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Thread: Are Human Beings Inherently Evil?

  1. #16
    Registered User billl's Avatar
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    Wow, PeterL, is that your preferred definition of goodness, or are you just throwing it out there to make the point about how there can be flexibility/variation in how we might define goodness?

    I would consider it bad if someone who's ready to accept rape as a valid method for spreading genes were able to spread them by that method. Same for one who prefers to define goodness in terms of the interests of a particular gene over those of a particular individual person.

  2. #17
    Voice of Chaos & Anarchy
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    Quote Originally Posted by Scheherazade View Post
    This is, wherever you have taken it from, a very disturbing definition.
    That is a paraphrase of the ordinary evolutionary advantage definition. It is not at all disturbing. Most people live according to that code most of the time, but it is usually buffered by the fact that there are other people who also want their DNA to survive.

    By that definition, would it be OK to murder or rape someone not intellectually or physically up to a certain "standard"?
    Perhaps, what do you think?

    Should we pull the plug on the educational and training programmes helping them?
    Would that be an advantage to you? Such programs make little, or no, difference to me, so I don't especially care.

    Or maybe we should not offer medical treatments to such people if they are not well?
    Perhaps, if you see them as a challenge to you, then maybe you should do something about them.

    Quote Originally Posted by billl View Post
    Wow, PeterL, is that your preferred definition of goodness, or are you just throwing it out there to make the point about how there can be flexibility/variation in how we might define goodness?
    That is a valid definition for goodness, and no one had suggested any other.

    I would consider it bad if someone who's ready to accept rape as a valid method for spreading genes were able to spread them by that method. Same for one who prefers to define goodness in terms of the interests of a particular gene over those of a particular individual person.
    I see that you are trying to advance yourself by making it appear that you are ready to help other people in their fights for survival. That is a very good way to gain allies.

  3. #18
    Registered User billl's Avatar
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    Were you trying to make allies with the alleles or something?

    Because, you can suggest I was trying to make allies, but I was actually wondering if you forgot to include a bit at the beginning of your post, or if you had argued yourself into a tough spot, or if you'd had a bad day, or something.

    I think it would maybe be advantageous to the alleles to get spread via rape, but to use the word "good" in your definition (which would be your definition, not that of the alleles exclusively) seemed like it might have been a hasty wording or something like that.

    No, that's a stretch to say I was "trying to make allies."

  4. #19
    Orwellian The Atheist's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Neely View Post
    So in short, are human beings inherently selfish, or even potentially evil?
    We are inherently selfish, which is why our species exists. Unselfish species die out.

    PeterL has given an excellent description of the uses of good and evil from an evolutionary standard, which may not necessarily be the same meaning as they have in our socially-constructed discourses.
    Go to work, get married, have some kids, pay your taxes, pay your bills, watch your tv, follow fashion, act normal, obey the law and repeat after me: "I am free."

    Anon

  5. #20
    Registered User jinjang's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Neely
    Oh, I'm not being down about it. I just think that people do act within their own self-interest and that you could read each act of kindness as motivated by such interest.
    I knew you were putting this topic with an objective point of view. I am not good at expressing what I wanted to say. I wrote that sentence “Please do not be as pessimistic as that” to comfort myself because I tend to get subjective on anything discussed in the forum.

    I skipped the part when I was deciding which side to choose “are we potentially evil?” or “are we potentially good?” I decided to lean toward that we are potentially more “good” than “evil” and I concluded subjectively that people tend to choose to do a good deed than evil ones, sometimes even when conflicting with self-interests. Such a choice is made to avoid a life-long regret and remorse, which some could obviously call a choice motivated by self-interest.

    I am not religious in case you are wondering. But, I sympathize with all religions.

    I thought of Mother Teresa. She happens to be a good example to think about. Did she choose to live in poverty for her self-interests? What are her self-interests? Except a few saints like her, possibly most of us are more selfish than self-sacrificing.

    Even then and even with doubts, I so wanted to think the following lines of Baudelaire do not apply to most of us.
    If slaughter, or if arson, poison, rape
    Have not as yet adorned our fine designs,
    the banal canvas of our woeful fates,
    It's only that our spirit lacks the nerve.
    I am rereading Lolita and a doubt from the quote below started to arise in me creepily whether we humans have a gross tendency:
    A quote made in Lolita
    The moral sense in mortals is the duty
    We have to pay on mortal sense of beauty.
    And so, I would like to read more positive sides to stick to my conviction that we are mostly good than bad.
    Walk, meditate, forget - Victor Hugo
    Life is bigger than literature - Michael Cunningham

  6. #21
    Orwellian The Atheist's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by jinjang View Post
    I thought of Mother Teresa. She happens to be a good example to think about. Did she choose to live in poverty for her self-interests? What are her self-interests? Except a few saints like her, possibly most of us are more selfish than self-sacrificing.
    Excellent example!

    Mother Teresa's self-interest was a passage to heaven. Given her near-death appraisal of her faith having been misplaced, I wonder whether she'd do it again.
    Go to work, get married, have some kids, pay your taxes, pay your bills, watch your tv, follow fashion, act normal, obey the law and repeat after me: "I am free."

    Anon

  7. #22
    Registered User jinjang's Avatar
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    Ha ha, you are very funny! This is not a sarcasm. I was laughing amused. You are trying to be self-deprecating as a humanitarian yourself?
    Walk, meditate, forget - Victor Hugo
    Life is bigger than literature - Michael Cunningham

  8. #23
    Orwellian The Atheist's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by jinjang View Post
    Ha ha, you are very funny! This is not a sarcasm. I was laughing amused. You are trying to be self-deprecating as a humanitarian yourself?
    It's probably more correct to describe it as humanist rather than humanitarian, although the motives are the same.
    Go to work, get married, have some kids, pay your taxes, pay your bills, watch your tv, follow fashion, act normal, obey the law and repeat after me: "I am free."

    Anon

  9. #24
    Haribol Acharya blazeofglory's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Neely View Post
    If “evil” is too strong a word (which it probably is) then read “selfish” or “self-centred” but the question remains.

    Personally I am pessimistic in my belief that individuals are entirely motivated by self-interest and that there is no such thing as a real act of charity. That on the surface the individual may appear to be kind, but as Shakespeare said in Lear “beneath is all the fiend’s” under that mask of civility lies something much darker, something done entirely for the benefit of the self.

    So in short, are human beings inherently selfish, or even potentially evil?
    In point of fact this is sadly true, and our sense of charity is only superficial conditioned by moral ideas. Beneath all these superfluousness lies evils.

    In the wilderness survival is not possible without being cruel. Nature knows kindness at all.

    “Those who seek to satisfy the mind of man by hampering it with ceremonies and music and affecting charity and devotion have lost their original nature””

    “If water derives lucidity from stillness, how much more the faculties of the mind! The mind of the sage, being in repose, becomes the mirror of the universe, the speculum of all creation.

  10. #25
    Quote Originally Posted by blazeofglory View Post
    In point of fact this is sadly true, and our sense of charity is only superficial conditioned by moral ideas. Beneath all these superfluousness lies evils.

    In the wilderness survival is not possible without being cruel. Nature knows kindness at all.
    Hmm, yes I think so, well put.

  11. #26
    Voice of Chaos & Anarchy
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    Quote Originally Posted by blazeofglory View Post
    Nature knows kindness at all.
    Yes, Nature knows that kindness is a painless death.

  12. #27
    www.markbastable.co.uk
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    Mother Teresa is a very apt subject of the philosophical question of motive and outcome, in terms of good and evil.

    Teresa herself rejected any idea that she was particularly kind or selfless - she said that she was simply doing what God told her to do. If God had told her to open a lap-dancing club, that's what she'd have done. She didn't take any credit or responsibility for the life that she led, because she didn't feel that she chose it. She was just following orders.

    (As an aside, it's interesting that her justification for her actions was exactly the same as Goering's.)

    So - if we can't demonstrate that her motive for her actions was Good (or, indeed, Evil), perhaps we can look at the outcome of those actions. I think we can only judge whether she Did Good Things or not, in terms of other Things she might have Done.

    What she did, in effect, was say to the poor and uneducated young women of an overpopulated and disease-ridden city, "God wants you to have lots and lots of babies, and I'll look after them..." The outcome was that many many babies were born into poverty and hopelessness, of whom an unknown proportion actually made it to healthy adulthood, at the expense of all those who didn't - not to mention the perils of labour and motherhood for the women involved, and the general deleterious effect of adding to overpopulation and the stretching of thin supplies of food, water and shelter.

    You don't achieve what MT achieved without terrific organisational skills, a lot of determination and a healthy propensity for cutting through crap. So Mother Teresa was one tough cookie of a streetfighting nun. But what she might have done was put all that effort and ability in to distributing condoms and dispensing family-planning advice.

    Or she might have campaigned for the introduction of free vasectomies.

    Or she might have done absolutely nothing but spend her life in contemplative prayer.

    We all make our own call on this, of course, but I'd say that of the courses of action I suggest, the one she actually took resulted in the worst outcome, taking the thing in terms of the greatest good for the greatest number. I think that she was the instrument of a particularly insensitive and condescending form of repression.
    Last edited by MarkBastable; 08-06-2009 at 12:36 PM.

  13. #28
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    I would argue that all of mankind is inherently selfish as all human actions can be broken down into two self-serving motives: either acquiring pleasure or avoiding pain, and in most cases it is a complex compromise between the two, that is, how to gain as much pleasure as possible without causing a level of pain that would outweigh the pleasure gained. What is viewed as a pleasure or a pain, and the extent to which they are such, varies from person to person and is the result of a combination of experience and a person's ability to process the information received in that experience (therefore two people might have as close as possible to identical experiences yet, due to the way they deal with and evaluate the experiences, may emerge with a completely different set of values.) I will give 3 examples to try to demonstrate this way of thinking:

    1) Someone walks up to you on the street and hands you £1000, absolutely NO strings attached. In this situation, almost everyone would accept the money, as most people would view the pleasure that could be gained from that money (spending etc) very compelling. Even if they had some feelings of guilt or doubt (generally considered negative or painful emotions), the potential pleasure to be gained from the money would outweigh this pain, and so they would take the money. It would take a fairly extreme, but still possible, past experience or way of thinking to influence someone not to take the money, for example, the person may have been a victim of money laundering before, and so the pain of that memory, and the fear of it happening again may be stronger than the pleasure to be gained from taking the money, so they may refuse. Similarly, if they had been brought up in a family in which pride and not accepting any form of charity or money was very firmly enforced, the guilt they might feel on accepting the money could outweigh the pleasure of accepting it.

    2) A more realistic example: You are given a delicious looking and smelling piece of cake (or something else that you enjoy to eat). Your decision to eat may depend on a number of things: aspects of eating the cake that would generally be considered positive: the delicious taste, the subsequent sugar rush and feel-good feeling, the satisfaction of feeling full, not wishing to offend the person who gave you the cake. However, there are also more specific reasons for not eating the cake: you may be weight conscious, you may have just had a large meal and not want to feel even fuller than you are at that moment, you may be diabetic and realise the potential health risks to yourself that eating the cake would pose etc. In a very rapid evaluation (as eating is a decision you regularly make, and is generally does not have very severe consequences it is possible to make this decision very fast. More important decisions or ones that you rarely face generally require more time and careful evaluation) you weigh up all of the pleasure-gaining factors, wanting the satisfaction of eating the cake etc, against the pain causing factors, if you do eat it you might not be able to fit into the outfit you're trying to slim into etc. If the pleasure factors are greater, in your opinion, than the pain factors, then you decide to eat the cake. If not, you abstain.

    3)A complex example, in response to this quote:
    Quote Originally Posted by JuniperWoolf View Post
    according to hedonistic theory what advantage did he gain from his actions? Kin selection and reciprocity theory don't hold up in this example.
    This situation is very rare and exposes characteristics that most people do not have, but can still be explained in the same way. Generally, the instinct to survive is so deeply engrained as a source of pleasure (which is essential to species preservation) that most people do not have, or do not experience a situation that tests, the moral strength to have a situation in which the gain of not living outweighs the gain of staying alive. However, it is possible. The man may have experienced the death of someone close to him, or some other situation in which he keenly felt the pain of loosing a loved one. Perhaps he himself has not got any family, or is actually lonely or depressed for some reason and so he may place less value on his own life. Maybe he is also a lot older than the other passengers in the boat Therefore, for any combination of these factors, or any other, he may be aware that the feeling of guilt that he would feel had he escaped from the boat and left others to die would be stronger than the joy he could feel from life should he live. To avoid this pain, which would, for him, more than negate the pleasure of his life, he is prepared to risk sacrificing his life to let the other passengers go first to avoid this. He may also be aware that if he were to help save the other passengers, he would be praised as a hero. If the idea of this provided sufficient pleasure to be an incentive, he may be prepared to risk his life in pursuit of it.
    (This is a much more extreme, but similar situation to that of giving to charity-in that case, while loosing some money may cause you some small discomfort, you may give because you have been conditioned by your upbringing to feel good about being generous and giving to those that need it. Moreover, people are far more likely to give to charity, or give more generously, if they know they are being watched by someone else because the potential gain of being seen as kind and generous is very likely to make what would have been too large a donation before (ie. too painful to merit the good feeling of giving) seem worthwhile. Of course, some people do give anonymously to charity, but only a fraction of the total number of people who give. This can be for perhaps two reasons, each of them fairly rare, which explains why giving anonymously is a rarer action. Firstly, the donation may be exceptionally large and they may not want to attention and subsequent appeals by other charities for a repeat donation (one donation to a cause a person believes in may be one thing, donating, or the hassle of being asked to donate, to scores more is another!) Secondly, the person may have been successfully taught to value anonymous giving so much that the feeling of satisfaction, and perhaps superiority that they feel over others that do not have such “virtuous” standards, that they get from it personally makes up for the public appreciation.)

    Clearly there are almost an infinite number of minute factors affecting any decision, I have gone into them in slightly greater detail in the first example because it's a fairly simple situation (and as such it's almost completely unrealistic!) but any number of influences can be imagined for the other two and indeed any situation. If the emotions of pain and pleasure are equally balanced, it may come down to a person's view of impulse decisions that helps them finally decide but this will itself be evaluated in a similar way-for example, if they generally like and have had good experiences with impulse decisions (this could even be from just having a "good day" leading to a buoyed optimism), they may then decide to take the money, of the reverse was true they might refuse it. However, the fact remains that it is the balance of the sum of what the person views as the positive outcomes of a possible event when compared to the sum of the painful events that determines whether or not they attempt to take that path. It is purely a matter of self satisfaction.

    However, if this "selfish" way of thinking is inescapable in all mankind, then it cannot be described as being evil itself, for evil implies that there is the possible opposite of being good, whereas the instinct to to be self serving (in attaining these two goals, no matter how selfless working towards them may appear to be) is inescapable and is therefore a "universal norm". Instead, it is the various importances each individual places on various situations, emotions and aspirations, coming together to make a set of morals and so determining what the individual views as most important, that is, best able to help them achieve the acquiring of pleasure and the avoiding of pleasure according to their own internal system of judgement. In fact, it could be argued that this "selfish" way of thinking is the mechanism that allows us to process, and therefore act on, our own individual morals.

    Therefore, in conclusion, I would argue that all human beings are inherently selfish, but that this does not necessarily make them evil. Instead, it is the moral standards that we have that determine what, and to what extent, we view as pleasure or pain giving that can be judged my our culture as being either "good" or "bad", and so leading us to behave in a way that can be deemed "good" or "evil".

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    Sorry for the VERY long post there, I got quite into it...:P

  15. #30
    Voice of Chaos & Anarchy
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    Quote Originally Posted by laurahws View Post
    Sorry for the VERY long post there, I got quite into it...:P
    Yes, but what is evil?

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