"Humans are inherently evil"

[RandFan]

"Humans are good, is my stance. We have, like many other species, an instinctive urge to do good to one another and to punish evildoers. The majority of us aren't rapists, murderers, war mongers or 'evil' in other ways, and those who are nearly always end up this way as a result of illnesses, defects (such as in the case of psychopaths) or a bad upbringing or environment 'corrupting' them. At the risk of sounding too Scandinavian here ("aww, the poor wife-beater, he must have had a terrible childhood"), it's no coincidence that most serious criminals have a history of poverty, neglect, abuse, etc.

I don't at all believe that this fits with the anthropological data. There have simply been too many wars, too much atrocity including genocide, etc., to simply excuse it as a result of illness or defect. That doesn't comport with history. The fact is that the majority of us obey the law in part because of social stigma and fear of punishment. Our current morals are a result of moral progress but that can easily break down. See Stalin’s Purges, Mao's Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot's killing fields, the Holocaust, North Korea, etc..

As Hitchen's notes, our adrenalin glands are too big and our frontal lobes too small. In the past century there were significantly more than 100 million people who were killed and they died as a result of people acting contrary to the morals of not only the current times but even earlier centuries. There is simply no evidence that so many suffered and died so horribly only because of or largely because of defect or illness.

The notion that humans are either inherently good or inherently evil is a false dichotomy that is counter to all of the evidence.

If humans are inherently evil, how come certain countries such as Iceland can have ridiculously mild laws and a lack of religion and still have very low crime rates?"

Again with the false dichotomy. It is simplistic to stat that humans are either inhernetly evil or good. It is far more complicated than that.

 

[Shadowdweller]

Again with the false dichotomy. It is simplistic to stat that humans are either inhernetly evil or good. It is far more complicated than that.

Well said. It should be noted that even the most universally detested and stereotypically evil figures in history have had bizarre touches and juxtapositions of humanity. From Stalin's delight in his daughter Svetlana to Hitler, choosing vegetarianism so as to avoid cruelty to animals and/or vomiting at the sight of human blood whilst mercilessly executing millions.