Are We Born Good or Bad? A Deep Dive into Human Nature

A dangerous subtext in our political ideology

My whole life I have heard this discussion, with people taking sides and trying to justify their position. Rather, the sides seem dictated by our own inner perception of ourselves as good or bad.

Let’s get this straight right now. The people who think we are naturally evil are evil themselves and think the rest of us are too. So they have contrived to write laws and policies that keep the rest of us from doing what they are dying to do. Same with the people who say we are naturally good. I argue they create less hardm. We are not restraining the people we should be.

Humans are complex creatures who must be raised with a moral compass. I speak of public virtues as conceived by Plato and Aristotle. Seems to me that religions make up a bunch of crazy rules that benefit those institutions but not their adherents. (1) (Discuss.) viz. no meat on Friday, no dancing, no showing your hair.

As a political scientist and an observant human being, I have seen that it does not matter about private morality. I see far more evil done to us by those who are immoral in the public square. For example, Wells Fargo Bank has paid $3.7 billion in fines over the past few years for misconduct across many business lines. (2) Just think of all the good this money could have done had the bank supported low-income housing or supported public schools.

Feast your eyes on the Department of Justice corporate crimes division departments.

• Fraud Section

• Money Laundering and Asset Recovery Section

• Criminal Enforcement Program

• Procurement Collusion Strike Force

• Consumer Protection Branch

• National Security Division

• Tax Division

• Environment and Natural Resource Division

• 93 US Attorney offices

Now just imagine if public virtue instead of profit was a guiding motivation for our society and polity. We could upgrade our power grid and update our infrastructure with the money we spend on corporate crime containment.

I myself have had the opportunity to view this question through many different political and religious prisms in my 72 years on earth. I started out as a Catholic Republican, converted to Mormonism in my teens, teethed on my father’s right-wing libertarian indoctrination, swore off religion at 20, and started moving left in my political stance.

I moved left because I was now out in the real world. I no longer could credit my father’s position that we all had an equal chance to succeed. The women’s liberation movement convinced me that women were an underclass. Once I had poked my head up out of the fog of received opinion, I saw that most of us were the underclass.

I took philosophy courses at night school and embraced the women’s liberation movement. I was scandalized and horrified by Watergate. My second presidential election saw me proudly voting for Jimmy Carter, the first post-Watergate president.

I lived in the real world as a banker and real estate broker for 30 years, then I went back to college. I made the most out my political science major and went directly on to law school.

So there’s the background, the various lives I have lived that inform my opinions. We do not become indoctrinated in college, we become educated. The right only exists to indoctrinate; they do not want to be educated themselves nor do they want their children to be educated.

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1 Political science studies the tasks of the politician or statesman (politikos), in much the way that medical science concerns the work of the physician (see Politics IV.1). It is, in fact, the body of knowledge that such practitioners, if truly expert, will also wield in pursuing their tasks. The most important task for the politician is, in the role of lawgiver (nomothetês), to frame the appropriate constitution for the city-state. This involves enduring laws, customs, and institutions (including a system of moral education) for the citizens. Once the constitution is in place, the politician needs to take the appropriate measures to maintain it, to introduce reforms when he finds them necessary, and to prevent developments which might subvert the political system. This is the province of legislative science, which Aristotle regards as more important than politics as exercised in everyday political activity such as the passing of decrees (see EN VI.8). https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-politics/#ArisViewPoli

2 https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/banking/well-fargo-fines