Semi-cheesy question Are most people inherently good?

rhandco
Fri, 01 Apr 2016 17:33:02 +0000

Maybe you are thinking of a Boltzmann distribution - highest probability is earlier and end of curve tails off. Like a narrow bell curve in the beginning, and few in the population at the end.

I think that is probably the best way to describe people. Few people are very very good, but many people are good, and then you have a range of evil, with fewer and fewer the more evil people get.

The thing is, it doesn’t take much evil to do a lot of damage. Negligence and carelessness hurt and kill a lot of people.

As for laws, laws are very specifically for the worst of us, and the rest of us have to have our lives regulated for the very few. The only reason we don’t walk around naked is because a few people would take advantage of us. The only reason it is illegal to hit someone is that some people can’t be trusted to do so only in self-defense. As a professor, we have many really stupid rules that are annoying and disruptive to thousands of students, all in place so that a few students don’t cheat or hurt other students. We have students sit so they can’t see another student’s paper. Then we have a professor who steps out of the room to take a phone call during an exam…

Laws are not for the general public. They are for the few in the general public who would mess things up for others. Just like playing a sport with no referee. That’s fine until you have someone who breaks the unwritten rules.