QuestionsAre humans good by nature?The theft of the pears: evil loved for its own sake
Are humans good by nature?Prone to evil

The theft of the pears: evil loved for its own sake

The theft of the pears; Confessions II; gratuitous evil; the jealous infant

Augustine of Hippo 354 · 430Believe to understand: God in the innermost self.
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What it claims

The human being is prone to evil by nature: the will can love evil for its own sake, without need or interest, and from infancy on.

Why

He stole with no need and no pleasure in the fruit, and finds no good in it: he loved evil for itself, from infancy on.

The same idea through history
Augustine of Hippo400In another context, Augustine explains evil as a lack of good and a turning away of the free will. The theft of the pears is its best-known lived example.
In short

"The theft of the pears: evil loved for its own sake" is an argument by Augustine of Hippo (Confessions I, 7 and II, 4-9 (c. 397-400), 400) on the question "Are humans good by nature?" (answer: prone to evil). Its claim: The human being is prone to evil by nature: the will can love evil for its own sake, without need or interest, and from infancy on. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P4, P7). AskPhilosophy presents 4 objections, 3 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

Confessions I, 7 and II, 4-9 (c. 397-400)
Valid with an implicit premise

At sixteen, Augustine steals pears with a gang of young people. He is not hungry, he has better pears at home, and these are not even good: they eat a few and throw the rest to the pigs. Years later, in his Confessions, he asks himself why, and finds no motive. For him this episode reveals something about human beings in general: we can love evil for its own sake, and this bent already shows in the jealous infant. It is a particular version of the "prone to evil" camp: evil does not come from interest or need, but from a will that turns the wrong way. The P1 to P7 form is our reconstruction, from Confessions I, 7 and II, 4-9.

P1The theft was without necessity: Augustine had better pears in abundance, these had neither beauty nor taste, and he threw them to the pigs.
P2When we ask the cause of a crime, we usually find a motive: a good to obtain or a loss to avoid. Even Catiline, said to be wicked for nothing, had a purpose.
P3After examining it, Augustine finds in this theft "no beauty" at all: nothing good was to be gained, neither need nor the pleasure of the fruit.
P4 · implicit premiseIf Augustine, examining himself honestly, finds no good in this act, then there was none: he wanted the theft for itself, "to be gratuitously wanton".
P5This bent shows from earliest infancy, before any upbringing or bad company: the infant jealous of its foster-brother is "innocent" only through the weakness of its limbs, not through its will.
P6No one is free from sin before God, not even the infant who has lived but a day on earth: Augustine here takes up Job's saying and applies it to everyone.
P7 · implicit premiseA bent found in every person from infancy, which can attach itself to evil for its own sake, belongs to human nature.
Therefore the human being is prone to evil by nature: the will can love evil for its own sake, without need or interest, and from infancy on.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P4 (or without P7), the computer finds a case where the theft had neither need nor visible good, but had a hidden motive, for example the pleasure of belonging to the gang, or else where this bent is found in many without being human "nature": the conclusion no longer follows.
With its seven premises, the conclusion follows. The weakest point is P4, which the text assumes without stating: it moves from "I found no motive" to "there was none". Augustine himself qualifies this later (II, 6, 14): he may have sought a false good, the shadow of a liberty that consists in doing what is forbidden. If this false good counts as a motive, the thesis of "gratuitous" evil becomes weaker. P7 is also disputed: do one episode and a jealous infant suffice to speak of the nature of everyone?
Analogy. A doctor who finds in a two-year-old the first signs of an inherited illness. He does not say the child has done anything wrong: he says the defect is there before any choice, and is not the environment's fault. Augustine reads the theft of the pears as that symptom.

Objections

4

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

Socrates (Plato's character) 385 BC · attacks premise 4

Summary: in the Meno, Socrates gets Meno to admit that no one desires evil knowing it as such: whoever desires evil takes it for a good, or wants to be miserable, which no one wants. Applied to Augustine: he cannot have loved evil as such. He loved something he took to be good.

Augustin replies
Augustin What Augustine himself says, in the same book (II, 6, 14)
Summary: Augustine asks what he loved in this theft. He suggests he wished to do by artifice what was forbidden, because he could not do it by power: to imitate, as a captive, an imperfect liberty, an obscured likeness of omnipotence. He then asks whether he could like what was unlawful only because it was unlawful.
The debate goes on (our summary) The two positions come closer. Augustine admits that evil is never desired in the form of evil alone: he seeks in it the distorted image of a good, liberty. Socrates would say that this is exactly an error about the good. The disagreement is about the cause of the error: an ignorance that knowledge is enough to dispel (Socrates), or a will that turns away while knowing (Augustine).
Where the debate stands (our summary)A point disputed since Antiquity ("weakness of will" or akrasia). Both camps admit that evil takes the appearance of a good. They differ on whether one can will it while knowing it is evil.
Rousseau 1755 · attacks premise 7

Rousseau grants that people are wicked: a sad and continual experience spares the need for proof. But he holds that man is naturally good, and that he has been depraved by the changes in his constitution, the progress he has made and the knowledge he has acquired. A bent to evil therefore does not prove that evil is in nature: it may come from life in society.

no reply
see the argument
No reply possible: objection raised in 1755, after the author's death (430).
The debate goes on (our summary) Rousseau writes thirteen hundred years after Augustine, who could not reply. An Augustinian's rejoinder would be the jealous infant (P5): at that age, social life and knowledge cannot yet have deformed him. Rousseau would answer that jealousy already supposes comparing oneself to others, hence amour-propre, which is born in society. The disagreement is about what is "already" social in an infant.
Where the debate stands (our summary)An open question, studied today by developmental psychology: at what age and in what form do jealousy, helping and comparison appear in the infant? Observations exist, but the two camps read them in opposite ways.
A
An objection drawn from the story itself attacks premise 5

In his own account, Augustine writes that alone he would not have stolen the pears: he also loved the complicity of the gang, the laughter at tricking people who suspected nothing. The theft would therefore come from company and age (sixteen), not from a bad nature.

Augustin replies
Augustin What Augustine says of it (II, 9, 17)
Summary: Augustine notes that alone he would not have committed this theft, nor found pleasure in it. He calls it a "too unfriendly friendship" and a seduction of the mind: a greed to do mischief out of fun, with no gain or revenge, and the shame of not being shameless when someone says "come on, let's do it".
M
Margo Gardner and Laurence Steinberg 2005
Summary: in a risk-taking experiment, adolescents, young adults and adults played alone or with two peers present. The presence of peers markedly increased risk-taking in adolescents and young adults, but not in adults. The authors see an effect specific to age, which may partly explain behaviour the same people would not show alone.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Augustine and his critics agree on a fact: company played a part. They differ on what it proves. If the gang brings out the bent, does it show that it was already there (Augustine), or that it comes from the group and the age (Rousseau, Gardner and Steinberg)?
Kant 1793 · attacks premise 5

Summary: Kant grants that there is in man a universal propensity to evil, but he refuses to look for it in sensibility and natural inclinations. The propensity can lie only in freedom: only what is our own act can be called morally evil, and it must be imputable to us. Applied to Augustine's infant: a child's jealousy is a movement of sensibility, not yet moral evil.

Augustin replies
see the argument
Augustin What Augustine already places in the soul
Summary: Augustine writes that the weakness of the infant's body is innocent, but its will is not: he places the fault in the will, not in the limbs. He adds that we tolerate these faults in the child because they pass with age, not because they are not faults.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Augustine and Kant agree that the propensity to evil is universal and that it lies in the will, not the body. They differ on its origin: for Augustine, the inheritance of a first fault; for Kant, an act of freedom for which no further cause can be given.