Wednesday, May 25, 2011

Most People Are Just Pretty Okay

I've always found the question, "Is man inherently good or inherently evil?" to be fundamentally flawed. First of all, good and evil are incredibly banal, black and white terms with no real application to real-world morality.* More importantly, there's no real answer to the question. Humankind is neither, because there is no law** that you can apply to the entire population. I can see someone arguing that INDIVIDUALS can have inherent predispositions towards good or evil, but society? No, that can't be done.

In a sense, what I'm saying is that there is no such thing as "human nature". Everyone has there own nature, and none of them are the same. Now if the question is more of a GENERAL thing, i.e: "Do the majority of humans tend to be good or evil?", then it just becomes a really stupid question. And once again, you run into the fact that "good and evil" isn't an applicable concept.

And now I should probably end this before it becomes an argument over DnD alignments. For the record, I'm Chaotic Neutral.

*Even if it is almost certainly true, it still feels odd to call the Nazis "evil". That's just such a gross oversimplification.
**Yes yes, besides things like gravity. You know what I mean.

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