Are people fundamentally good or not?

[Tarvos]

I don't know, can you tell me if it is?

 

[1. Luftballon]

Well, good is subjective, and subjection probably isn't fundamental, and that the concept of good needs derivation basically says 'I'm not fundamental!'.

 

[Tarvos]

You answered your own question there.

 

[1. Luftballon]

so is it even possible to answer affirmatively to the topic question without sounding stupid?

 

[Tarvos]

pretty sure you'd need to study like advanced philosophy to come up with something else than a useless one-liner

 

[FluffyGryphon]

*tl;dr the entire thread* People are naturally opportunists. They pick the route that they feel will get them ahead.

 

[Fuzzlechan]

OMG. This reminds me of a question that I had to answer for a Lord of the Flies project in English last year. I believe that all humans are fundamentally good. It's hard to explain this without just quoting my answer, so I'm just going to post what I wrote.

#10: ‘Golding said, “Man is born evil and is destined to remain evil.” Do you think that it is true that human beings are inherently evil? Give an example from the novel.’

No, I don’t think that human beings are inherently evil. Every person is a good person, but everyone makes mistakes. In some cases their mistakes define them as evil, but that doesn’t mean that they truly are. Take Jack, for example. His actions of killing Simon and Piggy are considered evil, but he as a person isn’t. In his case, being on the island for so long probably drove him partially insane, and made him capable of doing things like that. He made a mistake that was against the law, but he’s not evil because of it. Human beings in inherently good, because if we weren’t, we would never do good things. To be truly evil is to only do wrong, to know it, and to not care. That’s why human beings aren’t evil.

Note quite the same thing, but it has the same meaning. With handy examples from a book!

 

[Scyther]

Do any of us really know the definition of good or evil? They're opinions; therefore you can't really be either.

 

[Music Dragon]

OMG. This reminds me of a question that I had to answer for a Lord of the Flies project in English last year. I believe that all humans are fundamentally good. It's hard to explain this without just quoting my answer, so I'm just going to post what I wrote.



Note quite the same thing, but it has the same meaning. With handy examples from a book!

But if being evil is "to only do wrong", shouldn't being good be to only do right?

 

[Tarvos]

Only if good is the exact antithesis of evil.

 

[Loco Mocho]

Cold is the absence of hot
So IMO Evil is the absence of good in that case people are initialy evil.

 

[GameFreakerZero]

Cold is the absence of hot
So IMO Evil is the absence of good in that case people are initialy evil.

But then what do you define as goodness?

Being morally sound? Morals dart around all over the place among societies and individuals. Due to this it's impossible to say somebody's evil because it's very likely that they believe they're completely in the right.

Abiding to laws? In this case people aren't overall evil as the majority of people don't break the law, or at least not on a major enough scale to be labelled "evil".

And also this brings up the question of what happens when you do a "bad" thing. Does this count as a subtraction to the amount of goodness you've accumulated? Can you go into minus numbers and if so why would the default, 0 presumably, be labelled 'evil' when it's more 'morally neutral' as there's presumably infinite good and bad on either side of it?

 

[ultraviolet]

Cold is the absence of hot
So IMO Evil is the absence of good in that case people are initialy evil.

Cold is not 'the absence of hot'. What you call hot and cold are relative to your temperature and the air temperature around you. Have you ever done that experiment where you put two hands under warm water, then put one in hot water and one in cold? Try it.Temperature (iirc) is measured by the motion of particles within a substance at a molecular level.

Also it's been established already in the thread that 'good' and 'evil' are relative to each other, to the person who is judging between them and the situation. What is 'good' also changes - people's values change over time, society's values change (even religious morals change over time).
If Evil is the absence of 'good', what is good? 'Good' compared to what? To murder? To not eating healthy? To not going to church? Similarly, what is 'evil'?

 

[Zuu]

If I've posted here, I'm taking back whatever I said.

I don't really believe in morality anymore, if that makes sense. I don't really judge things as "good" or "evil" without difficulty.

So it's hard to say. But I'm a misanthrope, so you probably can guess as to how I feel about this question.

 

[glitchedgamer]

People, by instinct, do what they need to do to survive, which boils down to doing what they think would benefit them the most, which can be seen as "evil". Of course, this depends on what the individual considers necessary to survive. Personally, I think people aren't good or evil. They just do what they think is best for them.

 

[Tarvos]

I do judge morality but not on any absolute scale. I judge by circumstances and personal value systems.

 

[xkze]

yeah the question is kind of odd because the qualities of "good" and "bad" are human-invented concepts that vary with culture, so all societies have different definitions of them.

If the major world cultures ended up glorifying rape and demonizing lifelong partnerships, we would think of rape as 'good' and marriage as 'bad', which sounds entirely ridiculous to someone conditioned to believe the opposite.

I guess that means that my answer to the question is, neither. As has been said many times in this thread, we are opportunists by nature. Whether or not that's "good" is arguable.

 

[Loco Mocho]

Forget what i said
Pepole are essentially animals to you atheists are animals that kill others evil? Unless your in a storybook no. Also are animals that dont mate for life evil? No. So who says good is even there? Same with evil. I think this is like time and race. We "inveted" time to measure a nonexistent force. Race now, is trickier but a couple of chormosomes diffrence, like hair color but we make a big deal over this like white man and black man are from diffrent planets. After all were 99% DNAlogicaly the same as chimpanzees. How does this tie into good or evil? Good and Evil arent real. Like santa claus.

 

[xkze]

You are correct, sir.

 

[fresh fruit for Adol]

People are inherently focused on themselves.

This is truth. It's why Facebook and Myspace, or just the general blog exists. No one can say they aren't guilty either.

While I'm gonna try not to say anything, in order to prevent myself from sounding like an ass, I'm gonna be lame, and quote a line from a game, which I also believe to be true:

The only way for evil to triumph, is for good men to do nothing.

But this also raises the question; what does it really mean for someone to be "good", or "evil"?