People are inherently stupid. We have all the potential for good, but we are too stupid to see the right choice sometimes.
*shrugs* just my humble opinion.

Man is innocent.

Man then know what is good and then through aberration learnt evil.

Hence only in the light of good can one see the shadow of evil.

Go Figure.

God Bless!

People are inherently bastards

When people are born they're blank slates, it's life that makes us evil.

Human beings are born with a natural barometer which gives us a sense for right and wrong. This barometer isn't all that complex-- we essentially know we ought to play fair, not hurt each other, respect our elders, etc. When we fail to do these sorts of things, we feel bad.

Certain cultures express this in different ways. In hoity-toity college classes the professor asks whether morality is relative. Someone says, "Yes." For instance, tribes have been known to bury their grandparents alive before they're dead. This is a vice in western society, a virtue in theirs. However, if you study, the tribe buries their grandparents because they believe that if the body is not underground, the soul cannot find its way to the afterlife and gets lost. Thus, they believe in a different moral -fact-. We believe in another one when we commit our elderly to nursing homes. But here's another question: Which society is attempting to honor its elders?

Both.

So we all are born, I think, with an inherit moral compass which tells us when we're breaking the obvious rules. That leads us to the inclination to say that people are inheritly good because the vast majority of us have this sense (admittedly, some might not, but some people are also born color blind-- the vast majority of humans see in color, the vast majority of humans have a sense of right and wrong).

Moral intuitionalism, however, does not equate good character. In psychological studies people inevitably choose, in a list of scenarios, that which is most "good" in the traditional sense. Individuals like Maslow postulated that this means people are inheritly good, or moral, since they prefer the good over the evil.

I disagree.

You see, just knowing what the right choices are doesn't make you good. Morality doesn't exist in a vaccuum. In practice, the right choice involves self-sacrifice. Or, in some cases, to sacrifice something which is -not- yours. That's even worse, I think.

Because real life is so much -harder- than simply knowing the answers, people are inheritly flawed in their morality. This flaw: called sin by some, evil by others, selfishness by a few... it is as inherit as our innate moral sense. Hence, the problem of the human condition. We do wrong. We know we do wrong. But both doing wrong and knowing we do wrong is a part of our nature.

The cause of many tears. And far, far worse, I fear. Still, examining the issue, I must dissent on several other key points.

The capacity to do good and to overcome the evil circumstances of life is not in-born, and young children do not possess it. Young children are not good, they are innocent. Life has not presented them yet with those difficult decisions which make or break a man or woman. The separation between goodness and innocence is important.

In fact, children are primarily self-centered because they have not yet developed fully a sense of community and sacrifice. They are untouched, though, and untainted by the worldly, and so we place this innocence on a pedestol. Consider the story of the Garden of Eden. We look back to these days with lament, for we think that in re-attaining Eden we might find something approaching holiness, goodness, righteousness. Such is not true. We would only find innocence, which is impossible to reclaim. The Garden was, frankly, a garden. Not a wilderness, a place of contest and strife. Only in being placed into the wilderness, stripped of our innocence and naiveties, and truly tried can we really arrive at that which is basically "good" in our eyes, now-- the ability to make difficult choices, the capacity to withstand temptation, the heart to stand up for what is right even when it is not easy.

I think those are essential to the real-world conception of "good" and part of what we all must attain....

In all, I believe it is safe to say human beings are inheritly evil, because we start without that moral strength that each feels compelled to some degree or another to pursue.

good, though upbringing changes that before you could really measure it.

neither. They're not inherently anything.

evil

good