QuestionsAre humans good by nature?Ox Mountain: a goodness damaged, not absent
Are humans good by nature?Good by nature

Ox Mountain: a goodness damaged, not absent

Ox Mountain; the morning air; Niu Shan

Mencius c. 372 BC · c. 289 BCHuman nature is good: everyone carries the seed of benevolence.
See profile
What it claims

In the hard person as on the bare mountain, the apparent absence of goodness is damage suffered, not evidence against nature: human nature is good, and it must be nourished to grow.

Why

A bare mountain may once have had trees; likewise a hard person's goodness is cut down day after day, not missing.

The same idea through history
Confucius500 BCConfucius only says that people are close by nature. Mencius goes further: this shared core leans towards the good, and it can be damaged.Mencius320 BCThe same Mencius proves goodness by the reaction of compassion before the child at the well. Ox Mountain answers a different question: how to explain hard people who seem to have no heart at all?Zhu Xi1190Zhu Xi takes up the thesis and adds an explanation of evil: nature is a good principle, carried by a breath (qi) that is clear or turbid.
In short

"Ox Mountain: a goodness damaged, not absent" is an argument by Mencius (Mencius 6A.8 (4th century BC), 320 BC) on the question "Are humans good by nature?" (answer: good by nature). Its claim: In the hard person as on the bare mountain, the apparent absence of goodness is damage suffered, not evidence against nature: human nature is good, and it must be nourished to grow. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P5). AskPhilosophy presents 4 objections, 3 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

Mencius 6A.8 (4th century BC)
Valid with an implicit premise

When we meet a hard, cruel, unscrupulous person, we think they never had a heart. Mencius answers with an image. Ox Mountain, near a large city, was once covered with beautiful trees. They were cut down with axes. Every year the sap pushed up new shoots, but cattle and goats came and grazed them. Today the mountain is bare, and those who see it think it never bore trees. For Mencius we make the same mistake with people: their goodness is not absent, it is cut down day after day. The text does not set out the argument as premises: the P1 to P5 form is our reconstruction of passage 6A.8.

P1A bare mountain may once have been covered with trees: its bareness comes from axes and from animals grazing the shoots, not from its nature. Seeing it bare does not prove it never had trees.
P2With people it is the same: someone who seems to have no benevolence or sense of justice has had these feelings cut down day after day, like trees by the axe.
P3In the calm of the morning, even this person recovers a little of the likes and dislikes that are proper to humanity. This breath is weak, and it is smothered by what he does during the day.
P4When this smothering is repeated, the restorative breath of the night no longer suffices to keep these feelings, and the person becomes not much different from an animal. People then think he never had any such qualities.
P5 · implicit premiseIf good feelings reappear of themselves as soon as they stop being damaged, and if their apparent absence is explained by that damage, then they belong to human nature, and that nature leans towards the good.
Therefore, in the hard person as on the bare mountain, the apparent absence of goodness is damage suffered, not evidence against nature: human nature is good, and it must be nourished to grow.

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 P5, the computer finds a case where good feelings grow back by themselves and their apparent absence comes from damage, but where human nature carries as many bad inclinations as good ones: the conclusion "nature is good" no longer follows.
With its five premises, the conclusion follows. Two points are fragile. The first is the analogy: we can see the stumps and shoots on the mountain, but the "morning breath" is an inner observation, which each person must check in themselves. The second is P5, which the text does not state: that good feelings are natural does not yet say that the whole of nature leans towards the good, since a nature could carry bad inclinations too. Pascal, Kant and Xunzi, each in their way, will say that it does.
Analogy. A garden left to itself: from the street, people say it was never planted. But scratch the soil and bulbs push up every spring, and get trampled. What we see, says Mencius, is not what the garden is, but what has been done to it.

Objections

4

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

Xunzi 250 BC · attacks premise 5

Xunzi quotes Mencius: human nature is good, and if people do evil it is because they have all lost it. Xunzi answers that this is a mistake: barely born, a person has already strayed from his first simplicity, and necessarily loses it. A goodness that everyone necessarily loses does not deserve the name of nature. For him nature is what comes from Heaven without being learned, and he places in it love of gain and the desires of the senses.

a defender replies
see the argument
No reply possible: objection raised in -250, after the author's death (-289).
Z
Zhu Xi defender of the argument · 1190
Summary: Mencius speaks of nature as it is at the origin, and likewise of talents. Xunzi saw only the bad side, others saw a mixture (Yang Xiong) or a version closer to the truth (Han Yu). Zhu Xi regrets that Han Yu lacks the word "breath" (qi), and quotes Cheng Yi: to speak of nature without speaking of breath is incomplete. Just after, he notes that Mencius never spoke of the nature tied to breath, which explains why people are unequal.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Both camps agree on a fact: anyone can learn to become good. They differ on the starting point: Mencius sees sprouts to cultivate, Xunzi desires to straighten. Zhu Xi sides with Mencius on nature, but holds his theory incomplete without the breath (qi), needed to explain why people are unequal. Basic disagreement: should "nature" mean what is deepest in a person, or what comes first?
Kant 1793 · attacks premise 3

Summary: Kant writes that the opinion that man is naturally good probably does not come from experience, when moral good and evil are in question: the history of all ages speaks far too strongly against it. He sees in it rather a benevolent supposition of moralists, from Seneca to Rousseau, to urge us to cultivate the seed of good that may lie in us.

no reply
No reply possible: objection raised in 1793, after the author's death (-289).
The debate goes on (our summary) Kant targets the idea that the world progresses towards the better and that man is naturally good. Mencius does not claim that history shows this goodness: the bare mountain is precisely his proof of the apparent opposite. He relies on an inner experience, the morning air, which can be said to prove nothing to others. Kant himself distinguishes further on, in man, an original disposition to good that nothing can destroy (see his argument on the crooked wood).
Where the debate stands (our summary)Disagreement on proof: Mencius relies on self-observation (the morning breath); Kant holds that one cannot reliably observe other people's maxims, nor always one's own, and that a thesis about man's moral nature cannot be proved by experience alone. Neither camp has a proof the other accepts.
A
Augustine 400 · attacks premise 1

Summary: Augustine (who does not know Mencius) tells of seeing a jealous infant, not yet able to speak, looking pale and bitter at its foster-brother. For him the innocence of the infant lies in the weakness of its limbs, not in its will. Applied to Mencius: if goodness were in nature, it would be visible from the start, before anything had damaged it.

a defender replies
see the argument
No reply possible: objection raised in 400, after the author's death (-289).
F
Felix Warneken and Michael Tomasello defender of the argument · 2006
Summary: in a series of experiments, eighteen-month-old children, who hardly speak, spontaneously help an adult who cannot reach an object, without being asked or rewarded. For the authors this shows a tendency to help that comes before upbringing. They compare these children to young chimpanzees, which also help in some cases.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Both observations are real (the infant's jealousy, the eighteen-month-old's spontaneous help) and do not contradict each other: they show that the young child carries different tendencies. The disagreement is about what we call "nature": all these tendencies together (Augustine), or those that set us apart (Mencius).
Gaozi 320 BC · attacks the conclusion

Gaozi holds that nature is what comes with life: the appetite for food, the taste for fine colours. Benevolence is within us, he says, but righteousness comes from outside, as one honours an old man because of his age. So nature would hold no leaning of its own towards the good (objection built from 6A.3-4).

Mencius replies
see the argument
Mencius Mencius' reply (6A.3)
If "nature" only means "what comes with life", then the nature of a dog is the nature of an ox, and the nature of an ox is that of a man. Mencius puts this question, and the text keeps no answer from Gaozi.
The debate goes on (our summary) Gaozi left no writings: we know him only through the book of his opponent, and his best defence may not have survived. Passage 6A.3 stops on Mencius' question, with no answer from Gaozi: we do not know how he would have replied. Later in the chapter (6A.4), he maintains that benevolence is within us but that righteousness comes from outside.