by Scott Birch

Created on: March 19, 2009

The inherency of good or evil in humans is a trick question. One must assume, since there is no moral code in the animal kingdom, that humans are neither inherently good nor evil and that morality is nothing more than a valuable human invention.

At one point, Humans were little more than advanced apes. We lived according to the food chain, wandering in small bands, left to the mercy of the environment and one another.

We fought over women, land and food as we drudged through the very slow infancy of our species. Over this stretch of time, our minds began the assent to intelligence and we slowly went about developing communities and primitive forms of government. Our morality began to grow within these primitive cultures.

It isn't hard to imagine how developing a moral code would be useful in preserving and strengthening a community. It is always preferable to not kill, rape or steal from your neighbor in that it builds solidarity and trust. One might occasionally lend a hand in the hopes that one day he or she would be repaid in some way.

In these modest beginnings we find the bud that is now the flower of our morality, our sense of good and evil.

Through moral eyes, we put qualities or draws on things that aren't necessarily good or evil. A driver who lets us into his lane during a traffic gridlock is good'. The corner of your doorframe that you constantly stub your foot against is a piece of sh*t'. When you watch a nature channel and see a lion chasing a gazelle, the lion is the bad' guy.

These assignments of good and evil put us under the illusion that we understand the world, it assists us in coping with living on a planet of chaos and injustice, the positive flipside being that we have a conscious and it prevents us from acting in a way that would negatively affect others and ourselves.

One might define good' in this way: good is anything that strengthens, preserves or enables the positive movement and evolution of our communities, countries and our species. This is an extremely broad definition, one that must be open to revision and question (I warn the reader that the process of proving the good to be good is ridiculous and tedious). Obviously, anything bad would be the opposite of the defined good.

Labeling a newborn as inherently evil is, frankly, nothing more than religious stupidity. One must safely say that they are good, that they are innocent and worthy of love, care and deserve an upbringing in the most positive environment possible.

Humanity presupposes morality; therefore it is not possible for a human to be born inherently moral or immoral. The truth is simple and devastating: humans are inherently human.

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