Human Ethics
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Are human beings good, bad, or a combination of both? This is an age old question that I believe still has not been fully decided on. I want to say that when we are born it should be instinct for everyone to be good. I do not believe that bad people start out being bad. I think that this behavior occurs as when certain things happen to people. I do not believe religion should have any part in the factor of someone being good or evil. Everybody has different beliefs and should be able to practice anything they would like. Human nature is just like natural instinct and I honestly believe actions that occur in a persons life helps to define who they become.
Human nature was shaped through the forces of natural selection, like all functional features found in organisms. The reason that human nature is the way it is because it was adaptive to be that way in the past. (Cambridge, 2013) Human nature, like all functional attributes of organisms, was determined by differential reproduction of varying entities in the ancestral environment. Certain behaviors, responses, or emotions were adaptive in particular situations in our ancestors hunter-gatherer environment. Those that possessed these behaviors, responses, and emotions were more likely to reproduce than those who did not possess them; therefore the genetic predisposition toward those things was also passed down to the next generation. (Quest, 2000)
In time, the genes for those behaviors had become quite prevalent in the population, driving different alleles nearly to extinction. Of course, different genetic combinations of these adaptations could arise, but these too would be subject to the forces of natural selection. In this way, the seemingly automatic responses to many ordinary stimuli that we call “human nature” were hard-wired into our brains by natural selection at work. (Quest, 2000)
All in all, many of the behaviors and emotions we see as human nature are in reality responses to the environment of our ancestors; these behaviors have been shaped and structured by natural selection. (Parents, 2013) Contrary to the tabula rasa theory, humans do indeed have innate tendencies, but these tendencies are not intrinsically good or evil; instead, they were simply adaptive in the time in which we evolved, and are best analyzed from a functional, adaptations point of view. This type of evolutionary reasoning has enormous implications for philosophy, since it declares that the human mind does indeed have properties, but they are not defined morally. (Quest, 2000)
It should also be emphasized that, just because certain traits are part of human nature, does not mean that they are inexorable or unchangeable. It is certainly possible for cultural evolution to produce feelings and responses that are contrary to the view of human nature explained above, especially in a modern cultural context that differs widely from the ancestral environment. (Cambridge,