re: Are you a good person if you have no capacity for evil?

Read or watched "A Clockwork Orange" lately, didya?

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All had rules of law that they expected their citizens to obey - which was my point. Thanks for playing.

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And their rules included raping, reaving and stealing their way across the world they knew. Spreading their seed.

Having rules doesn’t make your actions any less “evil”.

Although i’d Suggest that actions like that are fairly normal for mankind.
For the winners at least

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Did you know that at the height of the mongol empire, it was said a girl could walk from Europe to China with a pot of gold on her head and arrive unmolested.

You know why? Because swift and severe and brutal punishment awaited those who broke the laws.

It takes a system that is correctly administered to create a deterrent.
And those that break it are the examples.

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A lot of things are "said", doesn't mean they are true. I seriously doubt that saying. The mongols didn't have Horatio Caine (the CSI - Miami guy), I have to wonder how many people got away with crimes. What evidence would you leave if you stole that pot of gold off from the little girl on some abandoned road?

Still, a society with the means to find the perpetrator could use a brutal system as a deterrent. If it could be shown to actually deter said crime then that could be one way to justify it - probably the only way to justify it.

But my original point dealt with the brutal killing being done out of vengeance, not as a deterrent.

I always thought myself a good person

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A lot of things are "said", doesn't mean they are true. I seriously doubt that saying.

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That's because it's pure nonsense.

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According to Jesus, "...there is no one who does good, not even one."

He's right, you know.

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Not sure if this is quite what you're getting at, but as I entered this thread, the following bit came to mind... just looked it up, Mark 10:17-19...

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17As Jesus started on His way, a man ran up and knelt before Him. “Good Teacher,” he asked, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” 18“Why do you call Me good? Jesus replied, “No one is good except God alone. 19You know the commandments: ‘Do not murder, do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not bear false witness, do not defraud, and honor your father and mother.’”…

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The context as I see it here is Good is a concept-- or Platonic ideal if you'd prefer-- that you can align to, and you can strive towards in your actions from moment to moment, but cannot "be" per se. Same thing with Truth... you can be truthful from moment to moment, but you can't be True or Truth.

If you'll notice, I also specified "from moment to moment". Good at the highest level-- as an archetype-- is always Good, or eternally Good. There's a parallel here to God's answer to Moses, when God simply declared himself to be "I Am". This isn't supposed to be just a clever play on words, but a succinct expression that indicates he is all of creation in a way that transcends time (*and duality).

This all ties back to the OPs question... are you a good person if you have no capacity for evil? Existence on our level-- as humans-- requires that we think and act here on earth at any and every given moment. In a way, this is part of the issue. It's really, really hard to do anything purely "Good" in a given moment, which does not have numerous contingencies that led to the act in that moment, and implications that stem out of the act, that are purely Good. Example: Feeding your child is good... but just one example of the contingencies that led to the moment might mean having killed an animal to create that food. You can probably come up with thousands of scenarios leading to and from that moment which are less good than the act itself... thus, in time, all actions are subject to some level of corruption in a relative way.

* I believe this is at least part of Jesus' intent in saying to not call even him Good, for nobody is Good; only God is.

Paradoxically, each moment also has it's own permanence. However imperfect the act of feeding your child was from a wider perspective when you consider successive moments, that moment you fed your hungry child will eternally exist as good (in a lower case way) as a stand-alone moment when you acted from love. But such a small sliver of existence is an incomplete existence (as I'll elaborate on below).

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Second thought to consider:

Good exists in a duality with bad/evil. If one exists in a plane where such a duality exists, I lean towards saying that one must necessarily possess the ability to do both good and evil. To be capable of doing either only good or only evil would make your existence on that plane incomplete.

To escape the good/evil duality, you must redefine existence: in this case I think "innocent" would be the correct term. And if one acts innocently, it is not purposefully good.

... And there's where free will comes into play. Take the story of the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve were initially innocent. They were perhaps good and perfect in a way... but not in a way that knew or understood good and evil. It was thus a limited existence as I alluded to above. When they exercised their free will in a way that was not in line with The One, they lost innocence, but gained a capacity to do good and evil with understanding.

LINK

I was thinking about something similar