People and what good they might have in them.

"Some people just have no good in them."

"There is good in everyone."

"Define good and bad."

People throw these three phrases around a lot, defending that which they agree with with reasons from the spiritual, to the psychological, to the logical. What do you think? Does everyone have potential to be a credit to the team, to say it one way? Are some people just wired to do harm more easily than good? Or is it a stupid question?

whoever wrote this shit needs to step on a rake in a comedic fashion

Yes. Incompetent people.

I just don't apply them at all. People change so often that it's hard to apply "good" or "bad" to them universally. Some people are total assholes most of the time, but can occasionally be really kind, and vice versa. Sometimes based on our situations, someone might act one way to me, but something else to others.

Preconceptions are part of that. I'm obviously biased against a gang member, and he would be biased against me. Thus we would probably not get along, and I'd consider him a shithead.

People are people, just like me.

Every single person I meet has passed though a lot experiences, doubts, self-questioning and in the end are as complex as I may find myself.

As such, it's hard to label them as good or bad without things getting really arbitrary.

People are people, intereting, many-layered and curious. Some will be more or less compatible with the person I am, but that's just how things are.

If I'm sure of something it's that I'm not sure of anything.

daltar,

I agree with this statement.

As for the topic at hand, I think that everyone has good points and that it is important to remember that lest we start saying that some people are just evil and begin dismissing them entirely because of harmful things they have done. I feel like the potential to do good that such persons have is worth quite a bit. Plus, I feel as though it can be dangerous trying to classify some as beyond redemption or wholly bad because I think it is difficult to draw the line there.

However, I am pretty much an idealist. Perhaps, I just like to think that everyone has good in them because it makes me feel better about society.

Sorry if I did not really clear anything up there. I am not an expert on this kind of thing.

edited 27th Dec '10 9:35:13 AM by LouieW

"irhgT nm0w tehre might b ea lotof th1nmgs i dont udarstannd, ubt oim ujst goinjg to keepfollowing this pazth i belieove iN !!!!!1 d

I think good and bad are subjective, and depend a lot on situation. I'm a vegetarian and I wouldn't order pork chops in a restaurant, but if I was dying of starvation I'd think myself perfectly justified in eating them. I don't think that people can be defined as having good or evil in them, because what we do always depends on the situation we are in - people have patterns of reactions which are more or less likely to be considered good or bad by other people.

So in answer to your three kind-of-quotes: I don't think people have inherent morality at all, I think everyone has the potential to do the right thing in some situations but I don't think that necessarily means 'everyone is potentially a nice person!', and good and bad are social constructs which are basically defined by situation and not moral absolutes.

Edit: I just realised how evil that makes me sound in conjunction with my signature. I'm not evil, I swear. Evil doesn't exist as a moral absolute, right? Right?

edited 27th Dec '10 3:07:35 PM by cityofmist

Scepticism and doubt lead to study and investigation, and investigation is the beginning of wisdom. - Clarence Darrow

I believe that humans are fundamentally good, at a basic level, and the bad things we do come from mistakes, being confused, and losing our way. No one sets out to be evil, after all.

Be not afraid...

I think good and evil don't really exist. Well, correction: good and evil people don't exist - there are good and evil actions, but it's a really knotty issue to decide which is which.

I think everyone is doing the best they can given their circumstances, which includes their internal psychological state. If someone does evil, it's because given their psychological problems and/or extreme circumstances, it seemed like the best thing for them to do.

If I'm asking for advice on a story idea, don't tell me it can't be done.

I highly doubt anyone who mugs people in back alleys think they're doing something good.

I'd say, simplifying things grossly of course, that you have three categories of people:

• Those who know legitimately don't have a system of ethics that defines what is, to them, right and wrong. The seriously mentally ill, in other words.
• Those who have a system of ethics and attempt to do what they think is right. This is most people.
• Those who have a system of ethics, but don't care whether what they do is wrong or write. These are the people that I would call "evil".

The big problem here is then that everyone's system of ethics is different. But that's a whole different topic.

Words cast into the uncaring void of the internet.

I think most of what you would call 'evil', i.e. doing things that are wrong when you know that it's wrong and just don't care, is just people putting their own wants ahead of ethics. That just makes it a difference of priorities.

Be not afraid...

Putting your own wants ahead of your ethics is evil.

Words cast into the uncaring void of the internet.

Indeed it is; but it doesn't make the people doing it inherently evil. We all do it to some extent: "I know it would be the more ethical to give little sister the last chocolate... but I want it."

It's only when that becomes a habit you get into evil territory. So, in my view, 'evil' people are just people who took a few a lot of wrong turns along the way.

Be not afraid...

Yeah no, everyone does this once and a while. But once it becomes a regular pattern of thought, then I'd say you've fallen into evil. So basically what you just said, I agree with.

Words cast into the uncaring void of the internet.

From my experience, the average person perceives himself/herself to be good and justifies their actions to match their ideologies. These actions can be good or bad (what is considered good or bad is a completely subjective, of course).

I'd also have to agree with the troper who said people are just people.

edited 27th Dec '10 11:47:39 PM by snailbait

"Without a fairy, you're not even a real man!" ~ Mido from Ocarina of Time

I've always liked the sort-of-moral in Good Omens - humans are capable of vastly more good than angels and vastly more evil than devils, both at the same time. Sometimes in the same person.

Be not afraid...

At this point, we've pretty much proven that you can take a fairly high percentage of people and put them in situations where they will do things they would normally balk at doing, with the precise percentage varying from somewhere around 40% (abusing prisoners, after both prisoners and guards have undergone significant dehumanization according to certain rules), to possibly as high as 95% (shooting an enemy soldier in active combat, after significant psychological training to reduce reluctance to kill.) In some of these situations, we cannot identify which individuals will and will not commit the actions in question. However, the fact that some individuals just can't be persuaded to do certain things indicates that there is an innate desire to avoid doing certain things—it's just either less common than we might think, or not always as strong as we might think. And in any event, the things that they would normally balk at aren't always bad, as countless stories of "everyday heroism" can tell you.

That's Feo . . . He's a disgusting, mysoginistic, paedophilic asshat who moonlights as a shitty writer—Something Awful

All able-bodied, able-minded people have the potential to act in the interests of others, and all have the potential to act against the interests of others. Because individual self-interest frequently overlaps with the interests of others, the previous sentence applies to both normal and antisocial personalities.