Good and Evil

Question 1

Socrates

Answer 1

We are innately good

Evil comes from ignorance not deliberate decision

If we knew what was good, we always would be good

Question 2

Plato

Answer 2

Evil occurred when rational souls fails to keep control of the other appetitive souls

Failure to balance soul

Question 3

Augustine

Answer 3

Everyone born with original sin

People are naturally evil

Only through God and religious teaching steer away from evil

Question 4

Renaissance

Answer 4

View people are naturally good Jean Jacques Rousseau

View people are naturally bad Thomas Hobbes

Question 5

Hobbes

Answer 5

How people can live together in peace without conflict

Thought all human motivation is selfish and tied to survival
○ Basic emotions are fear(negative) and desire for power(Positive)
○ Aggression is a basic and central part of human experience
○ In Leviathan, argued need for unaccountable, allpowerful sovereign who will create peaceful conditions to live
○ Social contract theory - with state

Question 6

Rosseau

Answer 6

Influenced by French revolution and Karl Marx

People are naturally peaceful and decent

“Nothing can be more gentle than man in his primitive state

Book the social contract
○ “Man is born free, and he is everywhere in chains” - society create chains –> evil, immoral behaviour - negative effects of society
○ believed that agriculture and civilization corrupted people and created strife.
○ Romanticized view of peasant life.

Question 7

Evaluating evidence (support Hobbes)

Answer 7

• To support Hobbesian view, many moral exhortations appeal to one’s self interest
  ○ “What you give is what you get”
  ○ ”I served and saw that service is joy” (Mother Theresa)
  ○ Coax people into behaving altruistically and self-sacrifice also appeal to self interest too
  ○ If we aren’t naturally selfish why do we need moral systems to nudge us toward altruistic behaviour
  § And why do we object when people don’t show gratitude

Question 8

While we may be motivated by self-interest, plenty of evidence to suggest human behaviour is not purely selfish

Answer 8

○ Ease other people’s suffering as it is unpleasant to us?
○ Assumes relationships are transactional in nature
○ Another less costy way of dealing with it is just ignore it
○ Many people don’t; around a third of the world perform charitabel activity in a given month - where we don’t see positive impact

Question 9

MODERN VIEWS

Answer 9

• Behaviourism
  ○ Environment makes people behave certain way
  ○ Watson
  § Can make anyone into anything based on environment
  ○ Skinner
  § Walden Two utopian novel using behaviourist principles
  
  • Not good or bad people, good or bad environments
  • People not as a whole naturally good or evil, but some people more likely to be evil

Question 10

Modern Research

Answer 10

ranslational evidence against Rousseau
○ Franz de Waal research on two Chmipanzee murders
○ Killing is an evolved tactic to improve killers adaptive fitness by increased access to resources
§ Can be interpreted in a Hobbesian viewpoint - desire for power, pessimistic
○ Human impact, killings are as a result of exposure to civilisations similar to Rousseau belief
○ Supports adaptive strategy hypothesis

Question 11

Selfishness and money

Answer 11

• Having more resources is only moderately correlated with happiness - weak relationship
  
  • Association with spending more on others is associated with happiness, spending on self had no relationship
    ○ Self included gifts, bills and cost of living
    ○ CONDUCTED BY ELIZABETH DUNN
  • Selfish reason to be unselfish?

Question 12

Cross species evidence

Answer 12

• Franz De Waal, chimps spontaneously comfort eachother
  
  • Animals will refrain from an action (pulling lever for food) if it is paired with another animal getting hurt
  • Animals react negatively to perceived unfairness to other animals

Question 13

Role of situation

Answer 13

• SPE
  
  • No good or bad people just good or bad environments
  • Badly conducted experiment makes evidence not strong
  • Young men, certain hormones testosterone and peersonality traits (impulsiveness) higher in younger men, does it generalise

Question 14

BOTH COULD BE WRONG

Answer 14

• Steven Pinker hypothesis in The Better Angels of Our Nature
  
  • Potentially due to policing improvements
  • Violence war and conflict falling and have been for 15 years
  • Other aspects aren’t, proliferation of democracy, trade and commerce; expansion of empathy, egalitarianism in positions of power
    Definitely challenges view civilisation is making us more immoral, but isnt entirely congruent with a Social Contract Theory either