#inherent morality

What affects other people are your actions, the choices you make. Your thoughts themselves are neither good nor bad, the things you do (or don't do) because of those thoughts are what matter.

If you worry that your thoughts might lead to you actually hurting someone, then get help. Talk to someone, find a safe outlet, find healthy coping mechanisms.

I'm not a psychologist or sociologist, so take what I say with a grain of salt. There's a few different aspects to this that I want to tackle though.

The assumption here is that having a bad childhood makes someone bad and having a good childhood makes someone good and everyone who doesn't fit that mold is an outlier. That's. . . not at all true though and has been proven time and time again. Many adults who were abused as children especially would not be happy at the dismissal of their work to make themselves better than the adults who hurt them. It's also a very cruel thing to claim in general, the insistence that someone can't be traumatized because their childhood was "good" by the measures of someone else AND that trauma inevitably makes someone bad.

Even if someone's childhood WAS good, there's a question of whether all their needs were actually met by their standards. This is complicated to think about because there's really no way to measure or test this sort of thing currently, whether certain coping skills or venting methods or other controlled outlooks can keep someone from turning to hurting and even killing others, but it is still something we need to think about when trying to reduce violence in our communities. Can these tragedies be avoided if measures are taken to redirect people with violent thoughts? What can we do to help people, especially children and teens, who experience violent impulses and desires instead of brushing them off as monsters who are born evil?

Like I've said before, this idea still takes away the power we as people have over own choices. Serial killers don't kill people because they had bad childhoods or because there's something about them that's just inherently bad and impossible to resist, they kill people because they WANT to. There's a lot of reasons serial killers use or claim, but at the end of the day, it is always THEIR choice to hurt someone else. Brushing their actions off as some sort of inherent evil excuses them from their choices.

It also gives other people a way to separate ourselves from those we deem evil. People like the idea of serial killers and other perpetuators of violence being "inherently evil" because that means we can dehumanize them, see them as vague monsters instead of our neighbors, coworkers, friends, family. They're a distant monster, not something we ever really need to think about but that we always fear. That, in turn, makes it easier for those who commit violence to get away with it! How many serial killers go years, even decades, without being caught because they're nice? Because they're pleasant? Because they have senses of humor or they love animals or they have a great family? That shit happens because we see killers as monsters, like we can look at a killer and just know that there's something inherently rotten about them, and we forget that they're still just people who have feelings and families and hobbies.

Sometimes it's a character challenging what those concepts mean (what is good? what is evil? what does that mean to them as an individual and what does it mean in their situation?) and sometimes it's a character actively fighting against a world telling them what they're "supposed" to be, the Chosen One becoming the Big Bad instead or the destined villain choosing to be good.

I actually have a handful of posts in my inherent morality tag if you want to check those out.

I'm gonna make a bulletpoint list because that's easier for me, but here's some of my issues with that trope and the idea in general:

(putting it under a cut because it got long and heavy; warning for discussions of child abuse, racism, and religious trauma)