Inherently Good or Evil?

I am wondering if you think that people are at the core good or evil?
This is probly a tough one to answer strait away. Perhaps we are evil in the fact that we would do just about anything in the name of selfpreservation and that we participate in evil actions through apathy and ignorance. But on the good side people will go to great ends to help others in times of crisis. Sometimes the little things shine light on our goodness as well like holding doors open for others etc.

But in my opinion I feel people are evil and that we are slaves to our primal instincts. When I think of the horrid things that go on in the world that we do nothing to stop or allow to continue by ignorance and inaction I have to beleive that we are good when it is easy.

What do you think? are we good or evil?

All governments are evil!!
Most ordinary powerless people are Good =)
The again, could depend on where you live.....
<<<<<<-----Australia

The vast majority of people are evil. Especially us in the develloped countries, we are obscenely rich and yet we give only crumbs to the starving poor. We prove everyday by our inaction that we are evil.
Most of the world however, does not have the money and means to do good, and so we don't *know* if they are evil or not. However, I'm confident that if the poor and rich traded places, the ex-poor would be no better then we are.

Why are we evil? Mainly because our behaviour is largely programmed in our genes, genes which were *made* for savanah roaming hunter-gatherers. That's why we are so apathetic to starving 3rd Worlders, we are creatures of visuals and experience. We might be shocked and horrified at finding a frozen beggar on the street, but we'll only give weak sympathy if we hear about 3000 dead bosnians on the news.

The reason we are apathetic to evil is not our fault, its genetic. So ultimately, most of us are evil, but its not our fault.

dumbteen,
genetic programming...u should expand on that thought.
let me set u up:

natural abortion - happens in the case of "bad programming" u could say, right.
Now say a certain species had some bad "genetic programming". Providing the universe works in uniform, then according to the natural process what should happen?

There is one notion that most of these responses presupose which is the existence of morality. Acts that occur in the world do not come w/ moral strings attached they are simply acts. People perscribe morality to those acts which they believe defines good or evil. Morality is a prison which urges you to behave in a certain way that you cannot be sure is necessarily the correct way to behave (presupposing there is a 'correct' way to behave at all). Morality as used by 'civilized' people assumes that the 'natural' or uncivilized state of man is immoral which is absurd! Therefore life in general must be immoral. And if life is immoral then by a 'civilized' mans laws, life in general should be locked up, destroyed, or controlled in some fashion, which is also absurd.

Its not Not Absurd to control life, thats what governments are for...
Grrrrr....Governments.....

...I suppose both you and the warrior are right Decius, however I guess I didn't state my point as clearly as I would have liked and that is that while morality is prescribed to man it presupposes, that life without man's existence, control, government, morals is as Thomas Hobbes called it "Nasty, Brutish, and Short." Time for a thought experiment! I hope people start to enjoy these...

Ok, you are the only person that exists and you are viewing the world without the presense of man. Where are you? By that I mean where are you viewing the world from? Are you in the world? Looking down from above? How do you view the world in its 'primative,' untamed form?

Answering this for me will help define what I'm saying a little better I hope...

BTW Decius does the quick chat work in this forum? The button is grayed out for me...

Hello all-very interesting conversation going on here and very solid points.
To reinforce(or at least dwell on) the subject of people "getting evil"through life's experiences-I'll let you all in on something which has been going on inside my head lately.
I've been trying to contact a bud who's now in the military and think I've found his addy and am just about to contact him.He was abused as a boy by his own mom and family so my family took him in part time,fed him well and so forth-things his own family wouldnt do.Lost contact with him through life's natural happenings and its been 14 years of no communication.He moved to live in with his dad who was a sargeant in the army.I was the closest to him-and remember him as such a sentimental boy that its almost unbelievable to believe he's now a soldier-much less a sargeant in the armed forces.Anyways-to make a long story short-my main fear in communicating with him now is that since he's in the army and I've heard stories(dunno if they're true)of the army being so mean-spirited,I fear he'll just send me and my family to hell after all we cared for him and still do.
Which leads my to the main concern....do you think people really change or do they remain essentially the same over the years only modifying themselves to adapt to change?
I'm the type of person who doesnt want to believe most people are evil even though most things sure point in that direction.lol
anyways nice to see this board online and I hope I can contribute more in the future.Best wishes to all.

Hi billyboy,
I can sympathize with you, a little bit anyway. I, too, had a friend that I had grown up with. He went into the airforce and became apart of the military police. We did everything together, and although it hasn't been 14 years since we talked (more like 6) I would venture to say that his is close to his old self.

I guess that I don't really consider people inherently evil. (and just a note, I think that there have been psychological studies that indicate that people tend to keep the same personality over the years, average people anyway.) I do think that whenever you really meet somebody and it is hard to get along with this person, that it is really a matter of having different world views. I also think that what gets construed as "evil" tends to indicate that people are really just insecure and defensive. So if you did make contact with your friend and things didn't go the way you planned, I wouldn't jump to say that he has been or turned evil. There just might be some issues underneath the surface that need to be worked out.

I used to work on an inpatient psychiatric unit. I have dealt with some pretty tough customers, and in no case would I ever say that I met a person that was evil. One of my professors in graduate school says that people with with Paranoid Personality disorder can come of as real A-holes, but deep down there is a lot of hurt. Personally, I approach most people as if they are lurking waters. Easy to read on top, but there is probably a whole world of things happening underneath the surface. To say that anyone is inherently evil or good, to me, implies that whoever is giving the label is just looking for a quick way to categorize a person.

However, I do think that people can change. Whether it is towards the darkside or the light side is not something I concern myself with. When people change, I think it indicates that they have learned a cognitive style that allows them to adapt to the world. If it is a style that is hard to deal with, I am guessing that they have been put off or hurt or they are defensive in order to prevent being hurt or taken advantage of.

So I applaud your mindset that thinks that people aren't evil even when everything seems to point that way.

nice post jali(and very refreshing).....didnt know about the scientific studies on personality.sounds interesting.
I think a lot of this does have to do with us being too busy judging people instead of getting on with our lives.
Good or bad it doesnt matter that much because we really are a mix.lol
As you point out we do things to adapt and deal with a life situation-we are built to improvise.
thx for the insight.

I think Jali sufficiently answered Billyboy so I'm not going to add. However I would like to take into account that the existence of good and evil outside of the human mind is purely fictitious. I think good and evil stem from events that occurred that man perceived as either aid or hindrance to his life.

For example, a man is robbed. He sees that this is a hindrance or a "set back" to his life since he lost money that he earned so he could buy food to eat and continue living. He wants to stop this hindrance so he gives it a label, and that label is "evil/wrong.' He then determines that this evil is something that should not be done with out compensation and so he forms laws to protect himself from being robbed.

I wanted to give an example about the separation of the idea and the event because I think it is an unnatural and unnecessary way to define things in this manner. Not to mention confusing to most people. For example, you would not say a lion that 'steals' another lion's kill is evil or wrong.

I guess what I would say is that the smarter of the two men (the thief and the man being robbed) would be the thief if he gets away with the crime because he increased his "aid" to living. Where as the man who was robbed and relies on laws becomes complacent or even decadent because he cannot compete with the thief. Furthermore, the man who was robbed endlessly creates laws to control what he cannot. Notice that people are still committing crimes today and the jails are overflowing. What is the problem?

It would seem to me that the man who was robbed is just slowing the process of a NATURAL cleansing of his species by enacting laws and by giving people and events labels such as good and evil. This may sound barbaric but if you think about the idea of the survival of the fittest or most intelligent, I think, it is applicable. I want to make note that there is an emphasis on 'natural' or as done by nature, because I think there is a difference between the ideas of natural cleansing and, for example, ethnic cleansing.

rschulz-I think what you say is 100%true.
we percieve and then think our perceptions are true without oftentimes seeing the other side of the coin.We give labels and judge to our convenience.
I think the main point in your post has been for a long time the main theme of profesional wrestling.There-the booker tries very hard not to stray from the midway point of a character.
"Is he really good or evil"should be the question on everybody's mind as the action unfolds.Do not label-the booker seems to be saying-interpret.
It's as if we were going to label ourselves.Kinda hard isn't it?
When I look back at my life I can honestly say there are things I did that were downright evil but some as I interpret them where quite good.Trouble is some of my"evil"actually caused others good and some of my "good"caused harm upon others.So I understand exactly where you're coming from.

yea... i think people are inherently "good" and become "evil" or gain "evil" tendencies once they grow older and begin learning about the world around them. i sorta think that even "evil" people are inherently "good" but somewhere down the line have obtained a twisted outlook on life and so they do bad things. also chemical imbalances are bound to play a part in many situations. a person may not be able to help themselves and yet still have the desire to be "good" ya know?

Let me answer your question with another question. There are Three sailors(Bailey, Daniel,and Robert) on a ship and the ship wrecked. One sailor Bailey also a doctor estimated that they could survive out at sea for 25 days without food, as long as they rationed there remaining water. On the 23rd day ALL of the sailors decided to draw straws to see which one should be killed and eaten, since they felt there was going to be anyway of them being rescued any time soon. THEY ALL AGREED TO THE DRAWING OF THE STRAWS. Daniel was drew the shortest straw he decided no to consent to his own death. Bailey and Robert decided to kill him any way and eat him. TWO DAYS LATER BAILEY AND ROBERT WERE RESCUED. SO IS THE HUMAN MIND INHERENTLY EVIL OR INSTINCTUALLY EVIL .

"INHERENTLY EVIL OR INSTINCTUALLY "

Those words mean basically the same thing so I do not understand your differentiation?

My question is how can someone who is inherently good do something evil? I think the confusion comes in because people misunderstand what evil is. Evil is not a thing - like goodness is - evil is the corruption or lack of a thing - namely goodness. If humans are capable of evil -as we all know we are - then we must be intrinsically or inherently evil - it must be a basic aspect of our nature.

Another way to examine this is by thinking of goodness as a perfectly straight line and evil as any point below that line. The human line would be a wave going up and down - even if it reached that line (which I doubt it ever truly does) it would not be perfectly straight but consisting generally below it.