Morality question. Nature/nurture

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Would you guys say that even if your naturally more prone to being a 'bad' person, as in you were born that way, but you can choose to behave in a way that benefits others and doesn't cause harm, are you still technically a worthy person? Or still scum even if they never act in a bad way....
The person might want to do things considered wrong but doesnt
Just curious.

I wasn't brought up to be a particularly decent person.

God knows, my stepmother would make Fagin look like Mary flippin' Poppins.

However, I have turned into an ok person now and that is definitely through choice.

It was hard at first but as the years have gone by it's become more natural for me to do the right/moral thing.

Hope that answers your question.

I don't believe anybody is "born" bad or good.

If you do worthy things, then you're a worthy person.

If you harm people, then you're a bum.

(Remember, I'm only talking in generalities!)

The concept of good and evil people doesn't really make sense to me. I feel actions can be good or evil, but no one does only good things or only evil things.

The closest thing to being 'born evil' is having genetically-based psychopathy, but it's more than it makes them not understand morality, rather than inherently making them do evil things. Plus there's still an environmental component we don't fully understand yet.

I don't think behaving in a good or evil way is as much of a choice as people think, anyway. If you're not a psychopath, a lot of your morality is motivated by an instinctive, hardwired aversion to causing distress to other people. Is a hardwired predisposition still a moral choice? I mean, you can go fight that predisposition, but the deck is stacked from the start.

I believe, for the vast majority of people, doing good and doing evil involves conscious choice and free will.

Okay. Thanks

Some traits are hard-wired at birth, some are learned. Of the learned ones, some are formed during specific developmental periods, similar to imprinting in some animals and from that point on are considered intrinsic. Others are considered learned, like phobias but are not hardwired at all. They can be un-learned.

Are there hardwired/intrinsic "bad" attributes? Certainly - full blown sociopaths come to mind, but they are somewhat rare. However, if someone is only mildly so (like nearly everything else neurological, it's a spectrum), they can learn that certain actions are "wrong" in a way somewhat similar to how we people with autism learn that certain behaviors hurt other people's feelings, etc..

There also appear to be hardwired/intrinsic "good" attributes such as a tendency toward being nurturing or self sacrifice, but since those can also be learned neurologists are just starting to weed the two apart (sociopaths were easier low-hanging fruit in that regard).

It really depends on what you define as good or evil.

When I think if evil, I think of a sociopath. Sociopathy is still not completely understood, and they believe it's a combination of nature and nurture at the moment.

There are people that have serious mental problems as a result of upbringing. These people in many cases might have turned out to be wonderful people. Serious childhood abuse can make a huge difference in the way a person turns out.

So can traumatic events in adulthood.

Personality is largely genetic. I know people born into bad situations can overcome them and become good people.

I don't think one can make a sociopath into a loving, caring person no matter how they are raised. But they can teach them by example. There is some evidence that early intervention can help children who are sociopaths.

Then there are people who don't have trouble with empathy, but have poor impulse control and are quick to anger. They may be more likely to commit violent acts. These can be genetic traits and probably can be overcome with practice and technique.

I adhere to the philosophy that everyone is born into this world as a blank slate, that it is the environmental factors and personal experiences that will determine their morality later on in life.

If I may make a suggestion, you may find reading up on the "Blank Slate" / Tabular Rasa theory from 1960's & 70's psychologists which tried to give much older ideas of Locke and Rousseau a sheen of academic authority. And then fast-forward to the mid-1990's where it was pretty much debunked by so-called sciences, especially neurology.

Non-scientific/pop-culture summary:
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/science/columnist/vergano/2007-02-18-babies-psychology_x.htm

That debunking/disproving was a good thing - a very, very good thing - for us people with autism. It started the end of NT people in our culture from claiming we were lazy, not trying hard enough, intentionally disobedient or oppositional and morally deficient and instead they now realize that being autistic is hardwired during brain development.

However, that's not to say we don't have plastic brain regions & attributes as well. From a wonderful article on sex differences that actually goes into nurture vs nature quite a bit & has a nice list of solid citations should you be curious:

"All those wishing to understand sex influences on the human brain need to fully grasp the implications of the animal literature, and then think about the Udry data, which captures an incontrovertible fact from brain science: Yes, brains are plastic, but only within the limits set by biology. It is decidedly not the case that environmental experience can turn anything into anything, and equally easily, in the brain. The specious plasticity argument invoked by anti-sex difference authors appears to be just a modern incarnation of the long-debunked "blank slate" view of human brain function, the idea that all people's brains start out as blank slates, thus are equally moldable to become anything through experience."
(from: http://dana.org/Cerebrum/2014/Equal_%E2 ... man_Brain/ )

Last edited by Edenthiel on 01 Jan 2016, 7:24 pm, edited 2 times in total.

In general, I am a staunch believer in the primacy of Nurture over Nature in most things.

I believe Nature is like the foundation and outward structure of a building; Nurture is what's inside the building--the plumbing, electrical system, etc.

At times, a faulty outward structure could interfere with with what's inside, and vice versa. They can both enhance each other as well.

Show me a good person and I will show you a good liar.

I think we're still absolutely terrible at both understanding ourselves as a race and properly evaluating one another. From that perspective this is something of a scary question.

Consider this - the likelihood is that all lives are predestined, 100% locked down to the most trivial detail like how you'll pick up your fork at breakfast tomorrow. There's no evidence that we ever really make choices, or at least the evaluation of two options is something that you could replay millions or billions of times over with the same person making the same exact end conclusion because what they have and what surrounds them is exactly the same.

At the same time you cannot use that to predict whether a seemingly bad or socially harmful person will stay that way. There are all kinds of things that could turn a person around, economic decisions both related to their safety and their own happiness. Everyone in this world is self-interested, those who are coined 'bad' generally speaking just aren't as good at what we'd call enlightened self-interest; ie. looking in the longer term, trying to create win-win situations with other people, working to augment one's self for longer and longer-term peace, stability, and happiness rather than having particularly lossy or dangerous short-term gains. IMHO that's a faculty that most people can get better at and there are plenty of people who at a certain point in their lives may not get it, then later in life the light bulb clicks on and they're on a different trajectory from that point forward.

You could perhaps in this way look at life as a DVD or blu-ray movie, it's frozen to plastic, just that it's a very boring, complex, and unpredictable movie where you won't know what's coming, what other people are capable of becoming or not becoming, and you only have the opportunity to watch it once - no rewind, fast-forward (well, some of that at least), no pause button, and if you hit the stop button that's it.

In other words whether our lives are mechanically predestined or not our genetic behavioral tendencies are probably much less so. Just like you can't always tell what kind of kid a set of parents will have you also can't tell whether a teenage hoodlum won't be a great dad or mom and an asset to their community just like you can't tell whether a straight-A student in school might later be a meth addict, blow up for one reason or another, or have a crippling mental illness set in.

Nurture, 99.9%

Conscious choice is not the same as absolute free will, it is relative free will hence the 'consciousness' part or 'self'.

Absolute free will doesn't exist. I don't know why that whole debate crops us quite a lot. It belongs in an era when metaphisics was synonymous with science.

Nowadays we know enough about neurology, and nature to that quite a lot of things drive our choices including ultimately chaos.

We are also able to show simple choices on an fMRI before the person is aware.

This is a different question from responsibility, the doesn't absolve responsibility. We still own our choice, as self is the person.

I have a question for those who believe that our actions are due only to, or primarily because of nurture and the import of nature is minimal:

What about all those behaviors - some quite beyond our control - that are symptoms of autism? If we "choose" to allow ourselves to express OCD, meltdowns and the rest, doesn't that meant that for all practical purposes Autism can simply be "trained" out of us and we could be considered "cured"?