Humans: Inherently good or bad?

This is a philosophical question many couldn’t answer.

But through this writing, I will write what I think about this question and what my answer be.

When I try to answer this question, first of all, there must be a definite definition about good and bad.
What dictates a thing to be good and bad?
This is a question that is hard to answer, because it will lead to longer discussion about what is universally good and universally bad.
Killing is bad, self defense is good.
There are many things that I imagine, if we discuss what is good and bad, it will lead to endless debate.

That’s why I will ignore those definitions altogether, and I will challenge the question itself.
The humans are neither good nor bad, there must be a definition, a new word, that best describes the characteristics of humans. For me personally, I think humans are “human” has a good ring to it.

To be honest, I think it is easy to answer this question if we learn why and how humans get their behavior. It is easy to be understood, if we know how evolution shaped our behavior. How evolution leads humans to us.

First of all, as I mentioned, the question whether we are inherently good or bad is not important, leads to a very subjective answer, and actually unanswerable, because humans are neither inherently good nor bad. By giving an answer to either humans are inherently good or humans are inherently bad, we have done wrong by giving simplification to factually complex reality of humans. We are neither, we are simply a product of evolution that is still evolving.

If we are hungry, we will try to find food and eat it to stay alive.
Maternal instinct to protect their babies comes from evolution. Without it, our babies wouldn’t survive. The mothers that don’t have strong maternal instinct get removed from gene pool. That’s why most mothers have maternal instinct (not all, because deviation will always happen).

There are some animals whose mother eat their children, for example hamster. Let’s say the cute little hamster doesn’t have maternal instinct, or to be more accurate, less developed. But they can still survive to this day. Because the instinct to eat their children is the way for their survival. Maybe the children are too many and where hamster evolves in the past, there are limited resources. Just maybe. I’m sure there are more accurate explanation than that.

If we are hungry and resources are limited, evolution guides us to be egoistic to survive, and of course there are deviations, there are still selfless people out there.

If we are full, have many resources, evolution guides us to be kind, helpful, because we humans can become the superior (dominating) species through cooperation. Without cooperation, maybe our kind is still prey to lions and tigers.

That’s why I think humans possess both of these qualities. All for survival. In each person, there is a battle between those qualities, the qualities that people call “good”, and the qualities people call “bad.” Good people can do bad things, vice versa, bad people can do good things. That’s as I mentioned two times already, definition of good and bad isn’t important at all. Humans do “human” things. Or in other words, if inherently means deep inside, then humans are inherently yin and yang. Let’s say yin represents bad and yang represents good (although it’s not true lmao.) Eliminating yin altogether is unwise, because humans do need yin to survive this far. If we are too altruistic or too yang, we would definitely be gone from gene pool, just like those animals in Australia that were too peaceful they become extinct, one of them is Dodo.