Is man by nature an evil creature ?(HOBBES) or man by nature is essentially good

Question:

Is man by nature an evil creature ?(HOBBES) or man by nature is essentially good? (ROUSSEAU)?

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: Neither is correct, but Hobbes is closer. All organisms, including mankind, engage in a behavior called optimization. This is a natural behavior that organisms (even ones without brains) are born with. The point behind optimization is that a given organism will attempt to gain the most amount of benefit for the least amount of work.

However, humans are one of he few creatures that can consciously opt not to optimize in order to gain other benefits. For example, simply grabbing food and eating it is a form of optimization, and the more food you can grab the better. However, working together as a society has benefits of mutual protection and cooperation, so learning how to buy food with money and saying ??please?? and ??thank you?? are technically detrimental to optimization but they offer greater long term goals.

So to answer the question more directly, I don't think that ??good?? and ??evil?? are appropriate terms to use, but if we have to then I would say that evil is a thing that is selfish and greedy while good is a thing that is cooperative. People need to learn how to cooperate, it is not innate behavior to be polite and to work towards mutual goals that do not directly affect you, but it is behavior that is learned by people all over the world. So indeed, we are born evil and we must learn to be good, but I wouldn't just put it that simply.