Human Nature

[Belacqua]

I would have thought the comparison was obvious.  You suggested that if we had an ounce of good in us there wouldn't be genocides or even a word for it.  I disagree.  I think that statement is factually wrong for the same reason and in the same way as the others I offered.  I think we can effect genocides..or make a damned good try at them at least, entirely by accident, utterly in ignorance, when we try to help..and..sometimes...for reasons not knowable by us.  That all of these ways to effect those types of outcomes vastly outweigh the singular claim of strong misanthropy.  

You keep returning to the idea of this being god-alike..which I guess is a code word for wrongbad.....but again, as factually wrong as it may in fact be, the idea that human beings are generally good natured but deeply compromised along predictable lines beyond their control or remit is the opposite of the christian view of mans nature or the moral view of christian ethics.  It has quite a bit of explanatory power.  We could run an experiment (which would be wildly unethical) by starving one group of people, leaving one group of people completely alone, showering another with cash...and then observing outcomes and decisionmaking ability between the groups.  None of us will be surprised when the people we shower with cash are more charitable, when the people left alone are more or less us, and the ones starving start loading rifles.  In fact we have run much less ambitious versions of this.  The results do seem to imply that we're genuinely compelled to do what passes for good to us, and that this behavior becomes less pronounced and eventually inverts as duress increases.

Genocide by accident. Go troll someone else, I'm not interested in further (or fuhrer) "discussion".

It seems to me that the question is being framed very strangely. 

If we ask "is there good in human nature," it almost sounds as if "good" is some kind of element we can isolate and identify. Then we could check whether the elements of a standard human being includes this element. 

But "is there good in human nature" is just not the same kind of question as "is there potassium in bananas"? 

So there are two ways I can think of offhand to decide what "good" means. The first way is Aristotelian: a thing is good if it does well what it is intended to do. [arete] A good hammer does well the things a hammer is supposed to do. A good computer does what computers are supposed to do. So the term "good" for a hammer and "good" for a computer denote different activities or qualities. 

So we can speak of hammer-nature and computer-nature, as being the ends toward which those things aim. The question "is there good in hammer-nature" makes no sense. We can only ask "does this hammer do effectively what hammers are supposed to do?" 

By this way of thinking, if we were going to claim that there is such a thing as human nature, we would have to say that the way people are points to certain ends. Human flourishing. The goals toward which humans aim are "baked in" to what they are. Not "is there good in human nature?" but "are humans capable of accomplishing those things which their condition aims for?" 

The natures of things are not like divine commandments, but simply the parameters of what it is natural for that kind of thing to do.  

I suspect that our colleagues here will not want to agree with Aristotle that human anatomy and human ways of thinking point to certain pre-determined ends. So we probably won't get anybody to agree that the term "good," in relation to people, is a judgment related to how well people are managing to do what personhood aims for. 

That simply leaves "good" (in relation to human nature) to mean a judgment we make concerning what people are apt to do. We could name some actions we consider to be good (according to whatever criteria we have learned) and judge whether people are apt to do those things. Rather than asking "Is there good in human nature," we could ask "are people likely to do those things which I consider to be good?" 

So the more important question, it seems to me, is "how can we organize our society so that it is easy for people to prefer doing those good things?"