QuestionsAre humans good by nature?The willow and the whirling water: a neutral nature, which is shaped
Are humans good by nature?Neither good nor bad

The willow and the whirling water: a neutral nature, which is shaped

The willow and the cups; the whirling water; "nature is neither good nor bad"

Gaozi c. 420 BC · c. 350 BCHuman nature is neither good nor bad: it takes the shape it is given, like willow or water.
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What it claims

Human nature is neither good nor bad: what people become depends on the direction they are given.

Why

Nature is what comes with life, like water that flows east or west: goodness is a form given to it.

The same idea through history
Confucius500 BCConfucius says that people are close by nature and that practice sets them apart, without saying whether the shared core is good or bad. Gaozi fills this silence with a clear answer: neither.
Gaozi320 BCGaozi (4th century BC), a contemporary of Mencius, left no writings. His ideas are known to us only through the book of Mencius, his opponent: they must be read with that caution.
John Dewey1922Twenty-three centuries later, John Dewey defends a similar idea: our original nature supplies raw materials, and it is customs that give them shape.
In short

"The willow and the whirling water: a neutral nature, which is shaped" is an argument by Gaozi (Mencius 6A.1-4 and 6A.6 (Gaozi's words, 4th century BC), 320 BC) on the question "Are humans good by nature?" (answer: neither good nor bad). Its claim: Human nature is neither good nor bad: what people become depends on the direction they are given. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P4). AskPhilosophy presents 5 objections, 1 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

Mencius 6A.1-4 and 6A.6 (Gaozi's words, 4th century BC)
Valid with an implicit premise

What if the question were badly put? Gaozi, in the book of Mencius, refuses both "good" and "bad": human nature is a raw material, like the willow from which cups are woven, or the whirling water that flows east or west depending on the passage opened for it. What makes people good or bad is therefore the shape they are given: upbringing, example, government. Gaozi left us no writings: all his thought comes from book 6A of Mencius, who refutes him. The P1 to P4 form is our reconstruction from these passages (6A.1 to 6A.4 and 6A.6).

P1Nature is what comes with life: the appetites for food and pleasure. What is in us from birth is not, in itself, virtuous or vicious.
P2This nature is like whirling water: open a passage to the east and it flows east; to the west, it flows west. It does not tell good from bad by itself, as water does not tell east from west.
P3Benevolence and righteousness are a form given to this material, as the cup is made from the willow: they are added to nature, they do not come out of it by themselves.
P4 · implicit premiseA material that can receive one form or another equally is itself neither good nor bad, and what is made of it depends on what is done to it.
Therefore human nature is neither good nor bad: what people become depends on the direction they are given.

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, the computer finds a case where nature is compared to water, goodness is a form given from outside, but the material has a natural slope towards the good: nature is then not neutral.
With its four premises, the conclusion follows. The weak point is P4: a material that takes several shapes can still have slopes, like wood that bends more easily one way than the other. Mencius attacks exactly there: water, he says, does not choose between east and west, but it does choose between up and down. And P1 is open to challenge: defining nature by what comes with life puts man, dog and ox on the same level, which Mencius reproaches it for in 6A.3.
Analogy. Clay: a potter can make a bowl or a weapon from it. Clay is neither bowl nor weapon, and no one calls it "good" or "bad". Gaozi wants the newborn to be clay; Mencius answers that human clay has a slope.

Objections

5

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

Mencius 320 BC · attacks premise 3

To make a cup, one must cut and damage the willow. If goodness were made the same way, one would have to do violence to people to make them good. Such a doctrine would lead all men to see benevolence and righteousness as calamities.

no reply
We have not yet found a direct reply by Gaozi in the texts.
The debate goes on (our summary) The text preserves no answer from Gaozi. One could reply that shaping is not always violence, and that forming a child is not breaking him. Xunzi will later take up the images of wood that is straightened and clay that the potter works, giving them a sense opposite to Mencius': for him, that goodness requires work does not show that it does violence to nature, but that it does not come out of it (see the argument on his theory).
Where the debate stands (our summary)Each side answers one image with another, and a comparison illustrates a thesis without proving it. The basic disagreement: is learning virtue the unfolding of what we already have (Mencius), or the acquiring of what we lack (Gaozi, and Xunzi in a different sense)?
Mencius 320 BC · attacks premise 2

Water does not tell east from west, but it does tell up from down: it always flows downward. Man's nature tends to the good as water tends downward. Strike water and it leaps above your forehead; dam it and drive it back and it stays on the mountain: it is force that makes it act, not its nature. When a person does evil, his nature suffers the same violence.

a defender replies
We have not yet found a direct reply by Gaozi in the texts.
John Dewey defender of the argument · 1922
Summary: Dewey writes that original human nature supplies the raw materials, and that it is customs that supply the machinery and the designs. War, for example, would not be possible without anger, rivalry or self-display, but to fancy that they must lead to war is as if a savage thought that, because the fibres he weaves into baskets have fixed natural properties, the immemorial patterns of his tribe were also natural necessities. The tendencies can be directed in many ways.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Both positions admit natural tendencies; they differ on their direction. Mencius sees a slope towards the good in them, Dewey sees them as having no moral direction of their own, directed by customs. For Dewey, original man is not "empty and passive" either: he criticises Helvétius on this point.
Mencius 320 BC · attacks premise 1

If "nature" only means "what comes with life", then the whiteness of a white feather would be that of snow, and that of snow that of jade, and likewise the nature of a dog would be that of an ox, and the nature of an ox that of a man. Gaozi must accept that there is no nature proper to man.

no reply
We have not yet found a direct reply by Gaozi in the texts.
The debate goes on (our summary) The text (6A.3) stops on Mencius' question, without an answer from Gaozi. One could accept the conclusion: all living things share appetites, and it is how man is raised that sets him apart. But one must then explain why only man can be shaped into virtue, which brings us back to Mencius' point.
Mencius 320 BC · attacks the conclusion

People's mouths agree on the same flavours, their ears on the same sounds, their eyes on the same beauty. Should their hearts alone have nothing in common? What hearts approve together is the principles of our nature and the demands of righteousness, and these please the heart as meat pleases the mouth. If the heart has a common taste, human nature is not neutral.

no reply
We have not yet found a direct reply by Gaozi in the texts.
The debate goes on (our summary) Gaozi does not answer in the text. One could reply that common tastes are those of a common culture: agreement of hearts is observed within one society, and does not prove a bent before any society. Mencius gives only analogies here (mouth, ear, eye), no direct proof.
Kant 1793 · attacks the conclusion

Summary: Kant writes that it matters greatly for morals not to admit any moral middle, either in actions or in characters, as long as that is possible, because in this ambiguity all maxims risk losing their precision and firmness. He ranks those who say that man is by nature neither good nor bad among the "latitudinarians of neutrality". In a note, he adds that since the moral law is an incentive in us, lack of agreement with it can come only from a real opposition.

no reply
see the argument
No reply possible: objection raised in 1793, after the author's death (-350).
The debate goes on (our summary) Kant's objection assumes that the moral law is already in man as an incentive: this is what Gaozi does not grant. For Gaozi nothing moral is given at the start, and Kant's argument then goes in a circle. Kant does give a reason for it, though: we would not find this incentive by reasoning if we did not have it, since the moral law makes us aware of our freedom.