Andrew Brown asks:
If humans are naturally good, why can we do such terrible things to each other and feel so very little remorse?
Be warned that some of what he goes on to describe makes hideous reading, so you may want to avoid clicking through the link. Under it there is a lot of what he calls ‘factual evidence against liberal optimism’. And that’s just what it is if liberal optimism requires us to believe that humans are naturally good.
They aren’t naturally good but contain impulses and potentialities both good and evil. The usual argument to the contrary denies the bad sort of impulses by claiming that these are all products of some given situations and/or of ‘society’. But this argument cannot work, since situations, ‘society’, could not bring out in people just anything at all. In the same way that no situation could get you to run a mile mechanically unaided in 30 seconds or to live indefinitely without food or water, no societal stucture or mode of acculturation could get us to be of a character that does not have support from our natural capacities and dispositions.
The short answer to Brown’s opening question, therefore, is that human beings aren’t naturally good – except as one possibility amongst others.