are human beings inherently good or evil?

Question

what drives us to do what is considered right or wrong?
What qualifies as an act of evil?

Answer 1

Humans define what is good/evil, right/wrong etc. They are human concepts. Humans say to kill a fellow man is evil or wrong. But in nature this is just part of survival.
We try to place ourselves above animals even though we are just hairless apes.
If you took food and shelter away from a man, he will go to whatever means he can to gets those needs back. Some of the things he does for survival may be considered evil by society. But I don't put much stock in what society says, it is created by and to the advantage of rich people.

Humans are wild by nature. If you consider the survival tactics evil , then yes, we are born evil. We are born with a desire to breath, eat, drink, seek shelter and reproduce. We will do whatever is required to satisfy our needs.

Answer 2

Humans start off as a clean slate, so they do not know good or evil. They are only born with instincts. Good and evil will be learned as a product of their environment, parents, and who they socialize with. Then you have TV and other things. But I'd qualify an act of evil as knowing that an action has negative consequences, ignoring that, and committing the act anyway. This means a person is aware of right and wrong, and does wrong anyway.

To make the answer more complex, it all depends on your source of right and wrong. Right and wrong can be learned at home, at the church, in society, etc. Ultimately you choose what you believe is right and wrong, and that may not match up with what your Government or Church sees as such. Every organization has ulterior motives so they may be attempting to control someone instead of actually doing what is right. Hence the reason why revolutions happen.

If there was a universal right and wrong, that would make the answer much easier. Maybe the 10 Commandments. Usually in philosophy, though, there's never a right or wrong answer, only opinions with sound logic.
Anyway, those are my thoughts.

Answer 3

Humans are inherently complex. Capable of both good and evil, mercy and severity. Even a serial killer might stop to help a poor kitten down from a tree. The point is finding a moral center, but with the society being structured upon "virtues" such as greed, vanity, pride or what not.... its only but a miracle to find a person with clean fingers or should I say "hands".

Answer 4

The last question is the one that should be answered 1st. The utilitarian would say that an act can only be determined to be good or bad by the results of that act. Did that act serve the greater good or did it cause more suffering/pain than happiness/pleasure. Kant would say that it is not the result of the act but the intention of the act. Did the individual have good intentions when choosing to behave in a given way even though the end result was negative.

Answer 5

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Answer 6

The good in ontologically correlated to existence, while evil is correlated to privation or non-existence. Evil is a parasitic reality, and is entirely dependent on a good for its appearance in the world. (The metaphor of evil being much like a cavity in one's tooth is often used to describe the relationship of evil to good.) Inasmuch as a human nature exists, it is good, but prone to perform actions that are lacking in the good. The question is why?

There are many different proposals in this regard.

Plato thought that what directed us to choose an evil rather than a good had more to do with our knowledge (or lack thereof) than anything else. Aristotle saw virtue or vice as something that we have habituated toward, and we learn these habits largely as a result of mimesis or imitation of the behaviors we see in others. Augustine identifies the proclivity to choose that which is wicked as inherent in not just our intellect, but in our very nature.

An act of evil is that which willfully or intentionally rejects the good.

Answer 7

I don't find this a useful or productive way of looking at things.

Obviously, people can do good things, neutral things, or bad things -- and we do. All of us do all of those things. Some people do a lot of bad things and not so much good things. Others rarely do bad things.

All of us mostly do neutral things.

What we are is inherently social.

We also have some capacity to reason, and to put ourselves in the place of others (mentally).

To me, 'evil' smacks of some supernaturalness of some kind, therefore, there really isn't any such thing.

Fun is good, and suffering sucks. This is all that matters.

So, increase the sum total of fun in the world, try to avoid adding to the suckiness, and whenever you can reduce the sum total of suckiness in the world, go for it.

Lots of things drive us -- and people vary as to what most often drives them to do this or that sort of thing.

Since suffering sucks, it seems to me that people who cause suffering are confused, usually because they've been mangled by suffering.

Answer 8

Children are like a sponge. They will soak up what they see and hear and hardly know the difference between right and wrong until they get to a age of comprehension and teaching. By that time the wrongs become a evil when they imitate them knowing not to from instruction and reason.

Answer 9

Paulo Coelho talked about that in his book "The Devil and Miss Prym". He was trying to answer the first and true nature of human beings. Eventually he decided on "Human beings choose their nature".

My personal opinion is that Good is the nature, but some people, for some reasons, choose to go with evil even if involuntarily. If the nature is evil, people would say it's god's fault and it can't be.

Answer 10

Humans are born pure and unaffected by outside elements. Due to upbringing, morals and values -gives us the basis for how we perceive life and how we look and value things, people and our outlook. Based on what we are taught to believe is right or wrong is what we base our knowledge on. But once we become adults and maybe stray from our upbringing, we tend to see things differently and accept more or less of how we were taught. The act of evil again is a judgment call on what your beliefs are, and what society sets as ground rules. Again the morals and values set upon by our leaders and society acts as definition and set standards to all things.