Are human essentially good?

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My opinion:

1. Everything has a reason (plus, I'm a determinist).
2. We can't define good or bad (I'm a nihilist).
3. We have instincts of empathy, which we consider "good", universally.
4. Autistic people are more sensitive to other people's pain.
5. Autistic people are more honest.
6. I've never met a person who doesn't have ANY compassion (how many psychopaths are there?).
7. Non-Autistic people are less sensitive, and more capable of hurting, manipulating. etc.
8. Non-Autistic people are more influenced by society.
9. Autistic people have some kind of "self-defence" from society's influence.
10. Autistic people therefore are more true to their nature.
11. Therefore, if Autistic people are honest and sensitive, it's their nature.
12. If other people still feel compassion and appreciate honesty, universally, it's perhaps something about their nature as well.
13. If people are more violent in different cultures, than they're "bad" due to influence.
14. It cannot be because of genetics, because they act differently in different eras, and have different values.
15. Violent Aspies are motivated by moral (so they're still "good"), or because society has ruined them by being cruel to them, or teaching them to socialise too quick, perhaps.
16. "The task of education is to make the individual so firm and sure that, as a whole being, he can no longer be diverted from his path." (Nietzsche)
17. "The State is never concerned with the truth, but only with the truth which is useful to it, or to be more precise, with anything which is useful to it whether it is truth, half-truth, or error." (Nietzsche)
18. States control education, and are responsible for indoctrination.
19. Children cannot be "educated" to be good by their parents, if their parents are dishonest, violent and/or justify violence (including punishment by state).
20. Children show empathy without education.

Conclusions:

1. Human have a natural feeling of empathy, which is destroyed by society and the state. When people don't mind those influences, or live without them, they feel more empathy than others, when they recognise it. This feeling, which people naturally have, is considered good. If so, we can that human beings are essentially good, aren't they?

2. Cruelty such as revenge has no reason, so if people think about it, they can get rid of the will to punish. So I feel, so other aspies I know, and Nietzsche himself was against punishment, as I understand him.

3. Reasoning makes us want to encourage feelings such as empathy, and feelings of empathy can get us rid of wanting to hurt others - when we realise we won't gain from it, and feel sensitivity towards everyone.

4. Humans have a natural tendency to empathise, but also to harm. If they use logic, and trust each other, they won't feel the will to harm others.

Any thoughts?

One of the most noted comments by Hannah Arendt about the people involved with inflicting the cruelties involved in Nazi Germany was that they were simultaneously kind to children and dogs and had loving family relationships just like most other normal people.

As much as I know, one of the reasons that they stopped the method of killing Jews using the slaughter pills was that the German soldiers were mentally scarred from shooting people like this.

It's amazing how a person can be very kind to some people, and very cruel to others. I think perhaps they had to be even extra-kind to their own family and pets, in order to keep some level of sanity, and convince themselves that they were okay.

I'm pretty sensitive to the whole Nazi holocaust issue as my grandmother was in Auschwitz - but I also like to think of the brave men and women who risked their own lives saving people, just out of feelings of empathy and humanity.

See this amazing story for example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giorgio_Perlasca
An ex-fascist who pretended to be the Spanish Ambassador, and confronted Eichmann himself.
It's worth mentioning that the ambassador before him taught Hungarian Jews to speak Spanish, because Sephardic Jews were regarded as citizens in Spain at the time (my family kept speaking Spanish for 500 years outside of Spain).

Good and evil is really an opinion. Good is typically associated with selfless acts and evil as selfish (anyone is capable of either, it just boils to choice and scenario). The way i see it, we in the spectrum are the gray area, but we lean more towards "good" because of its structure and rules (which a lot of us like/prefer). "Evil" is a bit chaotic and nerve racking for us (which could mean psychopathy, or a variation thereof, is the opposite of autism). Humanity, in the end, is neither . . . we are merely products of our own guided evolution. We survived at the expense of something else, whether necessary or not . . . all things on this planet live by this fact (gotta love Darwinism).

That is why once the Zyklon-B method was put in place most of the dirty work were done by Einsatz Kommandos chosen from the prison population itself. Also the gassing took place in closed chambers mostly unseen by anyone outside.

ruveyn

I agree that in general good/evil is an opinion. I think sympathy is better - because if we all hate each other, or all love each other, well, we all prefer the first option.
Therefor I allow myself to define "good will" ("good act" is a different issue).
I think we show more sympathy than NTs, in general, when we recognise it - but am too tired to search for researches/surveys right now.


That's amazing - even for the Nazis, it was easier to kill without seeing it.
It reminds in the time when we had suicide bombings in Israel, and when my friend and I heard of someone who actually took a knife a stabbed innocent people, we were much more shocked. It seems much more difficult, emotionally, than to just press a button and die as well.

However - let us not forget people like Mengele. I can't even write about some of the horrors, so we'll leave it to Wiki. There was Japanese unit who did human experiments as well, and reading this isn't quite easy, at least for me:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Mengele

The US gave immunity to Unit 731 physicians in exchange for data on biological warfare (based on the experiments) - I think that's a great moral question.

The histories of western countries are full of cruelties. The natives of America, Canada, and Australia were forced to give up their children in the cruelly mistaken idea that it was better for the children to be separated from their parents. And this is only one example. If there is anything constant about humans it seems that they can be indoctrinated to do almost anything.

Last edited by Sand on 04 Feb 2010, 8:02 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I think humans are essentially both... evil and good. But evil tends to predominate, we're fairly disgusting if the truth is told.

Being humanitarian with a fair share of realism, i'd say yeah....but...I'd scratch off the "essentially" part. Besides, such dualistic concepts as good and evil are purely subjective and do not allow us to answer the question you just posed.

Oh and Sand, i think i said that before, but the empathy (as in, being empathic to someone else's emotions) diminishes with the distance you put between your target and yourself. A bomb will ALWAYS be easier to drop than stabbing someone, because chances are you won't see the people you just bombed and feel sorry for them, whereas stabbing someone involves proximity and the resolve to do what must be done. (This is my personnal theory atm <.<)

Humans are human. Good is the term for things we like. Evil for the things we dislike. It is more complex as this as good and evil aren't *just* statements of liking or disliking something, but rather they are statements about reality, however, I am an error theorist.

That being said, human beings are basically animals.

That's a common sociopathic tendancy as a form of self-validation.


I believe that different people are born with different 'wiring', allowing themselves to be susceptible to certain choices/actions. It's simple genetic coding. You could call this Nature or as I prefer it - Hardware.

However, it is personal experience that allows an individual to form their operational matrix - be it, for want of a better term, for good or evil. You could call this Nuture or as I prefer it - Software.

A child might be born without empathy - but it is personal experience that forms their software response to this hardware setup.

Yep, predisposition.
This analogy works up until the point you think about the developer, unless you're religious.

Psychopathy would be a lack of empathy in it's purest form, although values can be learned that allow for unempathetic behaviour as previously mentioned. Justice is a big one. In your example this would be software, whereas psychopathy can be acquired in infancy, burnt out hardware, so to speak.

Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Mammalia
Order: Primates
Family: Hominidae
Subfamily: Homininae
Tribe: Hominini
Genus: Homo
Species: Homo sapiens

Oh and even for me, who is doing a bac on bio-anthropology (you could call it "major"? =/ Although i'm not sure that's quite the equivalent of the American diploma), which is pretty close to evolution, Darwin and the like, we are told that determinism can be quite a reductionnist way of thinking. There's a reason people are adaptable and can change. Besides, the environment has an influence on our genes -whether you want it or not- and those genes can be modified by at least two processes that switch them off or on, being methylation and acetylation.

If you don't believe me, do a search on epigenetics, but stop spouting nonsense about humans being geneticly determined. =.=

I'm not saying you're genetically determined, I'm saying you're either determined genetically or by an external source.
Even when we take choices, it's an illusion; there's a reason why we choose them, and it's predetermined, even if unpredictable.
I don't believe in free will.

Last edited by Omerik on 05 Feb 2010, 1:08 pm, edited 1 time in total.

My opinion is "no."

Here is why.

Humans are animals. Even a feral dog or cat can show compassion to something, but in the end, survival dictates the most primal standards of conduct.

Experts have confirmed that kids generally behave themselves because society teaches them to behave properly. Left alone, children act like little monsters. The weak are preyed upon. The strong bully everyone else for dominance.

Still, even the worst bully has the capacity to do nice things.

The finer qualities of human nature need to be encouraged and cultivated by discipline and teaching. Absent that, men act as what is their animal nature.