Most of the time we hate people who challenges  our ego. We can easily hate people when they don´t agree with us or criticize us. Because they defy our ego. You say you feel joy when  you see a hungry child smile and don´t feel joy when you see a crazy child killer smile. As i said you want to feel joy when you help someone in return. So you help people to feel that joy.This is egoist. But it is not a bad thing. I call this positive egoism. I am defending it. But Kant says you must help people for the sake of helping. He says this is the moral one. And according to common ethics he says the truth. But i don´t defend this kind of idea. I am defending positive egoism. We should help the people we love or pity and have pleasure in return. There is nothing wrong with this. We are egoist creatures. And egoism is not always an evil thing. I called humans evil creatures according to common ethics. Because egoism is evil according to it. But good and evil is relative. I am trying to show egoism is not always a bad thing.

All the big artists,inventors, scientists are egoist people. Because they followed their ideas by not paying attention to public opinion.Their whole purpose was creating or discovering something new. Because only this way they would be happy. As you see their egoism was positive.

 If you do an action to satisfy yourself it is selfish. But sometimes you can´t know if an action will satisfy yourself or not. You can only decide whether it is satisfying or not after you acted. If the result is satisfying you will go on doing this action.Because you will want to feel this satisfying or pleasure again. This is called operant conditioning by Skinner. So the intention is important. But most of the time we know whether an action will satisfy and make us happy or not. And we do an action to satisfy ourselves. This is egoism. But it is not an evil thing always. Read the posts above i explained this.

I think you are selfish if you do an action, which MAIN goal is satisfy yourself. If you help somebody else, and your biggest goal is not to satisfy yourself, it is not persé selfish. Satisfying yourself might be a nice side effect of helping somebody else, but this does not make the act selfish.

By the way, I have never hated anybody because they hurt my ego My ego is not easily hurt I think that is a very ego-centric vision on hate, to view hatred as something that only comes from hurt ego´s.

What made you choose "evil" instead of "bad" ? "Evil" sounds on my ears like "demonic". How can you use such a word as opposite of "good" ? . You must bare too much hate in your soul... Geçmiş olsun!

 1)I agree with you. But if you examine human behaviors you will see our main goal is always satisfy ourselves. You said yourself you feel joy when you see a smile on a child´s face. But you don´t feel any joy when you see a smile on a serial killer´s face. So you choose people you want to help. This is egoist. A serial killer is a human too. And his smile is not different from a child´s smile. If he is in jail, there is no obstacle to help him and make him smile. Because if you want to make  a bad person good one you must help him. I am sure Jesus would approve this. You can see a lot of serial killers or rapers became good Christian believers in prisons. There are priests in prisons also helping criminals. So it is a moral thing to help them. According to common ethics you should not choose people you want to help.

2) You say you have never hated anyone who hurt your ego. Let me prove you are wrong with your words. You talk like you hate or don´t like serial killers? Have you ever asked yourself why? Because they hurt your ego.There are two types of ego. One is the normal ego, other is super ego. The superego is the aspect of personality that holds all of our internalized moral standards and ideals that we acquire from both parents and society--our sense of right and wrong. The superego provides guidelines for making judgments. According to Freud, the superego begins to emerge at around age five.(1) So we can say superego is a representative of society in ourselves. A serial killer´s crimes challenges our superego. We don´t accept them because we are taught they are bad. So we don´t like serial killers. Generally we hate them. Because thinking their crimes makes us sad and scared. They challenge our super ego. But you know soldiers also can kill a lot of people. But you don´t hate them. You love them.Why? Because you are taught they are the people who protect you. You think they will never harm you. You trust them. This pleases your superego.

3) So everything is about ego. Freud saw these and called humans evil or bad by nature. But i don´t agree with him. Being egoist is not always a bad thing.

(1)http://psychology.about.com/od/theoriesofpersonality/a/personalityelem.htm

I want to say something. You are objecting me with the arguments which my inner voice objected me. It is very interesting to hear same objections. I also objected myself with these arguments but i convinced myself. Hope i will convince you too. Bye.

And please read this article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning

 You can use bad instead of evil.

 "bad" is not the same with "evil" ..maybe in Turkish you dont have the difference between these 2 words but in English you have !

 then forgive my ignorance.

I don´t believe people are either good or evil by nature because the idea of good and evil does not exist as the universal truth. Whether or not something is good/evil depends on the point of reference, subjective judgement or circumstantial criteria.

What I believe in is that we, being animals, care primarily about survival of our species. Hence the need to pass our genes and to make sure that we organise our world in such a way that our offsprings can survive.

That´s why we tend to organise ourselves in groups - we form countries, nations, religious organisations or clubs - it´s all to be a member of something bigger because bigger is more likely to win the fight of survival. We tend to help the people we don´t perceive as threat to our lifestyle, laws or existence. That´s why we don´t help serial killers. And we only help people because it´s not a situation where we have to choose whether it is us or our kin that survives or it is a stranger.

The ideas promoted by religions, ie. imposing their point of view as for what is moral/immoral, are like laws with the only difference being that people responsible for making the law do not claim it came from an invisible being who will be cross if, for example, you do the dishes on Saturday laws are to help our species to breed in peace, religion was invented to sort of assist law. Of course, things have gone wrong and now we have religious groups fighting with one another. However, I believe that the fight is not really about religion per se, it´s about gaining strength for a group so that it may survive. Usually people who do not follow what we believe in might be perceived as a threat and one of the ways to feel safe is to get rid of the threat

So, essentially, I don´t believe in good and evil as universal concepts and, logically, find people animals fighting for the survival of their species. If they´re required to help others, they will as a group is only as strong as its weakest member; and if they feel threatened, they´ll come up with bazillion idiotic reasons to attack/annihilate the individuals or groups that constitute risk.

It was very nice to read all posts...

In my opinion we can rather talk about situations.

Imagine two thiefs. And they are very close friends. Theft is sth. evil but watching over your friend is good. 

Lets assume one thief is cought. If the other one protects his friend at the risk of his own life, how can we describe his act? Where does evil ends and good begins or reverse in that case?

Different societies and relationship structures create and build up different situations. Although individuals acts differ according to their tendencies, genes, environments etc. their acts are mainly the results of the social acknowledgement which fit the situation. Otherwise how could we explain the same individiuals´ evelish and seraphic acts which he has done in just one hour time? So, in my opinion society creates the evil and good itself.

That is why, the matter is, how can a well organised society being established where individuals wouldn´t tend to act evilish or would feel being good is more profitable

 I cut a bit in the following quote:

 1) I said I do not feel joy seeing the smile on his face, confessing the MURDER of children. There are different smiles And I would not find joy in his smile after he would not be convicted for example, because of a technical error. This is a smile of injustice, that doesn´t give me joy. I do get a fuzzy feeling from smiles of criminals who work with street-dogs. (Just saw the documentary on discovery )

2+3) In my opinion Freud was a bit of a quack, especially during his last years  (quackery is şarlatanlık). Okay, quack is a bit overstated. I think 80% of his ideas were totally crazy. When I first started to study psychology I thought "wow, interesting, I never realised that" with what I read from his work. Most people quote Freud, so I thought he MUST be right. But as I started to read more and more of his work, and learned about his life, I started to totally disagree with his views. The guy was a total nutcase (with a deadly fear of the number 62), and connected almost every single problem a person could have with sexuality.