The child at the well: goodness is in our nature

The child at the well; the four sprouts; "human nature is good"

Mencius c. 372 BC · c. 289 BCHuman nature is good: everyone carries the seed of benevolence.

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What it claims

Human nature is good. If people do wrong, their natural endowment is not to blame.

Why

Seeing a child near a well, we feel compassion at once, without calculation or training: it comes from our nature.

The same idea through history

Confucius500 BCConfucius only says that people are close by nature and that practice sets them apart. He does not say whether this shared core is good or bad: his heirs will quarrel over this.

Mencius320 BCMencius (c. 372-289 BC) settles it: human nature is good. His proof is a small thought experiment, the child at the well, and he defends it against Gaozi, who says it is neutral.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau1762Two thousand years later, in Europe, Rousseau defends a similar idea without knowing Mencius: a feeling for the good, conscience, is innate in us, prior to any education.

In short

"The child at the well: goodness is in our nature" is an argument by Mencius (Mencius 2A.6 and 6A.1-8 (4th century BC), 320 BC) on the question "Are humans good by nature?" (answer: good by nature). Its claim: Human nature is good. If people do wrong, their natural endowment is not to blame. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P3). AskPhilosophy presents 3 objections, 2 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

Mencius 2A.6 and 6A.1-8 (4th century BC)

Valid with an implicit premise

Imagine you suddenly see a small child about to fall into a well. Before you even think, you start and your heart tightens. Mencius, Confucius' great disciple, starts from this reaction to defend a famous thesis: human nature is good. We are born with four "sprouts" of virtue, just as we are born with four limbs; they still have to be grown. The text does not set out the argument as premises: the P1 to P5 form below is our reconstruction, from 2A.6 and the debates with Gaozi (6A).

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 P3, the computer finds a case where everyone feels compassion at the sight of the child, without calculation, but where this feeling was learned in early childhood: it no longer proves anything about human nature.

With its five premises, the argument is valid. Without P3 it no longer is: a feeling shared by everyone and free of calculation could still have been learned very early, from the example of others. Mencius does not lay down P3 as a principle, but he asserts it when answering his opponents: these virtues "are not infused into us from without". This is also where his critics strike: Hobbes sees in it a hidden turn back to oneself, Xunzi a mere starting point that only education makes good.

Analogy. A baby smiles at a face before anyone has taught it to smile. We conclude that smiling is part of our nature, even if we must later learn when and how to smile. Mencius says the same of compassion.

Objections

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

Gaozi 320 BC · attacks the conclusion

Human nature is like willow wood, and righteousness like a cup: making a person good is like making a cup out of willow. Goodness is shaped from outside, it is not in our nature.

Mencius replies

Mencius Mencius' reply (6A.1)

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

Gaozi Gaozi returns with another image (6A.2)

Nature is like whirling water: open a passage to the east and it flows east; to the west, it flows west. Human nature leans neither towards good nor towards bad.

See the rest of the debate (1)

Mencius Mencius' reply (6A.2)

Water does not choose between east and west, but it does choose between up and down: it always flows downward. Human nature tends to the good in the same way. You can make water splash above your forehead, but that is force at work, not the nature of water.

The debate goes on (our summary) In this debate, each side answers an image with another image: the willow, the whirling water, the water flowing down. A comparison illustrates a thesis but does not prove it. Mencius' real proof remains the child at the well. Gaozi does not give in: later in the chapter (6A.3-4), he holds that nature is only what comes with life, such as the appetite for food and the pleasures of the senses.

Xunzi 250 BC · attacks the conclusion

Human nature is bad; what is good in people comes from effort. Mencius asserts that nature is good, but without evidence: his thesis cannot be checked against the facts. If nature were good, we could do without the sage kings and the rites; it is because it is bad that teachers are needed to straighten people, as crooked wood is straightened.

Mencius replies

Mencius What Mencius had already answered to those who see no goodness in people (6A.8; Xunzi came after him)

Ox Mountain once had beautiful trees. They were cut down with axes, then cattle grazed every young shoot. Seeing it bare, people think it never had trees: is that its nature? The same goes for people. Their good feelings are damaged day after day; if nourished, they grow, otherwise they wither.

Xunzi Xunzi's reply to this idea of Mencius (chapter 23)

Mencius says that nature is good and that all people have lost it. That is a serious mistake: barely born, people would already have strayed from their first simplicity. A goodness that everyone loses from the start does not deserve the name of nature.

The debate goes on (our summary) The two sides are closer than they seem: Xunzi grants that any person in the street can become a sage, and Mencius grants that the sprouts must be cultivated. The disagreement is about the starting point: a slope towards the good that must be tended, or desires that must be straightened like crooked wood. This debate runs through the whole history of Confucianism; Mencius' view prevailed from Zhu Xi onwards.

Hobbes 1651 · attacks premise 2

Pity is not so disinterested. To grieve at another's misfortune is to imagine that the same misfortune could befall us. That is why we feel less pity when we think ourselves safe. For Hobbes, what first guides people is concern for themselves, and without a common power they are at war with one another (see his argument on the state of nature).

no reply

No reply possible: objection raised in 1651, after the author's death (-289).

The debate goes on (our summary) Mencius had ruled out self-interested calculations (pleasing the parents, being praised), but not this imagined turn back to oneself, which he did not consider. His defenders answer that the alarm at the child is immediate ("suddenly"): it comes before any thought of oneself. Hobbes would reply that imagination is very quick too. The debate continues today in psychology, about empathy in very young children.