QuestionsAre humans good by nature?Man naturally good, corrupted by society
Are humans good by nature?Good by nature

Man naturally good, corrupted by society

Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1712 · 1778Man is born good; society corrupts him.
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What it claims

Man is naturally good; it is society, with its comparisons and inequalities, that makes him wicked.

Why

Natural man seeks to survive without harming others; wickedness comes from vanity, born of life in society.

In short

"Man naturally good, corrupted by society" is an argument by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Discourse on Inequality, 1755) on the question "Are humans good by nature?" (answer: good by nature). Its claim: Man is naturally good; it is society, with its comparisons and inequalities, that makes him wicked. 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 4 objections, 3 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

Discourse on Inequality, 1755
Valid with an implicit premise

Rousseau does not claim to describe a real past: he imagines man without society to separate what comes from nature from what comes from living together. He does not deny that people are wicked. He argues that this is not their nature: wickedness was born with comparison, property and inequality.

P1In the state of nature, man is guided by self-love (staying alive) and by pity (disliking seeing others suffer): he seeks to avoid harm more than to do it.
P2Wickedness comes from amour-propre: the need to compare oneself and to prefer oneself to others, which inspires all the harm people do to one another.
P3Amour-propre is born in society, when people begin to look at one another and to want to be esteemed.
P4 · implicit premiseWhat appears only with life in society, through a chain of accidents, is not part of human nature.
P5If natural man does not seek to harm, and if wickedness comes entirely from a passion born in society and foreign to his nature, then man is naturally good and it is society that depraves him.
Therefore man is naturally good; it is society, with its comparisons and inequalities, that makes him wicked.

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 natural man does no harm, wickedness comes from amour-propre and amour-propre is born in society, yet it is still part of human nature: we can no longer say man is naturally good.
With its five premises, the conclusion follows. Without P4 it no longer does: amour-propre could be born in society while still being a tendency of our nature, only waiting for the occasion to show itself. This is the weakest point, since Rousseau himself says that perfectibility, a natural faculty, is "the source of all human misfortunes". His answer: that faculty would never have developed without a chain of outside accidents that might never have happened. And he calls amour-propre a "factitious" feeling.
Analogy. A calm pupil becomes aggressive in a class where everyone constantly compares themselves. Rousseau says: it is not his character, it is the class. His opponent answers: if competition makes him aggressive, the aggression was already in him.

Objections

4

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

Hobbes 1647 · attacks premise 1

Hobbes does not say man is wicked by nature: he denies it. Our desires and passions are no sins, and the wicked man is only a "robust child", lacking reason and education. But his thesis does not need the wicked to be many. Even if they were fewer than the good, since we cannot tell them apart, the most moderate are forced to distrust, to strike first and to defend themselves. Without a power to keep them all in awe, even peaceful people therefore end up in a war of each against each.

Rousseau replies
Rousseau
Hobbes attributes to savage man passions that are the work of society. The wicked man, he says, is a robust child: it remains to be seen whether savage man is one. But he is weak when he depends on others, and independent before he is strong. What keeps natural man from doing evil is neither reason nor law, but the calm of his passions and his ignorance of vice. And Hobbes overlooked pity, which tempers self-love.
The debate goes on (our summary) In the same passage, Rousseau nonetheless ascribes to Hobbes the idea that man is "naturally wicked", which Hobbes had denied as early as 1647. The real disagreement lies elsewhere: does man without a state live scattered, with few needs and no reason to distrust (Rousseau), or among others who covet the same things (Hobbes)?
Objection anticipated by Rousseau attacks the conclusion

If society corrupts man, must we destroy it and go back to live in the forests among beasts? Voltaire made this reproach, ironically, in a letter of August 1755.

Rousseau replies
Rousseau
No. People like him, who can no longer do without laws, will respect the bonds of society, love their fellows and obey the laws, while judging severely an order that produces more misery than good.
Kant 1784 · attacks premise 4

Rivalry and vanity are part of human nature: our "unsocial sociability". They are even the engine that develops our talents. So they cannot be blamed on society alone.

no reply
summary: their text is not yet in our corpus
No reply possible: objection raised in 1784, after the author's death (1778).
S
Steven Pinker 2011 · attacks premise 1

Archaeological and ethnographic data show very high rates of violent death in stateless societies. Man before the State was not peaceful: organised society has reduced violence.

Rousseau replies
summary: their text is not yet in our corpus
Rousseau Rousseau's anticipated reply (he could not read Pinker)
Rousseau already knew this kind of argument, drawn from travellers' reports. He answers that the "savage" peoples observed already live in groups, with revenge and concern for esteem: they are far from the first state of nature. Concluding that man is naturally cruel confuses the two.
What today's voices say
Defend it
Jordan PetersonHe finds Rousseau's story plausible and partly true, but says it is only half of the picture: the Hobbesian story is as true.
Criticize it
Alain de BottonHe traces the romantic belief that every human being is pure and good by nature (and that only society corrupts the child) back to Rousseau, and calls it unhelpful for relationships; he prefers the old view that we are all flawed.