A hypothetical: If all laws regarding murder were removed for an indeterminate period of time, would there be a blood bath in the streets?
I believe that morals, ethics, and the"golden rule basics" develop primarily as a result of good parenting, religious values, and education as well as peers who hopefully have goodmorals and ethics. I do not believe that people are “genetically born good”.
In my opinion, there are multitudes of people who harbor enough hate and anger that without laws against it they would kill people in large numbers if they knew that they would get away with it.
How do you feel about the innate goodness of mankind? If laws against robbery, rape, burglary, breaking traffic laws and so on were all removed, I believe the evil resulting from this would be magnified to the umptienth degree.
I believe that perhaps many years ago, a relaxation or removal of laws would not have led to a bloodbath in the streets. However, these days people seem to think that it’s their right to shoot, stab, rape and steal simply because the world owes them something and they have the right to take it.
There will always be a minority who have no morals, principles and no sense of right or wrong who will use violence to get whatever they want. Fortunately the majority of people, at least in my country, seem to realise that society functions best when we at least stick to a few basic principles for good behaviour.
I think people are basically good. If you reverse the scenario you laid out…and go back to when there were no laws, people solved their differences by creating rules. There is an inborn sense of fairness, I think. People noticed that not everyone wants to play by the rules, so they create laws in an attempt to protect those who want to play fair from those who let their sense of greed override their sense of fairness. Empathy is a pretty natural response to the suffering of others.
I think that certain behavior is in the interest of society as a whole and that we call these things ‘good.’ I think social institutions are important in imprinting these values on individuals.
I think people act in their own self interest, and that ‘good’ behavior is ultimately in people’s best interest as it maintains the greatest amount of well-being for the largest number of people. I think when a culture decays to a certain point, or does not develop or maintain institutions that teach these values that the culture can reach a tipping point, by which short-term self interest trump everything, or by which ordinary people are convinced to unbelievably heinous acts (Nazi Germany being the most obvious example).
There is some innate “goodness”, because one of the instinctive drives among small children is to please their parents. Babies and small children (talking 0-3) need loving human beings in their lives, and will go to great lengths to sustain relationships with them.
Laws didn’t come into being out of thin air – we created them because of a desire for rational, peaceful co-existence. The laws are a manifestation of who we are, just as much as the lawlessness.
For the same reason, I don’t think that laws alone are keeping people in check. While many children are forced into religious practices while growing up because of their family’s culture, I think that a much larger number of adults deliberately seek religion because they want to live meaningful, peaceful lives.
But, OTOH, the genocide in Rwanda and the former Soviet republics does demonstrate that people who once lived peacefully can go absolutely berserko when the conditions are right. Is it because of pent-up rational anger over real events, or just a crazy random flaw in human beings (and a willingness among others to follow them)? Is it a necessary mechanism that keeps the population in check, where peacefulness might result in overpopulation that weakens the group even more? We are still animals.
I think most people are good, if you removed all the rules, the bad ones would cause vigilante groups to be formed. This would lead to abuses, false charges resulting in death and “frontier justice”. I do not find these desirable goals.
I do not believe the society could remain lawless for very long. We seem to create rules of conduct or laws where needed and even where not needed. In the vacuum of law, a despot is likely to eventually arise to bring order to scared and frightened people. I take our current very flawed system and work towards improving it over and despot in history.
Humans are social animals, not merely socialized animals. We are hardwired to engage in various forms of cooperative behaviour - including cooperatively attacking rival groups of humans. Are we innately good? Define good. We’re innately social, and some aspects of our innate social behaviour are paradigmatic of “good”.
Yes, and babies’ and small children’s behavior is also quite evil – they are incredibly selfish, violent, and think little of others. As St. Augustine said, “If children are innocent it is not for lack of will to do harm but for lack of strength.”
Every society has rules that it enforces, so saying that you’re going to eliminate laws misses the whole point of what it means to be human in the first place. If you eliminated the laws, something would be developed to replace them. You can’t be human without a society that enforces some sense of right and wrong.
I also think **Contrpuntal **made an important point. “Good” is defined as that which enhances human life. Are we “good” when we kill other animals to eat? Well, that’s just our nature, but it sure ain’t “good” from the animal’s perspective. When we save other human lives is that “good”, even if it means hogging more resources for our species and crowding out other species?
But if the OP wants to know whether humans innately want to help other or hurt them, I’d say **Gorsnak **got it right. We instinctively do want to help our in-group, but we care little about our out-groups. We may not instinctively want to kill any random out-grouper we encounter, but we tend not to trust them and tend to favor our in-group whenever there is a conflict.
What have laws got to do with it? Given the number of homicides in a year in this country, it’s reasonably safe to say our streets are already running.
Yes and no. It’s probably true that humans couldn’t have become this numerous without institutionalizing a prohibition on murder. OTOH, humans needn’t have codified laws, in the modern sense, in order to increase in numbers at every population density imaginable. We clearly became quite numerous before anyone wrote down a single law. And since we don’t form one single society, one might argue that those societies which strongly discourage murder will have a better chance of survival than those which don’t.
And since individuals are always part of some society or population, those populations where restraint wrt violence is more common are more likely to produce larger number of surviving members. To the extent that that restraint is genetic, then that becomes part of human nature.
It depends on what you mean by “getting away with it.” Because repercussions for any violenct act aren’t necessarily just what the coppers do to you. If I can kill Vladimir, Vladimir’s friends and relatives can kill me.
I don’t believe mankind is inherently “good” or “evil.” I believe mankind is inherently selfish. One can argue that even the most selfless acts have an element of selfishness in them, e.g. “I’m going to help that old person across the street because I want to be a ‘good’ person.”
Only if there was something in it for them. Hypothetically speaking, I would presume that with the absence of formal law, individuals will take the up the slack with personal retribution. So whether it’s retribution from the state or your victim’s survivors, the prospect of punishment will always be present. If the transgressor thinks they can escape retribution or the punishment doesn’t outweigh the perceived gains, the person will go ahead and be “bad.”
I also think that one could argue that this is the state we already live in.