For those who have not had the opportunity to read the entire thread, we've now added the concept that I'm deciding whether or not to annihilate all humans by pressing a button that makes them disintegrate. Hence subjectivity becomes irrelevant because it gets us no nearer the answer.

Quote from aneroplancape

The Devil EyesAll Of Us Are BadDont Deny This FactWe Are All Evil.We All Have The Devil EyesWe See What We WantAnd We Envy People Who Have ItWe Want To Tear Them ApartOr Rip Off HeadsBut We DontWe Dont Because We Have Self Control.- Fin

I saw this piece of spam, and it got me thinking. Are human beings basically evil? For those who can't read it, it says:

We all see the world through the eyes of the devil. Don't deny it; we are all evil. We see things which we want to possess and we envy those that have it. Sometimes we envy them enough to fantasise about committing, or sometimes actually commit, crimes in order to possess what we want. If we did not feel in some way constrained against our will by society we would be violent and murderous creatures.

Jutsu's thread about what you would do if you had just 24 hours to live threw up some examples of this sort of thing. Freed from consequences, at least four people have planned out killing sprees. You could argue that they wouldn't actually do it, but the fact that a person can derive pleasure from merely thinking about such acts is, on some level a psychopathic trait.

Freud argued that people all desired to commit barbaric acts, but were only stopped by an inherent feeling of responsibility to society. If people were completely free from repression and able to do what they wanted, they would rape and kill and run around naked for the hell of it.

In ecological terms, man is the most destructive creature on the planet. Throughout history there have been mass extinctions correlated with the arrival of humans to a particular area; Australia and North America most notably.

In sub-Saharan Africa and mountainous regions of Pakistan where the law has less influence, groups of rebels spring up and kill local populations for pleasure. Many developing countries have to excessively pad their military budget because commanders are blackmailing the politicians with threats of coup d'état. Chad is so corrupt that just 1% of aid given for education ever reaches to schools. If people weren't being so self-serving their quality of life might actually improve in the long run as their countries develop, and certainly the situation would be many times better for the majority, but because they are everyone suffers. The global cost of a single country having stagnant growth rates has been pegged at $10,000,000,000 per year, and this is entirely the result of human failings, largely malicious.

So, is humanity overall evil?

(Yes, I've presented a very biased point of view and am aware that I'm deliberately overlooking stuff. I'll post my personal viewpoint later on)

I don't believe so. I think it's less that people, freed from consequences, would do evil things, and more that people think that they would do evil things if freed from consequences.

I'm not trying to bring religion into this discussion, only to use personal experience as an example, but I remember a long time ago participating in a thread here about whether religion is a requirement for morality to exist. I was a theist at the time, and was arguing the affirmative. I was asked something like "So if you were an atheist, you'd go around killing people?" and I answered that I would, because I would have no god to answer to. (BTW, i'm not saying that I am necessarily a typical case, and am not generalizing, I'm only talking about myself here)

Lo and behold, I became an atheist, and I'm not going around killing people. This is because, well, I have no reason to kill someone. We don't take actions based on things we DON'T believe. Me not being responsible to a higher power doesn't mean that I'm automatically going to do evil things. If I kill someone it's because there was a reason for it, just like any other action. There's nothing stopping me from covering the paper in front of me in pentagrams, because we don't perform actions based on the fact that there's nothing stopping us from doing it.


There is no such thing as a person who kills people for no reason. A psychopath does it because he has a compulsion to do it, not because there's nothing stopping him from doing it.

Quote from Ash

There is no such thing as a person who kills people for no reason.

Yes there is. It could be an accident. :P /being nit-picky

No, that's a weird thing to believe in. Isn't a personality shaped while we're being raised? We're born with merely our instincts and the potential to learn, imho.

If this post gets ignored and somebody makes a similar point and gets acknowledged, I'm going to snap and ban some people.

Quote from Mantha

Yes there is. It could be an accident. :P /being nit-picky

No, that's a weird thing to believe in. Isn't a personality shaped while we're being raised? We're born with merely our instincts and the potential to learn, imho.

If this post gets ignored and somebody makes a similar point and gets acknowledged, I'm going to snap and ban some people.

Who could possibly ignore you? You have the presence of a six foot pink gorilla.

What if part of that instinct you mentioned is evil - an instinct to reproduce by whatever means necessary including rape for instance - but only controlled by that learning - the social expectations that keep you in line?

Quote from Zed

Who could possibly ignore you? You have the presence of a six foot pink gorilla.

Lol, excuse me?

What if part of that instinct you mentioned is evil - an instinct to reproduce by whatever means necessary including rape for instance - but only controlled by that learning - the social expectations that keep you in line?

Instinct to reproduce isn't followed by rape. Rapists don't really want kids, usually. We are born with instincts and the socialization helps us to keep them in line, but they're not evil. It's like saying animals are evil because they've got instincts?

It was just an example. Better one: our instinct to survive has led us to hunt hundreds of species of animal to extinction that were perfectly happy before we arrived. Look at the giant sloth of North America. Is that evil of us?

We didn't need to eat that many animals just because we were hungry. That was greedy. Sure it's evil, but it's caused by the greed, not instinct.

Whatever aspect of us it was caused by, it was caused by us. If it was an evil action, and the many similar actions (extinction of the bullockornis of Australia; other, more modern, destructive acts of greed like pollution) are evil too, then humanity, by extension, is evil.

a lot of humans are evil in some way.
i'm sure theres some pure hearted ones.
though, i haven't met any.
but i know of one.

Quote from Zed

Whatever aspect of us it was caused by, it was caused by us. If it was an evil action, and the many similar actions (extinction of the bullockornis of Australia; other, more modern, destructive acts of greed like pollution) are evil too, then humanity, by extension, is evil.

Sure, but we cannot be born evil per se. Each of us has their own mistakes, but that doesn't make us evil.

What is "evil"?

Quote from Ash

A psychopath does it because he has a compulsion to do it, not because there's nothing stopping him from doing it.

Just throwing this out there -- psychopathy is just a detachment from empathy, not a compulsion to do "evil" things. Being a killer doesn't make you a psychopath and being a psychopath doesn't make you a killer.

The fact that most of us have consciences and empathy towards others means I really don't think humanity is inherently evil, along with the reasons Ash mentioned.

Automaton's brought up a good point.

If evil is defined as "doing more harm than good to others", for example, then humanity as a whole would almost certainly fit the bill in terms of the environmental destruction and extermination of various species.

If evil is defined as "knowing something is wrong but doing it anyway, or doing it precisely because it is wrong", then some humans are evil and some are not. This being the case, psychopaths could not be considered evil because they do not know what is wrong. This particular definition of evil can only be applied on an individual level, however. With a much wider subject matter - a species - a different definition is needed.

Personally, I think there's too much generalization.

Is humanity evil? No.

Are some people evil? Yes, depending on how you interpret "evil".
I think evil is when you believe something is wrong, and could harm others as Zed said, and still doing it with no remorse.

Then again with humanity as a generalization of our species, I would say yes just because I think that there is a lot more evil people than people whom aren't.

Quote from Ash

I don't believe so. I think it's less that people, freed from consequences, would do evil things, and more that people think that they would do evil things if freed from consequences.

I'm not trying to bring religion into this discussion, only to use personal experience as an example, but I remember a long time ago participating in a thread here about whether religion is a requirement for morality to exist. I was a theist at the time, and was arguing the affirmative. I was asked something like "So if you were an atheist, you'd go around killing people?" and I answered that I would, because I would have no god to answer to. (BTW, i'm not saying that I am necessarily a typical case, and am not generalizing, I'm only talking about myself here)

Lo and behold, I became an atheist, and I'm not going around killing people. This is because, well, I have no reason to kill someone. We don't take actions based on things we DON'T believe. Me not being responsible to a higher power doesn't mean that I'm automatically going to do evil things. If I kill someone it's because there was a reason for it, just like any other action. There's nothing stopping me from covering the paper in front of me in pentagrams, because we don't perform actions based on the fact that there's nothing stopping us from doing it.


There is no such thing as a person who kills people for no reason. A psychopath does it because he has a compulsion to do it, not because there's nothing stopping him from doing it.

I think that there is a reason to not kill people, like getting shot by a cop or an electric chair. Just because your freed from gods concequinces doesn't mean society isn't going to point a gun at your head with a full chamber loaded with laws. That and I don't think you seem to be the kind of person to envy or be greedy, so I highly doubt that you would kill someone out of it.
A good arguement is, what if someone had something you need not simply want. However they need it equally, the both of you are freed from all laws and that ****er won't give it up no matter what. If you kill him for it are you evil?