The Nature of Man

The first thing to get straight is the use of the word "man." For most of the history of western society, I think the term "man" has been used to mean all of humanity. It is only relatively recently that we have become obsessed with gender. In my opinion, we have done a disservice to the language by narrowing the definition of this word to mean "male person." When I use the word "man" in these notes, I mean humanity, or mankind, or people in general. I refuse to be politically correct when it is to no good purpose.

Anthropology is the study of humanity; it means literally, "to talk about human beings. " This is the second area of knowledge that leads me to an understanding of what God wants me to do and why. Deciding about the nature of man is important in ethics because to understand what I need to become as a human being requires that I understand where I begin. To know what is "right living" I must first know what I am. What is my essential nature? Am I by nature good, neutral, or evil?

If I'm basically good, then right living will mean somehow becoming aware of my innate desires and then following them. This is the source of the saying, "If it feels good, do it!" An essentially good person needs only to follow their basic nature. Unethical behavior is anything that is imposed from outside. If I'm good, and I do evil, it's because something outside me caused it. All that is needed for man to behave rightly is the removal of external pressure to do evil.

If my basic nature is neutral, neither good nor evil, then I can't look to my own innermost feelings to identify the good. I think this leads to an intellectual view of right and wrong. In an sense I don't really care one way or the other. I'm not on either side in the war between good and evil. I should listen to the arguments put forward by both sides and choose the most reasonable. Society ought to adopt a non-interference position on right behavior. Since we are neutral, we might make different choices about good and evil and that's OK.

Neither of these two ideas seems to fit with my experience of living. I am absolutely convinced that there are things that seem right to me that are absolutely evil. Certainly there are things that feel good, but that I believe are wrong. The basically good model doesn't line up with reality in this respect. Neither does the neutral view. I don't see good and evil as two equally plausible choices. I have a strong preference for good over evil and I can't make that preference consistent with a basic neutrality in my nature.

So I'm left with the belief that I am basically evil. This position means that I can't be left alone to decide what I should do, because my nature will cause me to choose evil. This leads to the belief that society needs to create laws to curb the evil behavior of individuals. The difficulty is, who can make the laws if we're all evil? A society can't be less evil than it's members, so the laws it makes would be evil as well. The other issue I can see is this preference that I seem to have for good over evil. It seems that I should prefer evil if my nature is evil. Why would I prefer good?

I think where I end up on the nature of man is that I am by nature evil, but there is some remembrance of good in me as well. It's almost like good is a normal but dormant state. I am evil but I want to be good. This leads me to believe that I will need to look outside myself for a standard of good, and that's the tie back to ethics.

Right living requires a definition of right that is outside of me because I'm evil. There has to be a standard for good that is outside all of us because none of us is by nature good. If I am to live rightly I will need to obey the instructions of what ever sets the standard that defined goodness. Of course, for me that's the definition of God.