Are most people more good than bad?

[Cassius]

Not a question with a meaningful answer. ‘Good’ and ‘bad’ are subjective concepts, and can quite happily coexist inside one person. When they’re good, they can be very, very good - but when they’re bad they can be horrid. It seems rather odd to me to try and quantify this, as if a person is a pie chart that can read “60% good, 40% bad” or “5% very good, 33% good, 47% bad, 15% horrid”. People can go along for decades without hurting a fly, and then one day they kill someone and nobody can explain why..

I don’t think that human beings are inherently ‘good’ or ‘bad’ - we all pursue our own interests and for some this gets them canonized and for others it gets them demonized. For some, the deeds that got them canonized were done for totally impure reasons, whilst for others, the deeds that they were demonised for were done for totally selfless reasons. ‘Human nature’, such as it is, is so complex that it’s really almost impossible to unpick and categorise inside the blunt dichotomy of ‘good vs bad’. I do, however, tend to think with people that come across as being squeaky clean, you really just need to look hard enough and wait long enough and eventually you’ll find a black spot.