In the first season of The X-Files, Dana Scully accompanies her former FBI Academy teacher, Jack Willis, to an attempted bank robbery. One of the robbers shoots Willis and Scully shoots the robber, who dies. After a near-death experience in the hospital, Willis wakes up, but he has changed. He’s dark, evil. His body has been possessed by the bank robber, who will try to reunite with his lover and seek revenge on whoever tipped off the FBI.
If we believe that deep down, we’re morally good, does it push us to act accordingly? In a paper published in this month, Matt Stichter, a moral philosopher at Washington State University, brought up some potential ethical downsides of people walking around with the belief that they have a morally good true self.
“Initially my reaction was, ‘Oh wow, this is great. People inherently care about morality as core to their identity,’” Stitcher said ”But the more I started to think about it, the more it started to worry me.”