Human nature is good
Every person is born with the sprouts of compassion, shame, deference and the sense of right and wrong. Evil comes from neglect, hunger and bad surroundings, which destroy what nature gave.
Human nature is bad
People are born loving profit, envious and full of desires; left to their nature, they fight. Goodness is an achievement of conscious effort, shaped by ritual, teachers and law.
The Exchange
who answered whom
MenciusSuppose a man suddenly sees a child about to fall into a well. He feels alarm and compassion — not to win the parents’ favour, nor for praise, nor because he dislikes the cry. That heart is in everyone. Human nature is good as water flows downward.
XunziYou confuse what is inborn with what is acquired. People are born with love of profit; follow it, and strife results. A warped board must be steamed and pressed before it is straight. Goodness is the work of the press — of ritual and teachers — not of the wood.
- Mencius
Look at Ox Mountain. It was once covered in trees; axes cut them and cattle ate every new shoot, until it was bare. People now say it never had trees. Is baldness the nature of a mountain? So with the goodness destroyed in people day by day.
- Xunzi
If people were good by nature, what need would there be for sage-kings and ritual? We value them precisely because nature is bad. A potter makes a vessel from clay; the vessel is the potter’s work, not the clay’s nature.
- Mencius
Then why does the man in the street feel shame when he is called a thief? You yourself say anyone can become a sage-king Yu. That capacity is what I call nature.
- Xunzi
The capacity to learn is in everyone — but capacity is not goodness. A man can walk anywhere under heaven; that does not mean he has walked there. Goodness must be done, by effort, over a lifetime.
Wang YangmingSeventeen centuries later — Mencius was right. Every mind has innate knowledge of the good. Even the thief, told to strip, will not remove his last garment. Shame is the proof.
Thomas HobbesAnd in another country — without a common power to keep them in awe, men are in a war of every man against every man. Xunzi’s ritual is my sovereign.
The debate over human nature (xìng) was the central quarrel of classical Confucianism (Confucianism). Confucius had said only that “by nature people are close to one another; by practice they become far apart”. In the fourth century BCE Mencius, arguing against the philosopher Gaozi, who held that nature is neither good nor bad, insisted that it is good. In the third century Xunzi devoted a whole chapter, “Human Nature is Bad”, to refuting him. Both agreed that anyone can become a sage and that moral cultivation is the work of a lifetime; they disagreed about whether cultivation develops what is already there, like a farmer tending sprouts, or reshapes a raw material against its grain, like a craftsman straightening wood.
The disagreement had political consequences. If people are good, rulers should nourish them with benevolent government; if bad, they must be restrained by ritual — or, as Xunzi’s students Han Fei and Li Si concluded, by law and punishment. The Song Neo-Confucians (Neo-Confucianism) declared Mencius the orthodox heir of Confucius, and Wang Yangming grounded his whole philosophy in innate goodness. The same quarrel runs through European thought, between Rousseau‘s natural goodness corrupted by society and Hobbes‘s war of all against all — and into contemporary research on infant empathy, evolutionary altruism and aggression.
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Confucianism
The ethical and political tradition founded on Confucius’s teaching — humaneness, ritual, filial piety, learning and government by virtue — the backbone of Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese civilization.
Confucius
The teacher of Lu whose sayings on goodness, ritual, learning and right relationships shaped Chinese civilization for two and a half thousand years.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Florentine diplomat and political theorist whose Prince told rulers how power is actually won and kept — separating politics from conventional morality and giving the world the adjective “Machiavellian”.
Zhu Xi
The twelfth-century Song philosopher who synthesised Neo-Confucianism — principle (lǐ) and vital energy (qì), the investigation of things, the Supreme Ultimate in every thing — and whose commentaries on the Four Books were the basis of China’s civil service examinations for six centuries.
What Is Justice?
From Thrasymachus’s “advantage of the stronger” to Rawls’s veil of ignorance — the question of what we owe each other and who should rule.
Daniel Defoe
Merchant, bankrupt, spy, pamphleteer and pilloried dissenter who, at nearly sixty, wrote Robinson Crusoe (1719) and then Moll Flanders and A Journal of the Plague Year — inventing the realistic English novel out of journalism, spiritual autobiography and the voices of ordinary people.