Good, Bad, Neither or Both?

When I took a class on political philosophy my sophomore year, before we did any assigned readings, the professor gave us a worksheet of general questions to think about and respond to. The point of the assignment was to show us how to engage the future readings (Hobbes, Locke, Marx etc.) in a discussion of philosophy as opposed to a discussion of politics or some other medium. One of the questions was, "Do you think that people are inherently good, bad, both, or neither?" I answered like any good Ayn Rand scholar (although this was before I read Atlas Shrugged) that the answer has to be neither, primarily because to demand that human nature is constrained by anything, in either direction, is to make a mockery of free will. As rational beings, whether we are good or bad in a certain situation or just overall is defined by the choices we make, which we execute with our own free will.

In To Kill a Mockingbird, I think the reason that Atticus fights so hard to protect Jem and Scout is that he agrees that human nature is not inherently good or bad, but that over the course of life, it can be manipulated or taught to be one or the other. As kids, they just innocently believe that everyone is good. But the ensuing experiences involving racism in the community show that a lot of people are bad. It is of vital importance that Scout and Jem understand that people are neither good nor bad by nature, but can be either. People are either good or bad based on the choices they make, and have the capacity for both. Atticus wants his kids to be fully educated, fully informed, so that they can understand the good and the bad in the world, and then rationally choose to be good.