Are Humans Innately Good or Evil?

Plato posed the question of whether human beings are innately good or evil, or are we born neutral and learn through experiences goodness and evilness. Are humans prone to evil desires and actions until they experience good or do we learn evil tendencies? Plato believed humans are innately evil and become good only through learned behavior. If so how do we learn good behavior and transition from being innately evil to being good mannered? If Plato is right and we are innately evil, should we be punished for our actions because we know no better until we learn goodness? Plato believes people are born with certain knowledge and that knowledge remains the same until we are taught differently, does that go the same with good and evil. Are we born evil and remain evil until someone teaches us otherwise, or are we good and remain good until taught otherwise?

It goes with the "original sin" idea. Since the fall of Adam and Eve, we are born with sinful natures and driven to satisfy those desires by any means necessary and sometimes we can curb that desire and see the good within. Original sin theory seems to follow Plato's original theory about humans being born ingrained with evil desires and actions instead of neutrality as Coelho leads us to think. If we are born with sinful natures, then how can we be innocent? Original sin puts the desire in our minds/bodies/souls. It is something we cannot control; something like Plato says we are born with. We are born with our desires no matter if they are good or bad. It is not something that we can learn, a person doesn't learn a certain tendency. Behaviors are learned, but the desire isn't so much learned in the same way. A behavior could be presented to a person, but that behavior can be rejected or accepted whereas the desire and tendency isn't. Our ideas of good and evil we are born with, and honed as we grow older through experience and learning.

In his novel The Devil And Miss Prym, Paulo Coelho states "Good and Evil have the same face; it all depends on when they cross the path of each individual human being." Paulo sees humans as being both good and evil, and while a person can generally be good by nature there will be a time when that person succumbs to evil desires in one form or another, and vise versa. If a person has evil-like tendencies an act of goodness could change their tendencies and what they'd lean towards. A person can have all the hate in the world, but sometimes it takes one act of kindness, one show of goodness to change all the hate and replace it with kindness and love. Good and evil take time to show face so to speak. We all have that capability within, it is just a matter of when each will come out. When will something happen that will cause us to do something "evil based" such as stealing to feed a hungry family.

Too often we try to make excuses for our actions and why we do certain things others may think is improper or evil by some standards. Thomas Hardy put it best in his novel Jude The Obscure; "do not do an immoral thing for moral reasons." We may feel justified in doing something immoral, but that doesn't excuse the action. We tend to try and justify things we do that as Plato would put it are "evil." We say things like "its okay if I key his car; he cheated on me," "its okay that I date two men at once I need to see who will treat me better." or even "Its okay to kill that woman she abused and neglected a child." While these are moral reasons, the act itself is immoral. But because we try to justify the things we do that are considered immoral; does that really make us evil? In another sense what is considered immoral and who is to way what is? In some cultures it is okay to do to one person what they did to another. The idea of an eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth comes to my mind.

Thomas Hardy has also said 'But a resolution to avoid an evil is seldom framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidance impossible." We try our best to avoid what is deemed evil because we don't want to be considered evil. We try to avoid it, but in the same sense we don't realize evil desires until we feel them or do them. It is afterwards that we feel like we did something wrong and feel guilty about it. Many times when it becomes too late is when we decide we want to try and avoid the evil act. It is virtually impossible to avoid evil in life because it is all around us in many different forms. Good and Evil have different faces, different forms, different personas. We never know what is evil or good until we are staring it in the face and then, we decide to attempt to avoid it, yet we can't.

Good nor evil does not rule our lives, but the terror of evil does. Coelho says in Devil and Miss Prym "there was terror in each and every one of the people.." We do things based on our own fears. We try to avoid things that are considered evil or immoral because we fear the consequences of that action. We fear rejection, failure, being alone, what others would say and so much more. We allow terror to keep us from doing things because we fear that someone else would consider what we do as evil. Sometimes evil can feed off of that terror and lay in waiting to present itself the way Coelho says earlier in the book. Coelho states later in the book "they were evil because they had personal experience of evil." Coelho sees humans as having the quality of being both good and evil, but we need to experience one or the other before we become that. Plato on the other hand believes humans are evil by nature, that we are born with evil within us.

One things that interesting about what Coelho says is "Man needs what's worst in him in order to achieve what's best in him.' We need to see the things in us that would be considered evil not by other's standard but our own in order to see the things within us that are good. We need to know our flaws so to speak before we can highlight our strengths. Good needs evil and evil needs good. Sometimes the worst in us can bring out the good in us, but at the same time the best in us can bring out the worst in us. Sometimes when we think of things we consider to be the worst in us, the evil in us, we begin to see the things we think are good like our goals and our dreams, our compassion ad our warm-heartedness.

Coelho said good and evil have the same face. Good and evil both live within us, the author and philosopher believes we are all capable to good and evil acts. It doesn't mean we are born one way or the other, but with both desires within us. Sometimes when we do something we feel is wrong, we feel guilt about it and thus need to justify our actions. Aristotle said that humans by nature are social animals; we are neither good nor evil, but social. We do what we feel is socially accepted sometimes what is socially unaccepted. We act on impulse and those impulses are neither good nor evil, it takes someone else to decide what is. Who is to say what is good and what is evil? We all have different characteristics, some good some evil. In the words of Popeye: I am what I am. How can we change who we are? How can one single act of goodness change the evilness within someone say a murder? Can humans be innately evil, or are we born with some sort of goodness within?