Might doesn’t make right. Right is something everyone knows in, no matter who is the current power holder. No one in the world is so quick
to give up their morals and ethics to agree with, the one who is in power,
solely because they are the one in power. That’s the cause of most
revolutions.
Sorry if anyone’s already touched on this, but…
Good and bad are not objective qualities. They are never inherent. It takes one to perceive or experience another as good or bad in order for them to be so.
Not that I’m going back on what I said above, but Thomas Hobbs offers a model by which good can come out of a group of inherently bad people. Hobbs says that we form societies for the sake of protecting ourselves from each other. If there was no social order - no laws - then the stronger or more clever of us would out brute or out wit the weaker and less sharp. We mutually agree to play by the rules of an implicit contract (usually in the form of legislative documents) so as to refrain from living in an anarchical world, thereby fostering good behavior and amicable relationships.
If you look at my original post, that’s the exact same thing I said, except spoken differently.
They can be objective qualities if a majority of people make an objective qualification of them. There seems to be a fairly large majority of people who would say that murder is “bad;” wouldn’t that mean that, for at least now, murder could be considered bad?
And yes, I mean morally bad.
Hum, Hitler was a tea tottler, many could claim this to be redeeming??
People are neither good or bad inherently. Our “natural” state, without cultural influences, is amoral - without morals - which is different from immoral. Animals are amoral. When a swimmer is taken by a shark, we don’t call the shark evil or bad, because it’s ignorant of what’s good and bad. It’s similar with very young children. They may behave “badly” but it wouldn’t be correct to call them “bad” or “immoral”, because of the lack of bad intentions.
To generalise, “good” and “bad” are subjective values we place on people when two main conditions are met. (That these values are subjective does NOT mean they’re unreal.) The first condition entails objective behaviour. I think good practical definitions of moral/immoral behaviours are actions that are selfless/selfish. The second condition is subjective intention. Moral intentions mean knowing about the selfless and selfish options and the ability to choose between them.
Animals and very young children behave “selfishly” because they’re driven by their instincts to do so. They don’t have a choice, so they’re not really “bad”. As children become older, they are trained by their parents and society to behave in a “good” way, which requires that they’re made aware of the difference between right and wrong. Only then, with awareness and the ability to choose, is it fair to call someone who behaves selfishly a “bad” person.
I’ll throw my hat in the ring for man’s nature being inherently good.
Recent evidence suggests that we have an innate moral grammar, which this lay article outlines fairly clearly.
But, of course, much of this has been known for a long, long time. To quote The Mencius,
You can’t say anything is inherently good or evil, as both exist only in the mind. You can say ‘Is man inherently out for his own benifit’ as ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are two methods of looking after oneself. It all comes down to how much you trust other people to help you if you help them.
I would argue that both exist definitionally. As in, we human beings, define what is ‘good’ and ‘evil’. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be an innate trait. After all, colours are a semiotic construction (what is ‘red’ about a wavelength of 650nm?), but we don’t doubt the ‘innate’ nature of those constructs.
Then we argue about where red exists… in the object… in the light itself… in the eye… in the brain? Light is physical, you can measure it, of course. We can make a machine that can measure the wavelength of light because light is a real physical energy state, but you cannot measure an opinion. Opinions are not real things.
[size=75]…take the universe and grind it down to the finest powder and sieve it through the finest sieve and the show me one atom of justice, one molecule of mercy. And yet you act as there is some rightness in the universe by which it may be judged.
~Terry Pretchet, The Hogfather[/size]
What is real?
By your standard ‘red’ still isn’t real, it is just an opinion of what 650nm might be. I do not think that such an explanation is very satisfactory. After all, opinions are based off something, now we could argue about the validity of opinions, but their actuality?
If you need an excuse to control people, saying they are inherently bad is the right way to go. After all, if people are inherently good then they don’t really need to be controlled do they?
This concept, that people are inherently bad and need to be controlled is a primary basis of reasoning for having the law and its forcible control of the people.
If people were generally good, you wouldn’t need to have any laws to control their behavior, you could just deal with the few miscreants on an ad-hoc basis. But if you wanted to control people you could just pass a few unpopular laws and suddenly all the people are bad and the law is in need of enforcement.
It is a self-fullfilling position in the favor of the power mad and the megalomainacs among us.
rigid definitions is what i’m best at 
In a proper morality, that is a code to guide mans choices and action - the choices and actions that make up his life.
in such a morality, the basis is “life,” who’s life, well man’s life, every human. What are the requirements of human life. That if for morality to discover (and it has). Now with life as the basis we can provide a definition for good and evil:
Good is everything which sustains and furthers man’s life.
Evil (or bad) is everthing with hinders or destroys it.
or a fuller discussion of this view of philosophy:
I reckon the ‘bad’ behaviour of man is not really bad at all. Only that it’s now frowned upon in society. I mean maybe man had to kill each other at some stage for survival, or even to prevent disease spreading. Maybe thats why we have so much of it today? Its possible!
Also these primal feelings and behaviours that simply dont fit in to society may need to be expressed, but because we can’t some people can’t handle that. And that could be where murderers and psychopaths come from? Perhaps they feel so bad, for being ‘bad’ that they can’t handle it and the behaviour is amplified?
Just a thought 
Man is originally amoral without expression of thought or all rationality which to me implies a sort of blissful peace.
Once a man understands that vice is created by human beings themselves we know that human beings weren’t originally this way but instead became this present reality through long cycles of abstract inventions perpetuated by memetics.
Honestly, I doubt if a single person can be inherently good or evil. First of all, the concept of a person only thinking one way and one way alone on all matters is absurd. For instance, who has ever heard of a person being a strict political leftist or rightest, to contrast that, most people take the majority of their ideas from one side, while a select few come from the other. That said, the same must be the case with morality, in fact, it can very easily be said that morality is relative rather than definite. What is moral? What morals outweigh other morals? Well, to find the answers to these questions, one must look within oneself. For instance, depending on what one considers to be morally sound or unsound acts, it is possible that one can commit an act of immorality in order to pursue what one finds to be an act of greater morality than that which he refused to commit, an example of this will be provided later. Although this is overly controversial, I will also show that Adolf Hitler did what he felt was morally correct, before I conclude.
No time in history has ever been regarded by Americans as a whole as more prolific than World War II, and Adolf Hitler may be one of the most recognized names in the entire world. Here comes the controversy, Adolf Hitler was not an immoral man. Why did he come to power? Well, the reason Adolf Hitler pursued office was because he loved Germany, he loved the German people, predominantly he loved what he felt the traditional German should be, and he felt the country was in disarray. Adolf Hitler finally came to power after relatively little time attempting to get himself to that point, so if he is so moral, and has so much love for his countrymen, why slaughter the Jews? Well, in short, he needed a patzi. Honestly, Adolf Hitler couldn’t bring himself to blame the Germans for the state of disarray of the country because he saw his Germans to be perfect in every way. Honestly, Adolf Hitler’s morals lay in bettering his countrymen, nothing else was more important, so some of his other morals would have to be stepped on. He wasn’t the ruthless cold-blooded killer everyone makes him out to be, this is proven by the fact that prior to getting into office he never killed anyone, in fact, he’d never been in so much as a fight. Hitler was a very calm, collected, and quite brilliant individual, many would argue his intelligence, but let us consider that had the Japanese not bombed Pearl Harbor, the U.S.A. wouldn’t have gooten involved, Hitler and the Germans would have crushed all of Europe, probably beaten the U.S. afterward, and Hitler would essentially run the world.
What is it that people do in the end? Well, when the chips are down and someone at the table pushes all in, he or she does what he/she believes to be morally most correct. No person can possibly be inherently evil and those viewed as being such are viewed that simply because they are morally (which is relative, I reiterate) outside the mainstream. The bottom line is that everyone does what they do that will make them most easily able to look themselves in the mirror the next day, Hitler didn’t commit suicide because he was scared of what would happen, or because he was sorry about what he did to the Jews, he did it because he felt he failed the German people and he couldn’t live with that. So, in all matters, including those of morality, it is always better to say, “I disagree,” rather than, “You’re wrong.”