Is man inherently bad?

[NeoCorn]

Originally posted by: Crassus
Before jumping to ethical questions about good v evil I wonder how this question is to be construed. Looking at some people's medical record, I wonder men's construction is inherently bad. Especially considering the failure rate being 100% - eventual death being a question of when, not if.
Concerning the ethical debate, I'm inclined to support the argument that a society works better if people sacrifice individual gain for the greater wellbeing of all - and label "good" and "evil/bad" accordingly. The return for the person sacrificing it is smaller as if he/she would forego the "greated good" and act selfish. This seems to be seen as "evil" and needs to be deterred by the society.

Do you know of any living thing which does not have a failure rate of 100%? That aside, you do have a point about the construction of our bodies not being optimal in many ways. However, it is pretty flexible when combined with the attachments we have created for them. SCUBA, bicycles, automobiles, planes, kidney machines, artificial limbs, scanning tunneling electron microscopes, sonar, radar, telescopes...you name it we've probably created things to enhance our limited bodies.

 

[magomago]

No I th ink we are inherently good. If we were inherently bad there is no way we would have advanced to the point that we did.

I think we are easily corruptable, and that we can easily be led astray...but that doesn't mean we are bad

 

[CSMR]

Originally posted by: CrassusI'm inclined to support the argument that a society works better if people sacrifice individual gain for the greater wellbeing of all - and label "good" and "evil/bad" accordingly. The return for the person sacrificing it is smaller as if he/she would forego the "greated good" and act selfish. This seems to be seen as "evil" and needs to be deterred by the society.

However here good and bad are not only labels and perceptions but objective truth since there exists what you call "better" with respect to a society and the "wellbeing" of all.

 

[jagec]

http://www.personal.psu.edu/users/d/k/dkt112/mis/calvin/crazy.GIF

 

[sandorski]

Tough question, especially since, IMO, we are taught to not follow our natural instincts and have replaced them with the concepts of Good/Evil.

At the most Basic level we are just like any other Animal. After millenia of teaching each new generation a set of Goods/Bads, our inherent reality is too far removed from knowing. Even when asked this question we automatically access the synthetic Good/Bad Idealism we are raised with, instead of the Inherent.

 

[m1ldslide1]

I agree with one of the first responses saying that humans are amoral and that notions of good and evil are contrived from societal notions and zeitgeist.

As for some of the other posts, I feel like altruism comes from empathy and empathy comes from being glorified pack animals. In other words, what's good for another person is good for the pack, albeit indirectly. So humans are inherently selfish, but the term needs to be broadened a little bit. It's our individual selves that we care about, and altruism fits within that. (One could also assert on a less macroscopic level that altruism makes a person feel good and they do it for that selfish reason.)

I think that humans as a species function differently than the other animal species on the planet. We have far fewer physical resources for survival than any other species I can think of right now, so we compensate with forming groups (and that whole higher intelligence thing). Give it a hundred thousand years and you give rise to these uber-societies, where we are by far the dominant species on the planet's surface. There's no "good" or "bad" about it - it's just evolution.

Looking at some people's medical record, I wonder men's construction is inherently bad. Especially considering the failure rate being 100% - eventual death being a question of when, not if.

We have to have 100% failure rate because that's how life and darwinism works. If you didn't die then your gene combination wouldn't be removed from the pool, which is theoretically refining itself and becoming more "fit" over the centuries. (Sorta like how Duncan Idaho got his butt kicked by a girl in God Emperor of Dune). So I'd say our construction is inherently "good", since it benefits the species.

As far as people acting individually selfish, it's just so that they can reproduce. Obviously you'll still have 80 year olds who are terrified of death and would sacrifice a teenager over themselves, but that's just how we're built. I don't think we're meant to be AS concerned with the greater good as we are for our own good - the greater good kind of takes care of itself. It's a heirarchy of cause and effect. I think we have this in common with all life forms on the planet. So the question I'm stuck on is why life? Why any of it? Sagan says we exist in order for the cosmos to know itself, and a bunch of other goobers say its so that we can know God.

Sorry for tangenting the OP and then tangenting my tangent. It's hard for me to not break everything back down to evolution when it comes to the "why's" of society.

 

[LumbergTech]

ethical egotists.....i dont really like the word altruism..to me its more of a inner pang that serves the need of protecting ones societal members because of their worth to us in one way or another..we protect others because of what we get when we do that, whether it is just a good feeling or a feeling of relief...i wouldnt call that selfless action...and its not a bad thing, its pretty lucky that things are that way or it would be a whole lot worse on earth

 

[bwanaaa]

I know that we are in hell. I have seen too many signs of that. Truly evil people wander free, but stupid ones caught in the currents of bad behavior commit 'crimes' for which they are years imprisoned. I have taken care of drug addicts shot in the chest point blank- the bullet comes out the other side without injury to any vital structure, and I have taken care of little old ladies who fall, sprain their ankle, get hospitalized, acquire pneumonia and die in the hospital.

We are in hell , make no mistake, but as denizens of hell, if we are good-then we are obviously punished. Good and evil are not contrivances but measures of real effects- just as enthalpy, entropy and Gibbs free energy are measures of chemical reactions. Good and evil are absolutes. Not constants like the speed of light, Plancks constant,etc. but absolutes-they can be measured in any system as the sum of the outcomes to the members of any closed system.

Now, somebody give me my haldol....

 

[imported_PLo]

yes, man is bad. ape is better, but still not that good

 

[beansbaxter]

Sure. Left to our own ends, man would pretty much kill everything and everyone in our immediate surroundings. We use up all the our resources and fight with each other and don't have any idea what we're doing. But that's just in our nature. Humans are kind like a weed in the garden that needs so much to keep thriving that it sends out thousands of roots in all directions serching for nutrients that it creates a vast barrens around the iself because there is nothing left in the soil for anything else to thrive on. We're tenacious, nothing is ever enough.....

However, what defines the term "Bad"? Is it a definitive term, or relative. Relative to what? Where does the definition come from? What keeps us accountable, who sets the standards against which something can be judged "Bad"? Hmmm...