I have a friend who uses what he calls the “onion metaphor” – that everyone is like an onion. Some people’s first layer or two may be bad, but if you chip away at those upper layers, everyone underneath is inherently driven by the desire to be good and has the potential to be a good person and useful to society.
I personally do not agree with this, but that is just me.
Do you?
I believe we start programming our computer the moment we leave the womb if not sooner. Bad programming can make for a useless computer. Some of us have defects in our wiring right from the start. So no not everyone is inherently good or useful.
Depends entirely upon the society.
I think everyone has the potential to be good and most people are generally good but bad people do exist.
All questions that ask about “everyone” is an automatic no. Replace with “most” and I would probably say yes.
I take it your friend has never worked with ex-cons, i-bankers, and “turnaround specialists”.
There are people in this world who do the most for it by leaving it, e.g. Muammar Gaddafi, Ken Lay, and Dick Cheney (hopefully any day now).
Stranger
Everybody can be a benefit. It’s just that some of them are best suited as mulch. Rather a lot of them, actually.
Some peoples’ top layer or two may be bad, but if you chip away at those upper layers - underneath they can be really, really bad.
Dr. Cox puts in his $.02 worth.
Everyone is potentially useful to society but not all are potentially good.
I cast my vote for that - my thought being that if society considered someone purely evil, society could still find a use for them. Thinking along the lines of forced labor and lab research, etc…
I am not promoting such action - just being literal to the argument.
The key word is “potentially”. A sociopath, for example can still accept a decent code of morality through reasoning even if he does not feel anything is wrong with murder.
All people have the POTENTIAL to be good except psychopaths. Whether that potential is realized or not is the key issue.
I think ‘bad’ may be a limited yet profitable niche which isn’t just going to stay vacant.
Everybody has the potential to be useful, though that use may be as an object of experimentation to figure out how we can prevent or cure anybody else from having to be like them.
I’d like to believe that everybody has the potential to be good but I can’t. I think most people do have that potential, but there is a small subset of people that are just wired wrong from the start and are bad human beings.
Maybe as cannon fodder…
If nothing else, we can always serve as terrifying examples of what not to do…
If I didn’t believe most people were good, I’d never leave my house. If I didn’t believe a ver small percentage were extremely bad, I’d never make it back to my house after leaving it.
(Nice combo there).
… and psychopaths can be useful to society - so long as benefiting society benefits them.
Sociopaths, psychopaths, call it X - they don’t just “not feel anything is wrong with murder”, but the only reason they see not to do something is if doing it will cause them botheration. Their reasoning processes don’t involve such concepts as “the good of the group”.
The phrase ‘useful to society’ makes me cringe. The point of society is to be useful to its members, not the ther way around. A world where every member is 100% onboard with the accepted agenda, where everyone tries their best to be useful to society, would be a horrible place to live. It would be an ant colony.
I do not understand this view. Yes, society is supposed to be useful to its members. That inherently means that its members have to be useful to society, since society is just the group of members. All society is is individuals being helpful to other individuals. In fact, everything that is evil is evil because it causes harm to others.
Treating society as a monolithic group does not make any sense to me. Society is not a single person with single goals. Society is a group of people who get together to protect each other.
I do not get why you are treating society as some sort of “other.”
Anyways, my answer to the OP: assuming you are mentally healthy enough that capable of becoming a person at all, you do start out with both the ability to be good and useful. No one is wired so that they can’t be, although some need much more help than others.
It is possible for a human being to become broken, however, to the point that they can’t be repaired. But we tend to give up too soon on that. You might not be able to rehabilitate them but that doesn’t mean you can’t redirect their desires.
These broken people are, in a sense, incapable of doing good, since they lack the motivation. But everything they do can actually be good, as in not harmful to anyone, themselves or others.
Finally, I do hold out hope that this will not always be the case. If you have the potential to be good at birth, that potential can never entirely go away. We’ve got to be able to get it back in some way.
Also, most bad people are nowhere near that far gone.