#inherent morality

[tired-fandom-ndn]

"Good" adults in media will be like "this literal child is scary and dangerous and evil and I'm going to make sure they know that and that everyone else knows they can't be trusted so they'll never be loved or cared for and will always feel alone" and then I'm expected to feel bad for them when the child grows up to be a villain and kills them?? Fuck that, they got what was coming to them.

[tired-fandom-ndn]

Thoughts have no moral value. What you think to yourself, the words and images in your brain, cannot hurt anyone on their own. They don't affect anyone except you.

What affects other people are your actions, the choices you make. Your thoughts themselves are neither good nor bad, the things you do (or don't do) because of those thoughts are what matter.

If you worry that your thoughts might lead to you actually hurting someone, then get help. Talk to someone, find a safe outlet, find healthy coping mechanisms.

But don't let your thoughts consume you with guilt and fear. They're just thoughts. Passing flashes in your brain. They are not dangerous and neither are you.

[tired-fandom-ndn]

The flip side to that is that your thoughts don't make you a good person either. Too many people decide that they're "good" because they see their thoughts and opinions as good, even while their actions are cruel and selfish, bordering on sadistic.

I don't care about your thoughts, the things that go through your head. How do you treat other people? How do you behave in the actual world you live in?

[tired-fandom-ndn]

Legitimately not a fan of anything that implies (or even outright states) that "good" and "bad" are inherent and unchangeable states. Nobody is "born bad", no one is "warped" or "twisted" or "evil" at birth. We all make choices throughout our lives and we can always decide, at any moment, to start making different choices.

You are not "good" or "bad". You're a person with a will of your own, and how you choose to impact other people and the world is up to you.

[tired-fandom-ndn]

Generally speaking, I have a lot of thoughts about the (very Christian) concept of innate morality and how it's pushed over and over again in media. The idea that a person is born "good" or "evil" and that their individual choices don't matter. . . . . . . .

It makes my stomach turn. Nothing discourages someone from trying to change and grow more than being told that they'll never be able to.

[tired-fandom-ndn]

I agree completely that the "born evil trope" is harmful and not realistic, but I have seen people defend it by saying that there are real cases of people in their view were "evil from birth", for example they mention serial killers like Ted Bundy and Dahmer who had what appear to be "normal" childhoods. In their opinion the fact that Bundy and Dahmer became serial killers is evidence for them being "born evil". I disagree but I dont know how to counter the argument, so I want to ask if you can help me with that.

I'm not a psychologist or sociologist, so take what I say with a grain of salt. There's a few different aspects to this that I want to tackle though.

The assumption here is that having a bad childhood makes someone bad and having a good childhood makes someone good and everyone who doesn't fit that mold is an outlier. That's. . . not at all true though and has been proven time and time again. Many adults who were abused as children especially would not be happy at the dismissal of their work to make themselves better than the adults who hurt them. It's also a very cruel thing to claim in general, the insistence that someone can't be traumatized because their childhood was "good" by the measures of someone else AND that trauma inevitably makes someone bad.

Even if someone's childhood WAS good, there's a question of whether all their needs were actually met by their standards. This is complicated to think about because there's really no way to measure or test this sort of thing currently, whether certain coping skills or venting methods or other controlled outlooks can keep someone from turning to hurting and even killing others, but it is still something we need to think about when trying to reduce violence in our communities. Can these tragedies be avoided if measures are taken to redirect people with violent thoughts? What can we do to help people, especially children and teens, who experience violent impulses and desires instead of brushing them off as monsters who are born evil?

Like I've said before, this idea still takes away the power we as people have over own choices. Serial killers don't kill people because they had bad childhoods or because there's something about them that's just inherently bad and impossible to resist, they kill people because they WANT to. There's a lot of reasons serial killers use or claim, but at the end of the day, it is always THEIR choice to hurt someone else. Brushing their actions off as some sort of inherent evil excuses them from their choices.

It also gives other people a way to separate ourselves from those we deem evil. People like the idea of serial killers and other perpetuators of violence being "inherently evil" because that means we can dehumanize them, see them as vague monsters instead of our neighbors, coworkers, friends, family. They're a distant monster, not something we ever really need to think about but that we always fear. That, in turn, makes it easier for those who commit violence to get away with it! How many serial killers go years, even decades, without being caught because they're nice? Because they're pleasant? Because they have senses of humor or they love animals or they have a great family? That shit happens because we see killers as monsters, like we can look at a killer and just know that there's something inherently rotten about them, and we forget that they're still just people who have feelings and families and hobbies.

And those are my thoughts on this particular matter.

[tired-fandom-ndn]

The flipside to that is that I ADORE media (both canons and fan works) that challenges that idea, that inverts tropes involving prophecies and destinies that say someone is "meant" to be "good" or "evil".

Sometimes it's a character challenging what those concepts mean (what is good? what is evil? what does that mean to them as an individual and what does it mean in their situation?) and sometimes it's a character actively fighting against a world telling them what they're "supposed" to be, the Chosen One becoming the Big Bad instead or the destined villain choosing to be good.

Both are great.

[tired-fandom-ndn]

Hi! I want to hear some of your opinions on the "born evil" trope, why you dislike and find it harmful. I personally dislike it but its a popular trope in fiction so Im glad that you criticized it in regards to Tom Riddle/Voldemort being described as "born evil".

I actually have a handful of posts in my inherent morality tag if you want to check those out.

I'm gonna make a bulletpoint list because that's easier for me, but here's some of my issues with that trope and the idea in general:

(putting it under a cut because it got long and heavy; warning for discussions of child abuse, racism, and religious trauma)

It's EXTREMELY Christian. It's very heavily based on the idea of Original Sin, that you're born wrong and must spend your life atoning for that wrongness because it's just how you are. It's bullshit and I am always going to stand by that.

(Nobody better try to claim that Original Sin is "Abarahamic", I swear to god. Look up any information on it from Jewish and Muslim sources and you'll see that it is 100% a Christian concept.)

It treats morality as something inherent instead of a series of choices and shifting perspectives. "Good" and "evil" are very subjective ideas and what we see as good and what we see as evil are dependent on our own experiences as individuals.

To continue on that, we make choices every single day, every moment of our lives. We are constantly changing as people, even if we don't realize it, and we can always choose to change how we live and act based on new information we have or a desire to be better (or worse). And again, my idea of "better" and "worse" are incredibly subjective and personal to me, and other people will feel differently. The idea that we're born "bad" or born "good" takes away our choices in our own lives.

The idea that children are "born evil" has been used to justify some truly horrific things in the world. So many children end up abused, tortured, traumatized, and even murdered because adults in their lives decided that something about them was "wrong". This was actually a huge part of Tom Riddle's characterization and story in Harry Potter, but it's also something done to real children, especially in fundamentalist Christian communities.

(It's also weaponized against Black and indigenous children especially. Some American Christian sects believe that brown skin is a sign of corruption and rejection of Christ, and therefore those children need to be "saved" or not born at all. In other communities, racist ideas that children of color are more violent or sexual or aggressive combine with the idea that morality is inherent and the results are devastating for those children.)

Finally, the idea of inherent morality explicitly discourages people from trying to change. Why would someone try to be better and be kinder and show more compassion when they're told that no matter what they do, they're always going to be bad? Either because of choices they made in the past or some vague evil they were supposedly born with, there's no reason for them to try to improve because they're convinced that there's something about them that's so terrible that it can never change. We should always strive to learn more and make choices that we feel are better for ourselves, others, and the world around us but people aren't going to want to do that when every choice they've made in the past is always hanging over their neck like a guillotine, declaring them evil and bad for even trying to be better.