I don't that "good" exists outside of something that is important to humans. And for Goodness to be something that actually matters to humans, it needs to have a definition that is actually useful.
Sure, you can find a selfish motive for every "good" thing you do, even if that motive is "to make yourself feel better." But I think if the only reason you do something Good is to feel like a Good person... honestly, that's good enough for me.(As far as motivation goes anyway. To be an EFFECTIVE good person (i.e. "good at being good") you need to apply some intelligence to make sure you're actually helping people.
Every living person has the potential to do a lot more than they actually do. If you're judging goodness on an absolute scale, of course everyone fails to save thousands of lives. And yeah, you can think of that as "you are responsible for killing thousands of people." But that's not an actually healthy way to live. The reason most people aren't Gandhi is because being Gandhi is hard, and rewarding people for whatever good they DO accomplish is more effective at creating a wholesome world than punishing people who failed to save an additional 10 lives on any given day. I don't have solid evidence to back this up, but I'm pretty confident that if everyone measured goodness on an absolute scale, LESS good would get accomplished, not more. (Though if someone could cite studies regarding that assertion, I'd be appreciative).
Update: Discussion has moved on to a new thread.
After 61 chapters of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and 5 discussion threads with over 500 comments each, HPMOR discussion has graduated from the main page and moved into the Less Wrong discussion section (which seems like a more appropriate location). You can post all of your insights, speculation, and, well, discussion about Eliezer Yudkowsky's Harry Potter fanfic here.
Previous threads are available under the harry_potter tag on the main page (or: one, two, three, four, five); this and future threads will be found under the discussion section tag (since there is a separate tag system for the discussion section). See also the author page for (almost) all things HPMOR, and AdeleneDawner's Author's Notes archive for one thing that the author page is missing.
As a reminder, it's useful to indicate at the start of your comment which chapter you are commenting on. Time passes but your comment stays the same.
Spoiler Warning: this thread is full of spoilers. With few exceptions, spoilers for MOR and canon are fair game to post, without warning or rot13. More specifically: