fraudulent claims of genetic superiority of ill-defined racial groups, and so to them ethnic cleansing and genocide were the responsible thing to do, for the long-term health of the Aryan people. The author believes they knew what they were doing was morally wrong, but I doubt this - at most, they'd have called it a short-term necessary evil for the long-term greater good. So, what's the right thing to do? My view is, accurate information should be the basis of all decision making, and the only way humans have found to come up with accurate information (about things like risks of global warming, causes of disease, etc.) is the rational scientific process, so that's what we should be spending our time and energy on developing, more than anything else. Others may disagree and wish to devote themselves to the creation of art, literature, music, architecture, etc. and that's fine too. Maybe they want to sit around and do nothing, like monks in a monastery. That doesn't bother me either, as long as they're not trying to control society in the name of their moral purity. As far as moral behavior, this great quandry has the simple solution that you should simply treat others with the same consideration and respect that you'd like them to treat you with, assuming you're not some kind of masochist who craves abuse, right?