maybe we have higher emotions and with that come rage and love so... maybe because of the higher emotion we have to learn to control them. humans will kill for some lame reasons... other animals kill for food only. so humans can be considered with a heightened sense of good and evil and therefore need to be taught the difference between right and wrong. hence we are born with the ability to be either good or evil...
personally i don't think there is a true evil out there or a true good... i believe that everything is inherently both. it just depends on how you look at it. my pc is evil because we are becoming so dependant on computers that the west would fall into chaos if all the pc of the world just stoped running... but its good for the information (or misinforamtion as the case may be) at your fingertips. the abilty to share ideas with people of other cultures and whatnot.....
besides with out evil how would you even know what good was... therefore even evil itself is good.
everyone has some good and some evil inside them, and it can only take one event to tip the scale either way. a new born person is neither good nor evil, they are a blank slate, as there mind isn't developed enough to understand such powerful traits. also, their surroundings dont necessarily effect whether they are good or evil, as some people are a lot more willful and stronger than others, and can see what is right and wrong, and are not effected by bad or good situations or up bringing. and finally, true evil is very rare and so is pure good, most people are in between, so people cannot be BORN good or evil, and most people never grow to be good or evil anyway.
see im not just a pretty face...
when we say people are born evil; are we talking about the whole human race or just say someone who 'does evil things' do they develop it through life or are they just born that way...
I think to see that you perhaps have to look at genetics or the brain. Hmmm but I think its more likely people develop it through life and their environment.
The difference between good and evil can only be weighed in your mind. Things that seem good to you may completely be unacceptable from my point of view. As being the individual that you are and capable of making your own decisions, only you can distinguish the difference.
To every living thing, there is one primary choice, and that is to live or not. Choosing life as your standard of value is a pre-moral choice. It cannot be judged as right or wrong, but once chosen, it is the role of morality to help man to live the best life possible.
People born...
A few of us born with genetic tendence to evil wich is carried from their ancestries adn.
The most of us born naturally and our moral is dictated by external causes, like our education (family) and social life until dead. It is a permanent growing.
So, I believe we born good and pure, with a few of us who born"bad". But these ones have a psico-pathological diagnosis.
Originally posted by h0ck3yh0rr0r
well people change throughout their lives. im talking about when they are born.
Well, Hobbes, Locke, Plato, Rousseau, Rawls, Grotius, Pufendorf, et al actually all said that people are of one nature, and powerless (or perhaps, unwilling) to deny it. Their arguments were not in accordance with Social Contract theory, but specifically for it. Also, the natures assigned to mankind are better described as just and unjust, as put forth in Book II of The Republic.
With governed humanity being unjust, it stands to reason that there should be a set of rules established which, through adherence, would facilitate betterment of society as a whole, with threat of discipline (aside from capital gain) as motivation. Glaucon and Socrates agreed that the unjust are indeed the ones to prosper, and reparation is injury caused by others - but then since "injury" is purposeful and carried out by the administrators of the established rules, and injury is as much [or more] retribution as [or than] it is penance, those administrators are thus unjust as well. The world would be wholly unjust.
Hobbes' views on the government of the unjust was about the same - that mankind, being generally greedy, will design a set of social contracts in order to aid in the attainment of personal wealth. They would do so in realization that free trade cannot be carried out without assurance of what actions their business partner would carry out - and it is because of this same reason that they would accept the enforcement of such contracts.
John Locke had a typically Protestant view of humanity, feeling that we are all, by nature, good, and when our morals are combined with our similarly good common sense, we create a society of betterment and good out of common interest. He felt that we should concede some of our rights to a - umm - non-matriarchal (thinking that democratic may, at this point, be too finite of a term) government so that they may, in turn, protect our life, liberty, and property.
Personally, I feel that the majority is a healthy mix of the two, with the lower extremities being mostly nihilists born of necessity but without the socioeconomic (and perhaps intellectual) means of reaching the levels they are otherwise capable of, and the upper extremities being mostly some sort of materialistic ubermensche. For this majority, the real issue isn't the nature of their souls but the number of neurons between their ears. Human beings are lemmings (or cockroaches, for you Matrix people 🙄 ) and a good materialistic ubermensche, regardless of his or her moral character or those of the lemmings, can convince them to do anything.
There is no absolution, though - no black and white. I really don't believe that even Locke and Hobbes believed their arguments completely - believing instead that a noncommital thesis such as mine wouldn't sell. 😛
Originally posted by total metalhead
everyone has some good and some evil inside them, and it can only take one event to tip the scale either way...
i completly agree everyone has and can be good and evil, and we all have to do both. for example in south park bl+u satan says, well sing "without evil there can be no good, so it must be good to be evil sometimes, ooh ooooh", so you see we all have to be bot, just in moderation!
Well, it's been proven that people who are "evil" (commit murder or other horrible acts without remorse) were born with a neutron missing in their brain or something. Basically they are missing a chromosome that acts as a conciounce that allows them to differentiate good from bad. So it just depends on how you look at it.