Are Humans Naturally Good Or Bad?

Humans are the only species that fight and kill among themselves and cause other species to go extinct. Is the state of nature of humans naturally good or bad? This question has been asked in the psychological world many times. Here is my answer: although we humans have a tendency to believe that people are normally good, people are born to be bad. Because people can not have a peaceful condition of living without authority, are not trustworthy of the public, and prioritize their needs over others’ needs (self interest). Thomas Hobbes, a seventeenth century influential English philosopher, theorized that people are naturally evil and submit themselves to an absolute authority, and people distrusting others is observed everyday. Thomas Hobbes
It is critical that a society requires an authority, because people are so self-interested that society will become corrupt. For example, in Lord of the Flies by William Golding, when the boys first settled in the island, they had an efficiently running society run by a leader, Ralph. However the community that the deserted boys built came in ruins because there was no absolute authority and the other boys prioritized their own self-interests: hunting. Most of the boys ended up becoming savages, killing their own friends. This shows that humans are naturally evil because the boys’ self-interest led to several deaths and chaos. In
For example, in a social baby experiment, carried out by Professor Paul Bloom, a psychologist at Yale University shows that humans are naturally born to be good. In this experiment, babies are given choices between two dolls, one of which committed a bad deed, such as preventing the other doll from lifting a lid of a box. Each baby given a choice chooses the doll that did not commit a bad deed. This shows that humans are able to distinguish between good and evil starting from a premature age. According to Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor at University of California: Berkeley, humans are naturally compassionate and loving toward one another. He explains human natural instinct in his book, Born To Be Good. In the book, Keltner talks about how “children were tested to see if compassion was really part of human nature: children sacrificed their playing time, recess, in order to take homework to recovering children.” (D. Keltner 239). This shows that the children had an “active concern”. In another example, “a soldier was unable to shoot a wounded enemy soldier who looked like he was having a hard time surviving” (D. Keltner 225). This showed that the soldier had compassion for the wounded, although an enemy, by saving or sparing his life, and that people can be naturally