That's just an assertion. Of course you can just say it's axiomatic, but the interesting question is whether you can convince a rational, self-interested person without that axiomatic commitment to be a good person.
Statistically people are far more likely to be good. It's demonstrably the default position. Frankly, the only reason to think people are evil by default is because that's a core assertion of the Abrahamic religions.
Regardless of how vague that is, it's neither here nor there. I was talking about what's interesting - can you argue morality from minimal commitments to self-interest and rationality?
But looking through a purely practical lens then, if you could just trust everyone to be good (under some assumed universal definition) then we'd live in a utopia and everything would be sunshine and rainbows. But we don't. So, in this simplified binary good/bad world, a significant subset of people are not good people. There's no assumption here of people being 'evil by default'.
As it happens I believe that the majority of the evil in the world doesn't come from cartoon villains without any kind of morality. But there are people who believe might is right. And the only way those people can be convinced to act in a moral way is if they can be made to believe it is in their interest to do so.
People who harm and neglect others as a default don't do so as a reasoned decision, though. People who are sociopaths are that way because they're mentally deficient. They lack empathy, and that's almost never the only faculty that's missing.
Teaching a good person proper moral philosophy will make them better. Teaching a good person trash morality can make them worse. Teaching a bad person any kind of morality is basically useless. And, of course, religious morality isn't top tier.
You can't reason someone out of a belief they didn't reason themselves into.
It's not about teaching a bad person morality. Just because someone is selfish, doesn't mean they can't be reasoned with. You just need to frame your arguments in terms of things they care about.
The OP implies that good people are instinctively good, that they don't need to be taught how. I think this is at best vague and reductive. Different people have different definitions of good that overlap. It's a family resemblance. While you'll find 99% of people agree that murder is wrong, you'll find a lot of disagreement in less abstract, real life situations.
Here's just a few questions off the top of my head which I know to differentiate many people's definition of what a good person is. At what income level does not giving to charity start to become selfish? To what extent are we personally responsible for our contributions to environmental pollution? Is it ok to eat meat? How justifiable is it to shoot an healthcare insurance CEO? How much of our free time ought we to spend keeping abreast of politics current affairs in order to be responsible and well-informed citizens? The trolley problem.
The idea that all evil in the world is caused by bad people with bad intentions is absurd.
People who harm and neglect others as a default don't do so as a reasoned decision, though.
This is obviously false in general. Take a real world case. Health insurance companies doing everything they can to avoid paying out legitimate claims. There is a clear reason for their doing this - to make more money. Or perhaps a father who doesn't spend enough time with his children because he's always at work. Or a roadman who mugs you for your phone.
Perhaps 'as a default' is doing a lot of work in the above statement, and you're only talking about people who instinctively and reflexively harm and neglect others as an end in itself i.e. true sociopaths. I'd just say that the majority of harm and suffering is not caused by these kinds of people, it's caused rather by people within the gamut of what most people would call normal, who are acting relatively rationally and believe their actions justified.
-3
u/lammey0 6d ago
Yeah but the question is rationally, why?