What is the sole thing that makes me an acceptable example of a human? Is it the way I talk, the way I communicate, the way I listen, think, learn or act? To take it more materialistically, am I what my genes translate to the outside world? Or maybe it is my bodily composition that leads me to be recognized as human. We call things standing up with legs human, we call things which empathize with humans, we call things who we believe ‘’feel’’ human-like. Sometimes it’s the look on their eyes or a genuine tear that gives it away. Even after we manage to identify who is one of us, there is still something we cannot quite get our heads around. That being: The moral standpoint we all have.
We tend to make judgments about people. It’s an ancient practice to ensure our safety which is quite natural. The only thing that might lead this habit to not work is the way we identify bad, unnatural, and dangerous. As a rule of the thumb, we believe someone who isn’t like us in any way is someone to be avoided, or maybe even feared. What even qualifies someone as ‘’bad’’? Can we even spot it? Do people start out ‘’bad’’ and lead their way to a saint-like life with incredible hardships? Do they start out good and eventually fall behind life and start questioning what good being virtuous has done to them? Maybe we are created to be one way and one way only and the way we came to has always been the way we needed to be in the end.
In my opinion, humans are much more complicated to be reduced to only adjectives which desperately fail to be three-dimensional. No human ever was born good or evil and no human ever died fully good or fully evil. We are just products of nature, doing natural things to live safely in our natural lives. Even if that means going out of our way to oppose nature. If someone you’ve thought was good has done something unexpected to them, then they’ve been having a bad couple of weeks. The same goes for the other party. If someone evil has been sparing too much kindness to the world, then the world greeted them with enough decency to cause a revelation. In the end we are just biological creatures with ethical and moral values fed into us. And biology is the most complicated engine any machine can work with. Sometimes the machinery fails- ‘’failing’’ is defined in our terms, not the natures- and people end up with a smaller capacity to feel leading some of us to be sociopaths. And those people are all around us, trying to blend right into society. Some are trying to overcome their nature and some fail to do so. But all is always natural, no good and no e
vil only nature trying to find its way out.
“What is better ? to be born good or to overcome your evil nature through great effort ?”
-Paarthurnax