Are Humans Inherently Good

In philosophy and ethics, an ancient debate has raged on for centuries. A seemingly simple question has led some of the greatest philosophers ever to lock horns. Are humans inherently good or evil? I believe we are good, however we have different ideas of what “good” is, or circumstance forces us to turn evil.

First of all, to debate this we must understand what “good” is. Is “good” fairness, or being kind to other? One interesting definition is Aristotle’s, who proposed that how good something is depends on how well it performs it’s function. For example, since knives are meant to cut and sharp knives cut well, a sharp knife is a good knife. In reality, we all have different concepts of what good is. If you look at people like Hitler, you

can see that he believed he was doing a good thing by purifying bloodlines. However, as you can see in Night by Elie Wiesel, he thought it was reasonable to do so by committing genocide against the Jewish people. Most people are not like Hitler though, and are good people. We try to do right by following our ideas of good, which shows our inherent “goodness”.
Furthermore, pretty much everybody is born as a “good” person. Having volunteered over a hundred hours at children’s camps, I have seen how children try to be kind to each other, and share what they have. And even when we are not toddlers we are still good people. Look at your friends and the people around. Most if not all of them are “good” people.
In addition, I have heard the arguments that many people like scammers and thieves know what they are doing is bad or evil, yet they continue doing it.

However, a study by Stanford University found that many career criminals, rapists, drug users, etc. were abused as children, had a rough childhood, or had traumatic experiences. And, there have been many incidents of mothers having to resort to stealing small amounts of food to feed their children and save them from starving. In these cases, these people were inherently good, it’s just that their experiences or the circumstances they were in shaped or forced them to do some morally wrong things. If you provide them access to therapy and new opportunities, they can be good. But even if most people are inherently good, not all are. Many serial killers or rapists are just purely evil people. This just comes down to the majority over the minority. As actor Patton Oswalt said, “If it’s one person or a HUNDRED people, that number is not even a fraction of a percent of the population on this planet [...] The vast majority stand against that darkness [..] We would not be here if humanity was inherently evil. We’d have eaten ourselves long ago.” We cannot judge everybody because of the actions of a minority, so as a majority, we are

good.
In conclusion, we as humans are good. We try to do the right things and do them the right way. While a fraction of us are evil because of our circumstances, we cannot let the outliers define us. We are and always will be inherently good.