Human beings evolved in tribal societies that are as old as human beings themselves. Probably before we were anatomically modern, we lived as hunter-gatherers in bands and tribes. Obviously such a life demanded much aggression and aggressive instinct; animals were dangerous and other tribes were dangerous, and humans needed to be capable of violent rage. The Earth was sparsely populated but so much acreage was needed to sustain a small band, with the hunter-gatherer mode of survival, that territory was precious. Battles for such territory between bands, if not common, was probably present. And if one doubts this based on archaeology or whatever evidence, at the least we had to be capable of violent rage to deal with beasts, both those that raided us and those we hunted. This life that demanded a propensity for violence to remain and pass on down the generations most likely put into our most intimate genes a natural human instinct for aggression and rage.

Even men and women who do not consider themselves wickedly angry or violent are prone to arguments, yelling, covert and overt aggression to others, sometimes considered justified and sometimes not. Any psychologist will tell you that all people get angry--even enraged--from time to time, and that it is as unhealthy to stifle it as it is to unnaturally stifle the sexual instinct. What the psychologists usually say is that rage is often justified. Someone cuts you off while driving, and you have a right to be angry. To take a more dramatic example, a man drives drunk and kills a woman's daughter. She has every right--even a duty to herself and to her daughter--to see to it that he rots in prison. This is justified; she ought to be enraged and ought to wish the man to suffer, or she wouldn't be human.

But why is this? Is it at all rational? Her daughter has suffered; she has suffered; now the drunk driver will suffer. Is her or her daughter's suffering in the least erased or even mitigated by adding the suffering of another to it, other than to satisfy a bit of her rage at him? Does reason demand that the suffering of a grieving mother have added to it the suffering of a criminal, to "make things right", or does a rather irrational emotion demand it? Why make criminals suffer? Is it rational--or only human nature--to want to make those who cause suffering themselves needlessly suffer, when it helps not at all the ones maimed by them? All it does, after all, is add suffering to a world already full of it; it erases none of the harm the criminals have inflicted.

Obviously "justified" anger is just the psychologist's way of pointing out an aspect of the human psyche--we react when harmed or threatened, and that reaction is a wish to inflict harm, whether it does any good according to reason or not. But just as the human mind--complex and unique thing that it is--creates endless variation from individual to individual in each of its instincts, from food appetite to sex appetite, so too does the instinct to inflict harm take on many, many forms and manifestations. That it is human nature--universal human nature even--for men and women to wish and sometimes act to inflict at least some needless harm on others--from harsh words on up--is a perfectly evident fact. It is also evident that this basic, universal instinct--much like the sexual instinct--takes on unusual variation and degrees of intensity from individual to individual. Hence we have murderers, rapists, cruel dictators of nations, wars, genocide, and so on.

Consciously, human beings nearly universally wish for good to prevail. Ask any man or woman whether he or she wishes evil to overtake the world, his or her nation, even other nations; or to overtake God and the cosmos, and they will say no: they wish for good to overcome and prevail. How many people, voting for President, or even their city's mayor, purposefully vote for the candidate they deem to be the worst? No one, or almost no one, ever does or has. Consciously and honestly humans claim to wish for good to prevail; they do in fact wish for this good.

It is obvious our aggression instinct is present, and the reason for it is, I believe, what I detailed earlier: it has its root in our need for violent aggression to survive in the tribal mode. This need led to a desire to harm enemies, even uselessly according to reason--enemies both animal and human--which in turn became complex and variegated individual-to-individual with the complexity of the human brain. There is probably also a flip-side of pleasure and reward to this aggression drive, a euphoria when others are overcome or conquered by us that rewards us and tells us it is good to conquer. Hitler only seemed to grow more and more sadistic and enraged the more aggression he inflicted. But I think it is certain that once he came to power, once he triumphed over political foes then rolled over Poland and France, he must have been driven mad by this euphoria of the conqueror. This would explain the cases where releasing rage does not lead to mental health or balance but only contributes to the desire to inflict more and more harm, manifested in serial killers, power-addicts like Hitler and others with an unusual and pathological manifestation of this aggression drive.

But we might need to explain not so much the evil and cruelty in the world as the bigger problem of our wish for universal good. Humans are animals: does any animal wish any other animal the best? Could the lion care a whit about the elephant's fate? And when the lion needs nourishment does it feel any anguish at the abject cruelty it inflicts on its prey? Would it make any evolutionary sense, after all, for it to do so? Would it make any evolutionary sense for the lion to not be indifferent to the elephant, or wish to help him should he see one in dire straits? Obviously the rule in nature is that animals care not for any other animals--excepting symbiotic schemes, progeny schemes and herd or tribe schemes. No animal wishes for "the best" for all other animals, even in cases where animals have nothing to lose from the best befalling some others. The bigger problem before us might be not why humans irrationally inflict cruelty and harm on one another and on animals; but why do we so universally and honestly hope that the ultimate best should befall all and everyone?

I think the answer may have to do with the unique human capacity for reason, its ability to project extremely far-reaching consequences and make plans accordingly, and its ability to engage in and desire to accomplish tasks that have nothing to do with our appetites such as hunger or their stimuli, except intellectually.

Human reason is not different in kind than animal reason, but only massively different in degree. But it is--strictly speaking--so different in degree that it has effectively also attained a difference in kind. The difference between a chimpanzee using sticks to draw termites out of a mound and a human society making tools like a computer is not a difference in kind, strictly speaking--both are tool-making behaviors. Obviously the difference between these is not just that humans are able to look at action A and see that, indirectly, it may result in event B which results in event C, which is desirable. The chimpanzee has done this very thing. The only difference is that the chimpanzee has done this, say, to degree 3 while humans have done it to the degree 100,000. But obviously with such drastic a difference in degree of thought about consequences of actions, comes a very real difference in kind between the two. I think examples are unnecessary to demonstrate this point.

The human capacity for thinking through extremely complex means-to-ends scenarios obviously requires a strong concept of goals and what-is-good. The chimpanzee's only concept of what-is-good is that pain is bad and satisfied desire is good. But a chimpanzee sees no relation between satisfying sexual desire and satisfying hunger; both of them are experienced as pleasant, but I doubt the chimpanzee can class them both as "goods". And if it cannot, this would certainly stand in the way of its using long strings of actions unrelated to a goal to attain a biological goal after the human manner. Man is able to do any number of actions completely unrelated to the feeling of hunger in his belly--at least in the sense that these actions give no biological stimulus that they are working to fill his hunger at all--because he is able to have goals, to think in terms of "the good" in the abstract. Certainly our concept of "the good" has its roots in biological sensations, satisfied appetite feeling and being good for us, pain being bad and so on. But with our reason, we set aside totally these sensations and plan a set of actions completely unrelated to the biological desires and stimuli involved in order to reach our goals. Thus we are able to think in terms of goals, in terms of goods, in ways completely unrelated in any biological sense to their biological foundations, which is our appetites and their natural stimuli. Part of the way this came about is through our ability to think in extreme generalities; one of these generalities is the total good, the best, the best for everyone. We were able to disassociate the goal "food" from food itself, and concentrate on totally unrelated things like spending hours affixing a spearhead on a pike in the way that seems "best". We were able to take "good" away from a desire and its objects and think in terms of "goal" and "what-would-be-best" in terms of things only intellectually, and not biologically, related to that biological desire or its stimuli. We developed a strong concept of "goal" which no other animal has, and no human working at some task will ever try to find the worst way to do it; this goes against our nature. Apply this thinking to our view of the world and with the unique human capacity to think in broad generalities, and this is the source of the universal or nearly universal human hope that the ultimate good will prevail. This is the reason, I believe, that consciously humans have always wished that not only their personal good, but a universal good triumph the world over. Hence all humans wish for things like the best candidate for the office, the best philosophy, the best scientific method. Does hardly anyone actively seek what he considers the worst in these areas?

So to recap, the human concept of goods and ends has its root in biological events like pleasure and pain, issuing from things like appetites and the need to escape injury. But humans are able to think in and perform incredibly long chains of actions with which to satisfy these desires that for most of the time have nothing to do with their biological stimuli such as seeing an edible plant would inspire. This requires humans to abstract from the sensation of hunger into the concept of "goal" that can disassociate itself from that hunger and its objects, etc. The intellectual exposition of this very essay and the desire I have to complete it in the best way I can is one example of many side-effects of the phenomenon of humans being able to create goods and aims and goals that have nothing to do with meeting biological needs. The universal desire of all humans that ultimate good prevail simply issues from applying this to higher tiers of generality, of which the human mind is uniquely capable.