Human Nature

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Human Nature: Good or Evil?
48.15%
13 votes
Evil
51.85%
14 votes
Good
27 votes. You may not vote on this poll




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Some disciplined people kill a lot.
the military counts on this very thing.
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. . . we're more bad than good. And I don't think it's close. I think the only way we can look at ourselves as good is if we use all sorts of common excuses wherein we compare ourselves to others, which isn't a useful comparison if we're all pretty bad to begin with.
Now this is actually sort of funny to me--I mean, I've personally seen young children poisoned, beatened, stabbed, and burned by their mothers. I saw a woman's body split open from her pelvic bone to her chin with a machete. I've seen people who killed themsleves and killed others, blood-soaked floors and beds and cars, brains lying in the street. I've smelled burned and rotted flesh, and I know the smell of blood. I've seen rape victims of both sexes and all ages. I've seen people get probation for what I consider major crimes and people who likely were punished more than they really deserved because they couldn't afford a decent lawyer. I've had run-ins with communists, fascists, Ku Klux Klanners, Black Panthers, and outlaw motorcyclists. I've encountered more than one mass murderer. I've associated with drug dealers and prostitutes. I've seen phony preachers, crooked politicians, and cheats of all kinds. In short, I've seen virtually every kind of criminal and the aftermath of every sort of crime out there.

And after 67 years of witnessing life on earth, I still have the highest possible opinion of people as a whole, because most of the people on this earth are good; most of the people on this earth are more likely to help than to hurt others; most people are doing the best they can and trying to support their families. Most honor their parents and love their children, and I suspect most people around the world are truer to their spouses and significant others than I've ever been.

I just don't understand how anyone can see only the bad in this world. For every killer I've ever seen, I've seen dozens of firemen run into burning buildings and policemen risk their lives to protect others, and soldiers who have stood guard on the frontiers of freedom, and politicians with principles who have tried to make things better.

I was born in the South at a time when segregation and racial intolerance was deeply ingrained in my society at large. I grew up not knowing there was any other designation for blacks than the N-word. Hell, I didn't even know for years that it was wrong or insulting to another race. I grew up in a society where toilets and drinking fountains were labeled white and colored. I've seen signs that said, "N-----, don't let sundown catch you in Vidor." I've seen Hispanic workers who were cheated and abused and called "greaser."

But most of all--most important to me--I've seen things change, people change. I've seen my kids playing in their own neighborhoods with other kids who are black and Hispanic and Vietnamese. Those same kids have been in my house, kids of nationalities and color who my paternal grandfather would not have allowed in his. I've seen mothers working with diseased and brain-damaged children to accomplish small victories that will make their children's lives better. I've seen children with skeleton forms from polio lying in iron lungs and young men and women who are quadraplegics who still laugh and have ambitions and love life despite their terrible handicaps.

Science is doing more to help and heal people than at any time in our whole history. More important, people are doing more to help and heal others. We're communicating more and better today and learning more about our similarities rather than just our differences. I know this is a better world today because I've watched it improving for 67 years, and I'm sure it will be better in the future as we become better and move beyond old fears and hatreds.

Most of all, I know there are more good people than there are bad, more people wanting to do the fair and the right thing than trample their neighbor under. I've seen people rise above themselves and above their setbacks, the triumph of the human will and of the human spirit. And I believe in that totally.



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I voted evil because of this one ethics philosophy I forgot the name of but it had to deal with people doing things only for themselves, even when they trick themselves into thinking they do something for someone else.
I am reading Literature and Evil by Georges Bataille and in it the argument runs counter to what you have stated. Good is that which preserves life and Evil is the destructive force. Selfishness can be life-preserving and can be a rational response to danger. Of course people are irrational and drawn to danger as well as to what is safe and therefore Good. So where do I stand...on my head naturally.

Seriously, I vote for Good but only because I like to see Good triumph. Go Team Good!
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see, it's that word "evil" that i seem to be hung up on. having bad in you doesn't mean that you have evil in you. does it? isn't evil on a whole different level than that?
I've seen at least three really evil people in my life--not just mean or often bad, but honest to god truly evil who were to the general population like wolves among sheep. If you ever see a truly evil person, you'll never forget it because they'll make your blood run cold. But those people are as rare or perhaps more so than the "saintly" good.

The thing is we all have free will and we make choices constantly of whether to try to help those we encounter in life or to hurt them. Most of us choose to do good, and I don't think it's simply out of fear of punishment for being bad. Think of it--when you do just a simple kind act for someone, don't you feel good about yourself? And when you do someone a wrong--even if no one else knows it--don't you feel disappointed in yourself that you would be so petty? I think most of us do good most of the time because it makes us feel right and good about ourselves. And for most of us, that feeling is much better than any advantage we could get by doing something to harm another person.



I am reading Literature and Evil by Georges Bataille and in it the argument runs counter to what you have stated. Good is that which preserves life and Evil is the destructive force. Selfishness can be life-preserving and can be a rational response to danger. Of course people are irrational and drawn to danger as well as to what is safe and therefore Good. So where do I stand...on my head naturally.

Seriously, I vote for Good but only because I like to see Good triumph. Go Team Good!
Wasn't Bataille a Marxist? Besides that, his views come off very un-french-like, or perhaps the surrealists have had too much of an impact



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Wasn't Bataille a Marxist? Besides that, his views come off very un-french-like, or perhaps the surrealists have had too much of an impact
I don't know if he was a Marxist or not but I can definitely see the influence of the Surrealists and psychology in his criticism. Didn't the French avant-garde embrace Marxism in the main?



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Some disciplined people kill a lot. Maybe not as many as "undisciplined" people, but percentagewise, I think that many people die in a war where the people in charge came up through a regimen of discipline.
Yea, your point would be? Discipline is fundamental in creating docile individuals, especially soldiers. If you look around at society, you will see that discipline has a very large role in creating citizens. It's just scary to think about.

And as a teacher, your position is a part of that very power relation. You are a piece of the very machine that's creating docile individuals!
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"This is that human freedom, which all boast that they possess, and which consists solely in the fact, that men are conscious of their own desire, but are ignorant of the causes whereby that desire has been determined." -Baruch Spinoza



whelp. i finally voted. and now we're tied again.
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I can't believe it's still tied. 11 to 11!

By the way, I voted for EVIL.



I voted evil because of this one ethics philosophy I forgot the name of but it had to deal with people doing things only for themselves, even when they trick themselves into thinking they do something for someone else.
There are other philosophies--probably most of them--that go the other way. Besides, pursuing one's own best interest is not evil, especially if you let others pursue theirs. That's basically is what democracy is all about--the majority deciding what is best for them without trampling over the minority in the process. There's got to be a sense of compromise, a recognition that everything can't always go your way.



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Good is that which preserves life and Evil is the destructive force. Selfishness can be life-preserving and can be a rational response to danger.
Sounds essentially like utilitarianism reworked or regeneralized in terms of "preservation". While preservation works in being less ambiguous than its emotional cousins, "happiness" and "pleasure", it clearly fails to interpret the many ethical/moral decisions we are forced to make daily that do not pertain in the least bit to life or death. While it can be argued that any decision can eventually be traced to a "location" of life or death, e.g. the purchase of an individual pair of sneakers leading to the death of an Asian sweatshop worker, the final ethical conclusion of these greater removed sorts of action must ultimately strike the observer and the subject as some kind of reductio ad absurdum. I think the most obvious location of major ethical dilemmas seeming to bear no relation to life or death are those of the romantic or sexual nature. Will cheating on your wife lead to her death? In some cases, it surely might, but what about in the cases where it doesn't? Isn't her emotional suffering enough to render your act unethical? And here I am purposely ignoring any sort of religious commandment of fidelity. All kinds of suffering occurs without any bearing on moral law. Are we to say that as long as this suffering does not result in death, it's causes are to be grouped within the good? Unless the label of the good is relegated purely for an explicit act of "preservation", at which point, Bataille's notion is extremely weak in that it glosses over what many would consider important in their lives. Thus, I prefer to relate the good and the bad explicitly to the human emotions of happiness, pleasure, pain, suffering, and the like.

I don't know if he was a Marxist or not but I can definitely see the influence of the Surrealists and psychology in his criticism. Didn't the French avant-garde embrace Marxism in the main?
Don't know about avant garde but it certainly has its place in its New Wave cinema. Historically, the French as a people have been somewhat more Marxist than even Marx himself. I'm actually not sure why Bataille's Marxism was even brought up. It seemed almost like some kind of retort as if Marxism is irreconcilable with the good? What's going on here?
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I just don't understand how anyone can see only the bad in this world. For every killer I've ever seen, I've seen dozens of firemen run into burning buildings and policemen risk their lives to protect others, and soldiers who have stood guard on the frontiers of freedom, and politicians with principles who have tried to make things better.
I'm not sure if this is addressed to any one in particular, because I think almost everyone here has shown that they see both good and bad in people. I think every reasonable person has to acknowledge that humanity is capable of beautiful and terrible things.

I think I see why I disagree with you, however. You see a fireman run into a burning building and think he is therefore a "good" person. But that's a snippet of his life. He could be a drunk, an abusive father, or just cold and unloving. He could take advantage of his friends. He could put people down to make himself feel better. He could do that every day for a decade. Is all this wiped out by saving someone's life? Is goodness a points system wherein such an act is a counterweight to all the little things we do at the expense of others?

I don't think that's how morality works. The question is about US, and what we are at our core. That's different from the the effects of our actions. Morally speaking, though the effects of saving someone are momentous, it may say a lot less about us than the things we choose day in and day out. And you certainly can't judge a life on such a good deed, just as most of us would agree you can't judge a life by its worst failure, either.

But most of all--most important to me--I've seen things change, people change. I've seen my kids playing in their own neighborhoods with other kids who are black and Hispanic and Vietnamese. Those same kids have been in my house, kids of nationalities and color who my paternal grandfather would not have allowed in his. I've seen mothers working with diseased and brain-damaged children to accomplish small victories that will make their children's lives better. I've seen children with skeleton forms from polio lying in iron lungs and young men and women who are quadraplegics who still laugh and have ambitions and love life despite their terrible handicaps.
People can, indeed, change, and it can be a marvelous thing. But the fact that they need to change to begin with underscores how bad they (we) are. If someone thinks ill of another person, but holds their tongue, that's better, but it sure isn't good. That we change and restrain ourselves at all is fantastic, but the fact that we so often have to is the most relevant thing.

I don't think this is the kind of question that can be answered with anecdotes, no matter how many of them we may have amassed in either direction. The only life we can judge thoroughly with full knowledge of circumstance is our own, and I think all of us, if we're honest with ourselves, will be pretty staggered with the number of times we've put ourselves first.

Most of all, I know there are more good people than there are bad, more people wanting to do the fair and the right thing than trample their neighbor under. I've seen people rise above themselves and above their setbacks, the triumph of the human will and of the human spirit. And I believe in that totally.
Wanting to do the fair and right thing, and rising about setbacks, is a far cry from being good at our core. Wanting to do right does not make us good. If anything, the fact that we have to want to do right so strongly in order to do it underscores how much badness we have to overcome.

Triumphing over our own flaws is a beautiful thing, but it doesn't change the fact that we have those flaws, and they are as manifold as they are numerous.



There are other philosophies--probably most of them--that go the other way. Besides, pursuing one's own best interest is not evil, especially if you let others pursue theirs. That's basically is what democracy is all about--the majority deciding what is best for them without trampling over the minority in the process. There's got to be a sense of compromise, a recognition that everything can't always go your way.
I think this confuses what's best for what's good. Things like capitalism and democracy are good because they're the best systems we have, but only because they account for our flaws and work best with human nature. But that's different from being objectively good. Better systems might be possible if we were better to begin with.

There's also a false dichotomy between "good" and "evil" here. You say pursuing one's own best interest is "not evil." But that's not quite the same thing as saying it's good, is it? It may be inevitable, or even necessary, but how can it be good when we all admire people who work more for the interests of others? If those things are good, then not doing them is bad. Whether or not you want to assign the word "evil" to it depends on whether or not you reserve the word only for atrocities (which I think is one of the reasons the vote is split, by the way), but it's definitely not good.



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Yoda, you're basically saying being imperfect and selfish makes us bad people, aren't you?

i don't really see being selfish as being a bad person, really. is that another way of saying in an ideal world, everyone would put everyone else before themselves, and we'd all live our lives as passive doormats?



Yoda, you're basically saying being imperfect and selfish makes us bad people, aren't you?
"Imperfect" seems to imply that we just fall a bit short, and it's just about the nicest word we could possibly use to describe ourselves. I think we're so far removed from "perfect" that we have a warped view of what it would even mean to be so.

I'm saying that when people say we're "good," they're either comparing one person to another, or they're letting people off because being good is hard. It's always accompanied by a rationalization about how so-and-so is worse, or how it's very difficult to be good all the time. These are both true, but they're addressing a different question than the one that I think is being asked.

i don't really see being selfish as being a bad person, really. is that another way of saying in an ideal world, everyone would put everyone else before themselves, and we'd all live our lives as passive doormats?
Well, technically if we all lived that way, we wouldn't be doormats, because there'd be no bad people to walk all over us, anyway. And, of course, being good does not always mean being passive.

I think being selfish is a bad thing. But I think it's so inevitable, and so impossible to avoid, that it actually starts to feel okay because we feel built for it. It's such a part of how we think -- to look out for ourselves first -- that it almost as if it's a basic human need, like hunger, which makes it feel less like a choice, which in turn makes it feel sort of okay. To my mind, this is all just another reason why we're bad: most of the time, we don't even know it.



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i don't think anyone would disagree that people are far, far from perfection. however, a lot of flaws come from things that are out of our control. even someone who was perfectly angelic would still have flaws, wouldn't they? or are you just talking about being perfect in terms of being good?

i don't disagree that being selfish can be a bad thing, but taking care of yourself is a human need, though, therefore, it really is necessary to be selfish a lot of the time. you've got to take care of yourself before you can take care of others, and as humans, we really aren't able to function as well when we don't have the bare necessities of life. is this a flaw, too? maybe, but i don't think it's one we can "fix".



i don't disagree that being selfish can be a bad thing, but taking care of yourself is a human need, though, therefore, it really is necessary to be selfish a lot of the time. you've got to take care of yourself before you can take care of others, and as humans, we really aren't able to function as well when we don't have the bare necessities of life. is this a flaw, too? maybe, but i don't think it's one we can "fix".
Isn't there a concept of necessary flaws? Obviously, what you said is true, otherwise all the good people would be sickly and giving their money to alcoholics. Plus there's a difference between what others perceive you to do as good versus honest. To me, being honest is far more useful than being nice, even if most people won't ease up to it immediately. However, there's an infinite grey area here where being selfish for your own sake of mentality and just being selfish because you think you're doing it for your well being as well as how deep into other people's issues you wish to dive until you go from trying to help them to trying to change them



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I voted evil because of this one ethics philosophy I forgot the name of but it had to deal with people doing things only for themselves, even when they trick themselves into thinking they do something for someone else.
It isn't evil for people to do do things for themselves if they aren't hurting others by doing it. A philanthropist may be only interested in the attention he gets from the media, but the causes he gives his money to are helped, not hurt even if his motives are selfish.



I think the issue here is the definition of each term, then. Something outside of our control isn't really a flaw, and taking care of ourselves isn't really selfish if it's genuinely necessary. But of course, very little of what we do is strictly necessary for our own well-being (though we lump a lot of luxuries under this heading, I think), and very few of our mistakes are completely accounted for by our circumstances.

I really think we're so screwed up that we often lose the ability to even see it. It's not unlike addiction: the first step is admitting we have a problem. I'll let C.S. Lewis say it better: "When a man is getting worse, he understands his own badness less and less. A moderately bad man knows he is not very good: a thoroughly bad man thinks he is all right." It's also kind of like Socrates being the wisest man in the world precisely because he understood how little he actually knew.

When I think about what it would take to be good all the time, I can barely get my head around it. It feels so utterly impossible that I wonder if people dismiss it out of hand as unrealistic, and use something less than total goodness instead before they even begin to see how they stack up to it. It's like we're so broken that we can only consider one shattered piece at a time, and can't even fathom what it would mean to be whole again. If it all sounds pretty dramatic...well, I guess it's because I think that it is.

It's kind of amusing, though, because I probably sound like a nihilist, when I actually can't stand nihilism. I love the order we can bring out of so much chaos, and I'm a total softie when it comes to the awesome and beautiful things we can do. I have a lot of hope for humanity, but it's largely because I think there's a lot more than humanity out there.