Jeff challenges the myth of human innate goodness, arguing toddlers prioritize self-interest even in harmful situations like accidents, with morality developed only through learned interactions. Studies show frontal lobes—key for ethical decisions—mature by 20–25, debunking childhood "goodness." Raised by robots without moral training, humans would likely form power-driven hierarchies like baboons, not altruism. Dogs can’t judge evil; violent individuals often bond with pets. Unchecked selfishness demands governance, undermining the idea that inherent virtue could replace laws. [Automatically generated summary]
And we're back with Truth Unrestricted, the podcast that would have a better name if they weren't all taken.
I'm Spencer, your host.
I'm here today with Jeff.
How are you doing, Jeff?
Not too bad, buddy.
How about you?
Oh, pretty good.
So, before we get into any topic, I just want to remind everyone that if you have anything that you'd like to comment about, anything that we're saying and doing here on this podcast, the email to send that to is truthunrestricted at gmail.com.
Otherwise, let's get right into it.
I really like this topic we have today.
It's a thing that pretty much everyone just assumes is true, and we're going to question whether it's true, which is to say that we're going to ask the question: are people naturally good?
So, here's a lead-in: we would like to think of humans as humans, we would like to think of other humans and the entire species as being at some kind of moral pinnacle.
Like, we are the best, of course.
We're at the top of the food chain.
And not only are we the best at dominating the landscape, but we're the best at being good creatures.
That's more or less what we'd like to think about ourselves.
And this assumption sits at the root of a lot of conversations that I listen to on other podcasts and other places, and almost no one questions it.
Everyone starts the conversation with both parties assuming that it's true that humans are just sort of naturally good.
Like, we wouldn't have to try at it.
We're just good at stuff.
And some people actually say it explicitly in saying that we have to be taught to be evil, for example.
So, here we are.
We're going to ask this question: Is this really true?
Are humans naturally good?
Go ahead, Jeff.
Hard no.
Okay, well, that's very succinct.
I like it.
Hard no.
The idea that we have to be taught to be evil, I think, is pretty naive because evil, what we view as air quote, evil behavior, really is nothing, I think, other than intense selfishness coupled with power.
And selfishness is an absolutely innate human behavior that we absolutely need to be trained to ignore.
Anybody in the world who has raised a child, I challenge you to disagree with me on this.
Yeah, small children are inherently selfish individuals, right?
They need to be taught empathy, they need to be taught to care about things around them.
The id is sort of that sort of base primal instinct where I just care about my own basic needs and nothing more.
And like, we come out of the womb wired for that, right?
So, like, I don't know how you could call someone basically good when we're basically selfish.
Those two states don't work well together.
Yeah, I'm going to mention it right now in that we're going to ignore it, but we're going to try to ignore all the Ayn Randisms, which, of course, is the attempt to declare selfishness as a good thing.
We'll deal with Ayn Rand in a whole different podcast in the future.
But for now, look forward to that one.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, me too.
When I do research on this, just, you know, as a person, keyboard warrior, sitting at my keyboard reading Wikipedia and other articles, it's very difficult to nail down what's really happening here.
It seems to be an area of science that is sort of a frontier thing that's still being known among like neuroscientists and psychologists and child psychologists and all of these collection of people.
It's very much still in flux as to exactly how we're coming to our moral decisions, our moral centers here.
To say that we are naturally good would be to say that we are born with something like a seed that grows into something bigger in us, whether that seed's an idea or it's a mechanism inside us that makes us behave in a fashion that is found to be good and useful for other humans.
The area, what is known is that the area of the brain that is busiest while we're making moral decisions, which is the only real way to kind of say for sure that, you know, the moral decisions are happening here.
They can't really say that, but they usually say that when a person is making moral decisions, this one part of their brain is busier than all the other parts.
And that's the frontal lobe.
And it seems like, and of course, there's many ways to look at all the different bits of science here, but it seems like those moral decisions or perhaps that entire area of the brain that would light up when you're making moral decisions isn't fully developed until sometime between the ages of 20 to 25.
And so that's a okay.
When we were cave people, a 25-year-old would have been a wise old man or woman, mind you.
And that makes sense, I guess, but it puts a really stark view on this thing that we usually think of children as being essentially good creatures.
We certainly want to protect them and have the best for them.
But it's difficult to say then that they're naturally morally good, which is a thing that I think upsets a lot of people.
A lot of people don't like the idea that their children could be moral monsters.
It's not comfortable for any parent to think.
I have stepchildren and I didn't raise them from infants.
And I even find it a little uncomfortable just thinking about children in general.
Like I survived my childhood, but part of that experience tells me that, yeah, maybe some of them are moral monsters.
What do you think of this idea that we only really come to our full moral development in our 20s?
I don't have any stories to pull from my own children's history that wouldn't potentially offend my wife and get me in trouble.
That makes sense.
Yeah.
But I can say that like the behavior that I witnessed from, you know, toddlers through to three and four year olds was the behavior of inherently and passionately self-centered individuals.
And that's speaking completely objectively.
And also not just my monsters.
Like I have many peers who have children in the same age bracket as mine and experiences, anecdotal experiences were the same across the board.
Like everybody's children.
Everybody talks about the terrible twos or threes or fours.
That behavior that's such a milestone in child rearing is really just sort of a shining example of the fact that we aren't born.
Well, I guess you could say we're born innocent, but we're definitely not born good.
Yeah.
Because any child in that age range will choose for themselves first and foremost, even at the detriment of other people, and even if it hurts other people.
And if you give them access to the same, I guess, sort of scale of hurt or injury that an adult is capable of doing, I don't think it would change their actions at all.
I think that empathy and understanding and caring about other people and caring about the world around us, these are all things that we're taught.
These are not things that we inherently possess as values.
Right.
I think it's important to note that taught isn't, we normally think of taught as in someone had to teach you this thing.
Taught is also, I mean, most of these things are self-learned in an environment in which we're interacting with other people.
Yeah, exactly.
We're taught it by our interactions with the world at large more than being like having a teacher in front of us with a blackboard teaching us the thing.
That's not really how it works.
It's that we gain experiences with the world.
And in those experiences, we gain an idea that other people exist, that they have feelings, and that perhaps we should care about those feelings nearly as much as we care about our own.
And that's really what empathy is: the ability to understand other people's feelings.
Oh, perfect example from more recent experience.
I was headed to the beach with my son and one of his friends a couple of weekends ago.
My son, as an aside, is 11 years old, very sweet boy.
We've done our best to instill in him all of the positive values you would want to see in a functioning Western society child or young adult.
But as we're approaching the beach, traffic slows down, like down to a crawl.
And then we're straight up stop for a while.
And it becomes apparent that there's some sort of like big, nasty accident up ahead that is the cause of it.
And we crest a hill like right before the accident scene.
Like the first time we clap eyes on the accident scene, we're less than 50 feet away from it because our view was obstructed on the rest of the approach.
And there's, it's obviously like somebody blew right through a red light and got straight up T-boned.
It's two piles of twisted metal in the middle of the road.
There's a sheet out on the asphalt next to one of the vehicles where a body's been pulled out and is obviously already deceased.
There's two fire trucks and an ambulance there.
Firefighters are working with Jaws of Life to get somebody pried out of one of the vehicles.
The handful of survivors are off to the side being interviewed by police and blah, blah, blah.
And my son, we're in my non-air conditioned car, so all the windows are down.
My son cranes out of the window, like a dog out for a car ride, like to the waist to get a better view and bellows out at the top of his lungs, oh my God, Austin, check that out.
It's so cool.
Yeah.
11-year-old boy.
Knee-jerk reaction, police and firefighters, and flashing lights in a car crash.
That's cool.
Yeah.
Not knee-jerk reaction.
At least one person there is dead and several other people are in a lot of pain and they can fucking hear you.
Yeah.
Right.
So like I snapped at him immediately and told him to be quiet and to show some respect because somebody, there were, there were people hurting there and they didn't need to hear some loud spectator popcorning to it.
But it's just, you know, I think probably a good sort of anecdotal story about how like, you know, my kid's no monster.
Like he doesn't torture animals.
He's not an animal himself.
He loves his family and his friends, and he sticks up for his buddies.
And he listens to his elders for the most part.
And we think he's becoming a fully functioning member of society.
But he still thinks the car crashes are cool and doesn't like can't make that connection instinctually.
That car crashes are also scenes of great violence and potentially tragic loss.
And maybe you should think about that and put yourself in the shoes of the people that are in that situation rather than just witnessing it from your own standpoint of cool twisted, twisted metal and broken glass and flashing lights.
Yeah, you're absolutely right that children need to be taught to be good.
And of course, if I'm going to add a message to this podcast, it will be: parents, please take the time to teach your children to be good.
The thing they say about that kids need to be watched, that's what needs to be watched is all their interactions to encourage them to fall on the side that that's better, especially things like we think of, I think some parents think of online time as free babysitting, but you should watch kids in their development online because the things they'll do and say online are part of what will shape them for other things.
And that's a thing you have to watch for.
Children in the past have, we've seen children in the past develop strange sets of ideas about what is right and what is wrong.
You know, we know a great deal about history, some parts of history anyway.
And what a 16-year-old boy in ancient Rome would have thought was right and wrong would be drastically different than what we feel to be right and wrong now.
And we feel we know a fair amount about what ancient Rome, what life in ancient Rome was like.
We have a lot of documents about that part of history and what life was like for even a lot of average people.
And all the violence happening in Rome, all the slavery, all the many, many other things happening in Rome at the time that we would think were completely appalling was really things that were happening there during peacetime and they found to be perfectly acceptable.
That's terrible to think about, really.
But those were people just like we are.
They weren't any different except for the fact that they were raised with a different set of things that they found to be right and wrong.
And so that's a thing to consider is that how you raise a person makes the world of difference to how the world itself will turn out, which is why I encourage parents to get your kids to do the right thing.
Yeah.
At every moment, all the little moments, not just the big moments, but all the little moments too.
That's huge.
But more than that, I want to move into a part of this podcast where I do a thought experiment.
I love thought experiments.
I don't do them every podcast, but this one, there's one that's very applicable to this exact topic.
This is another one that I came up with and I kind of mentioned in passing for a lot of situations.
But it's a thought experiment that I call resetting the world in this thought experiment.
This is essentially an experiment that we would never do because it would be completely inhuman.
But imagine if you could having all the children be raised not by their parents or any other adult who knows about what this world is like, but being raised from infancy by robots.
And the robots don't mimic humans.
They just serve the food and speak to them.
So they learn how to talk, I guess.
And then, or maybe we want to do the experiment where they don't.
And we see if they do talk.
But we reset the world in this way.
We completely remove all the examples of all the things that a child could eventually do.
And then we ask the question as to what they would eventually do.
I mean, they're going to do something.
They're alive.
They were fed food.
They grew muscles.
They presumably crawled and walked.
And so what do you think would happen with these new humans who were completely removed from all the things that we consider to be morally good?
We've got two things to draw on, I think, with this thought experiment.
One of them is the book, Lord of the Flies.
And I think enough said there.
Okay.
And two is, I did a little bit of my own homework because I remembered one of our old high school socials and history teachers, Mr. Pettit, touched on this when we were in like 18th century history.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a philosopher who, I don't know if he coined or founded the philosophy of nativism, but in any event, he was a huge proponent of it.
And nativism is basically the idea that children are born with inherent talents and potentials and moralities that unfold as they grow.
And your job as a child educator is to be very passive and let the child do all of their learning through their own discovery and only intervene when absolutely necessary and make those interventions as soft and gentle as possible.
And I remember our teacher told us a story about how Rousseau created an early childhood school based on this concept and had a whole bunch of France's rich and powerful send their little ones off to this school.
And like it wasn't complete and abject failure.
Because I think that if you were to take it to the furthest extreme that you've advocated in your thought experiment of like no human interaction at all, like not even capable of reading facial expressions of adults to take nonverbal cues from,
I think it would take very little time for just the physically largest and strongest child to take over and dominate all of the others and take the lion's share of the food and water and any other resources they have available to them for themselves because they can.
And if there's no consequence for them doing that, they're just going to continue doing that.
What you would see is very quickly that the children would be organized like a coterie of baboons, where it's just like rigid pecking order based on who's biggest and strongest.
One might point out that even the baboons have examples of adults to turn to, whereas these in this experiment, the children wouldn't, they might not even be as ordered as baboons in that case.
True, true, yeah.
Much as we think of baboons as being perhaps less organized than us because they don't have cities and cars and everything else, they still have social structure and a set role for everyone.
But here's a few things that I think will definitely be true.
First of all, there will still be a social hierarchy.
Yeah.
And it may be well, as you say, that it's the strongest who rise to the top of that.
Eventually, it might be even be the smartest, the most clever, or at least the ones who are strongest need to be at some minimum level of cleverness in order to maintain.
Otherwise, they're, again, taken advantage by the ones who have a level of intellect that far surpasses theirs, which I think among most humans, genetically, we have genetically the ability to be fairly intelligent generally.
So I think you're right in that case, it would be the strongest because the variation in strength and the way strength works in comparison to intelligence is that, of course, once you're strong on day one, you're likely to again be the strongest on day two and day three and day four and everything else.
Whereas with intellect and what might be called smarts, it's still possible for someone to know something that you don't know, have some perspective that you don't have and therefore still outsmart you or withhold something from you, etc.
So it's it's not like a strong arm contest in that way.
It's not that the smartest will always be at the top and that we just move in that way.
It's much more likely that the strong do that because of the nature of strength.
Unless something makes them temporarily weak, which isn't usually the case.
Yeah, but you also, like, as we've seen evidence circling back to baboons again, because, hey, why not?
Sure.
One of the checks that we've seen frequently in the animal kingdom is if the leader or alpha or whoever's in charge because of strength is too, I don't know, emphatically vicious in the enforcement of their rule, they will be forcibly deposed.
Because no matter how strong you are, you can't, in a straight up contest of physical strength among a species, numbers mean everything.
And the strongest guy is not stronger than the next eight guys.
And so if those eight people decide to go, you know, full Ides of March, Caesar's not going to live.
Right.
And but that is basically the only check to power that would exist.
The masses rising up.
I think in this, in this thought experiment of yours, is you would definitely get a pecking order right away.
Yeah.
And you would definitely have the strongest to the top first.
And if that strongest happened to also be the most clever, they would stay there for a while.
If not, they would very quickly be supplanted by the one who is the strongest and also the most clever.
But again, like what we're talking about is basically Machiavellianism, right?
Like it's it's not a functioning society.
Yeah.
It's it's a hierarchy based on innate imbalance of power, innate disparity of wealth and resources, where strongest takes as much as they can, and then the next strongest gets as much as they can, and then on down and the bottom chunk of the pool gets nothing.
And I don't see how that could be objectively viewed anywhere as inherently good by any metric.
Especially when you think of them growing up into adults and the kind of behavior that would then result.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But we might ask other questions about this.
Like, do we think these humans who were completely separated from all human example that came before them, would they be artistic?
Would they be creative?
What do you think?
No, I don't think so.
I think that, well, possibly.
Would they tell stories?
I believe that art and creativity is a societal luxury.
And like, I can think of no examples of great works of art that were created by poor societies.
You know, like when you think about all the great groundswells of art and culture in human history, it was always at a time when we had peace, stable government, and relative prosperity for everyone, including the artists.
Yeah.
Right.
And all of the low points of all of the crappiest art we produced were like the dark ages and everything in the distant past when we had to focus all of our strength and energy and will just on subsistence, on tending to the needs of taking care of ourselves and making sure we didn't starve to death or get eaten by a predator.
Right.
But nothing in the thought experiment restricts it to being a poor society.
I mean, we're providing all the food by your robot.
So yeah, that's that's my point is I think I think it's I think it's a possibility that art or culture could take root in this theoretical society of sociopaths.
Because again, if they've got access to a bounty of resources so that nobody wants or lacks for their basic needs, then they have time to turn towards those kinds of pursuits.
Yeah, well, yeah.
Although it would also, it would also beg the question that if there's, if there's a bounty of resources, what is there to fight over?
So would we wind up with a rigid pecking order?
Well, I think we would get a pecking order regardless, whether it's for food or for popularity or anything else.
Popularity is a big one.
I mean, I think those humans would still want to be at the top.
They would have something in them that would want to move up.
They would see some gain in that.
Things would be better for them if they were popular and would be less good for them if they were less popular.
And so that's just an innate part of being human.
When you have a relative lack, there's a lot more things attached to that, which just makes it sort of a sharper edged sword, if you will.
But even in a society in which all of your basic needs are being provided, I think there would still be a hierarchy.
I mean, look at any high school.
Every high school kid has all their needs provided for them without having to work, and they still create a hierarchy based on all the other things that are happening.
I think it seems to me like hierarchies in humans, social hierarchies are part of the innate part.
They're part of our wiring.
We would want, it comes as part of being selfish.
Being selfish drives each of us to want to be at the top and want more.
Even if there is enough for everyone, we still want more.
And that's the thing that would drive us to be, to arrange ourselves in this way.
And to even if it's only to take attention from other people, we would still do that.
Well, or even like, you know, there isn't greed frequently transcends logic.
Like if we in this thought experiment society, if we say that, you know, they've all of their needs are taken care of, be it, you know, food, clothing, shelter, material comforts.
If any of these things can be gathered, stored, hoarded, saved for another day, added to a pile of bounty, there's all kinds of people that are going to try to do that.
Right.
I agree with your point, like just the presence of bounty does not immediately derail selfishness.
I mean, look at the world's billionaire class.
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah.
Objectively, anybody with that many zeros in their bank account should be done trying to make money because they just don't need any more.
And yet the drive is still there.
Yeah.
So, yeah, bottom line, I think that this, this theoretical society would most definitely not be one I would have any interest in belonging to.
Yeah.
So obviously these thought experiments, you can talk all day about all other level of aspect of humanity.
And if anyone wants to do that, they can feel free to send me that email.
As we get close to the end of the podcast here, I have a related question that comes up a lot.
A lot of people just assume this is true.
And I find that it very likely isn't.
And I think there's a lot of evidence to show that it isn't.
A lot of people think that dogs are useful for determining which humans are good humans.
Like a dog is a moral barometer.
Yeah, basically, yeah.
If a dog, you'll hear people talk about a lot.
If a dog doesn't trust a person, they think that that person is inherently bad and therefore the human shouldn't trust them.
And then if the dog does trust them, then that's okay.
You know, my dog liked him.
So, you know, but then he stole my car.
I mean, well, pet owners are goofy.
Like, I think a lot of that just comes from anthropomorphizing your own pets.
Yeah.
I think there's a great deal of sentiment that drives that premise that dogs can detect evil.
Yeah, I agree with you.
I don't think that dogs are good or evil detectors.
I can't see how they would be.
There's a long list of homicidal dictators, perhaps even genocidal dictators who love dogs.
Who had dogs love them?
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
Like, really, in other situations, they were objectively terrible people and the dogs had no idea.
No, because they were good to the dogs.
Well, not just that, but dogs look for other things in humans to appreciate than that.
Yeah.
I mean, you can murder people in front of your dog and it doesn't really matter.
Like the dog will still love that human, even if he's terrible to every other human.
The dog will see nothing wrong with it because that's not one of the things that the dog looks for in a human.
I just find humans to be really interesting when they look at this.
They really want humans to be good.
And I want humans to be good too, except that I recognize that it won't happen on its own.
It's a thing that doesn't just naturally occur just because we exist.
We have to teach each other to be good.
And this goes both ways.
If I'm not good, I would want other people to tell me where I'm screwing up, right?
Like no one should be above that.
Whenever anyone is above that, that's when we have problems.
As soon as there's a person that you can't tell them that they're screwing up, that's when you get problems.
That's when you get Elvis Presley doing weird, weird stuff.
Michael Jackson, and no one can tell him that what he's doing is just so bizarre, right?
Yeah.
I actually saw a really, I think, appropriate meme online today about it said over a bunch of anime cartoon cells, but like text only premise: government is necessary because people left unchecked will do evil.
Retort, government is composed of people left unchecked.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It really puts the point on the end of the spear.
Well, yeah.
I mean, well, but like it also, it makes the point excellently, I think.
Like if we were inherently good people, we shouldn't need government or police or laws.
Yeah.
Or maybe not necessarily shouldn't need laws, but shouldn't require enforcement of those laws.
We wouldn't require a police force and a judicial system and a penal system if people are inherently good.
So with that, I think we're going to end the podcast.