OK, let's look at that fireman from the other side--you and your new wife are in a burning building, choking on smoke, disoriented, trying to find each other and an exit within black clouds of smoke. Suddenly two firemen find you and pull you both to safety. Do you really care at that moment if they're drunks, wife-beaters, racists, and embezzling funds from the firemen's union? Does any of that really matter when they've just rescued you and the one you love?
Certainly not. But that's irrelevant because this thread was not posing the question "do you care about the moral purity of someone who may or may not save your life?," it was asking whether or not we're good or bad at our core. In support of the idea that we are good, you offered anecdotal examples of firemen braving harm to save people. My response is simply that this doesn't tell us whether or not they're otherwise good people, and they would hardly be surrogates for all of humanity even if they were.
Point being, people don't have to be perfect and good all the time--we're only human with all the weaknesses and temptations that entails.
This is exactly what I've been talking about
: "we're only human." You're saying precisely the two things I suggested that any defender of the "good" position must inevitably say: they must make excuses for our collective behavior by either pointing out how difficult it is to be good all the time, or by comparing people to other, worse people. Neither addresses the question being asked, though.
But based on what I've seen of people of all kinds in several countries, I still believe most people are basically good, that most will do the right thing when it gets right down to it, whether someone else witnesses it or not. Yeah it would be nice if good people were totally good, which would make it more likely bad people are totally bad, and that doesn't happen either. Yeah, people can do both good and bad, but I'm convinced most of us make a concious choice to do good most of the time. And maybe that's enough.
Depends on what it's supposed to be "enough" for. "Enough" to sympathize with, and sometimes enough to admire, perhaps. But not enough to be really good.
Another difference between us--I don't believe in original sin, that we are born basically flawed and have to struggle against our evil impulses all our lives. And my best argument for that are babies. From birth through their first 3-4 years, no baby is primarily bad, much less evil.
They're not really morally good, either. If anything, they're primarily self-interested. I don't blame them for this, but really, I have to imagine you know the obvious response to your argument: you certainly didn't let your children just grow up, did you, under the assumption that as long as you didn't teach them evil, they won't learn it? I'll bet you taught them right from wrong, because they simply wouldn't know it until you did. I'll bet you corrected them many times growing up when they let their own desires get in the way of what we all think of as upright behavior.
All that said, I'm not really concerned with the idea of "original sin." It brings too much theological baggage to the discussion, and I don't feel the case I'm making requires that you buy into it, anyway.
We differ on this, too. I think the only way we can address this issue is through anecdotes. I can't prove to you that some babies don't have an innate propensity to grow up and do evil. I can only recount what I've seen and learned from a variety of people.
Certainly the "only way we can address this issue" is through our own experiences. We are the only people we know the full circumstances of. Everything else involves large amounts of speculation. Anecdotes show us what is possible, not what is necessarily probable, and they certainly can't answer questions like this. I doubt you would pretend to know a person's core based on either the best or worst thing they've ever done, so it can hardly be used to answer whether or not anyone -- let alone all of us as a whole -- are innately good or bad.
As for putting ourselves first, that's not necessarily bad. Someone had to be the first to stand up and say slavery is wrong, the first to say segregation was wrong. Dr. King certainly was putting black people first, himself included, by fighting segregation, but I feel I benefitted from it, too. If I'm standing in front of you in a ticket line at the movie theater, I'm not going to feel bad because I got there first and have you jump ahead of me to make up for it. But I'm also not going to come up late and push you out of line so I can take your place, because that wouldn't be right and I choose not to do that.
Standing up to segregation is putting others first -- others who will benefit from the example of a Dr. King. I'm sure his life was a great struggle that was severely unpleasant for him at times. It cost him his life, for goodness' sake. He was most definitely not putting himself first.
That said, trying to find hypothetical examples that seem to fit under the umbrella of "putting ourselves first" but don't seem wrong is missing the point. The phrase refers to genuine selfishness, not any action which might benefit the person taking it.
Well, I've never met anyone who was good or bad to their core, have you? That's just not how it works.
No, I haven't, but that's only because the phrasing here has been subtly changed. There's a difference between "
to their core" and "
at their core." The former implies a thorough, pervasive badness. The latter just implies primary badness. And the latter is what was asked. Actually, the initial question was even more nuanced; it only asked which we had more of at our core, which is sensible, because everyone in the discussion seems to implicitly acknowledge that nobody is completely good or bad.
If we were all born good to the core, it would be easy to be good--that's all we can be. But there are temptations and injustices and all sorts of reasons out there to be bad. but most of us resist the worst of these temptations because we want to be good and we exercise our free will to do good more often than we do bad. And that's the biggest accomplishment, I think--we could be bad, but we chose not to. We conquer our temptations and do the right thing--most of the time.
But the fact that we have these temptations to conquer in the first place is what demonstrates our badness.
Between statements like this, and the earlier statements about firemen, I think I see one of the root causes of our disagreement. You seem to be taking the approach that
actions are the only things that can be really good or bad. Thus, if we think something terrible about someone, but have the good sense and decency not to say it, then we've done good through our restraint. But thinking it in the first place is what makes us bad. Being polite, or having some sense of social self-preservation, is not the same thing as being good. Real goodness and badness is about what we want as much as our actions.
I have to wonder if the law, and simple conditioning, has something to do with all this. We all live in the real world, and people think awful things so often that it's not plausible or useful for us to judge each other based on thought alone. And, legally, we obviously have little choice but to restrict consequence to action. But I wonder if these things haven't been internalized to the point at which we've fundamentally linked morality to action alone, and disregarded thought as inconsequential. In other words, we've confused legal necessity with moral reality. I suspect this is a cultural blind spot that exists now, but did not before.
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