The Problem of Evil deals specifically with the paradox of an omnibenevolent god and the existence of evil in a world created by such. "Are people good or evil" isn't one for debate by anyone other than Philosophy 101 students, usually right before diving into qualia. Once more, with feeling: the science says otherwise. There are firm physiological underpinnings for altruism and fair behavior. There are mechanisms that explain their presence and there are biological structures responsible for them. That's fine, so long as you understand that your opinions are contraindicated with fact.Whether people are good or bad is a pretty complex question that has been debated for a long time by philosophers.
I find that there is not real objective answer to that question (maybe for now? ) and that opinion and ideology actually ARE an argument in this debate.
I'm personally of the opinion that humanity is nor good nor bad.
Proof that there is "good" is not proof that there is nothing BUT "good" or even that it is dominant. Can't we just be a mixture of both "good" and "bad"? How about the Milgram experiment? Or Zimbardo? Testing the "bad" is quite hard to do in an ethical manner and what's the incentive anyways? I'm not surprised there is not much evidence. And how to account for all the "evil" in the world then? Is it the product of circumstances and not human nature? Is it just outweight by all the "good"? Or does is simply not exist? And I'm curious, how do sociopaths fit in your worldview? They certainly can't be considered "good". So many questions... :P
Somehow, "people are fundamentally good" gets heard as "all people are all good always." Nowhere did I say that, nowhere would I imply that. On balance, however, "people are fundamentally good." Milgram proves not that people are bad, but that people respect authority over their own moral codes. That, believe it or not, also implies altruism - in other words, the fundamental "good" of people can be used for fundamentally bad ends. Ask yourself - did the Nazis think they were evil? Zimbardo, likewise, proves that people value clan over country - hardly novel. It again illustrates that the altruism of individuals can be used to nefarious ends. Sociopaths are, by definition, mentally ill. As far as "evil in a world full of good" I need only point to Dunbar's Number - the count of relationships a person can maintain with other humans before those humans cease to be human. This does not imply that we are fundamentally bad to people outside Dunbar's number - it implies that we are fundamentally indifferent towards them. So - people within my Monkeysphere - fundamentally good towards. People outside my Monkeysphere - fundamentally indifferent towards. 1+0 = 1. You can NOT get a negative number out of that, no matter how hard you wish there to be one.
Yeah... I guess I was thinking of the big picture, humanity as a whole. I guess that's where my belief of a neutral "fundamentally indifferent" humanity comes from. As for the Monkeysphere, all it really comes down to is empathy. So humans have empathy = humans are good. I'll think on that, you have pretty good arguments when you lay them down nicely :)