Mencius says good, Xunzi says bad, Hobbes says wolfish, Rousseau says corrupted by society, Sartre says there is none — the deepest disagreement in ethics.
Is there a fixed human nature — and is it good, bad, blank, or something we make ourselves?
Almost every ethical and political system rests on a hidden picture of what human beings are really like. Are we naturally good and spoiled by circumstance, naturally dangerous and tamed by law, or blank slates written on by culture? Some deny there is any fixed nature at all, holding that we are what we make of ourselves; others root human nature in biology, in reason, in labour, or in unconscious drive. The stakes are practical: how you answer shapes what you expect of education, government and yourself. Reading these positions together exposes the assumptions that quietly govern debates about crime, freedom, markets and morality.
Chinese (Confucianism)
'By nature men are alike; through practice they grow apart.' Confucius said little about whether nature is good or bad but staked everything on cultivation: ritual, study and imitation of exemplars transform raw dispositions into humane virtue (ren). Human beings are fundamentally malleable and perfectible through learning and social relationship.
The Analects.
Chinese (Confucianism)
Human nature is innately good: everyone has 'four sprouts' — compassion, shame, courtesy and a sense of right and wrong — as naturally as the body has four limbs. Anyone seeing a child about to fall into a well feels alarm without calculation. Vice is not our nature but the starving or trampling of these sprouts; ethics is their cultivation.
The Mengzi (Mencius), esp. 2A6 and 6A.
Chinese (Confucianism)
'Human nature is bad; goodness is deliberate effort.' Left to itself, human nature seeks profit and gratification, leading to strife; the sage-kings devised ritual and standards precisely to reshape it, as a warped board is straightened by pressing. Goodness is a real, hard-won artifice of culture, not a spontaneous flowering of the given.
The Xunzi, ch. 23 ('Human Nature Is Bad').
Ancient Greek (Peripatetic)
Man is by nature a political animal and the animal that has reason (logos). We are neither good nor bad by nature but naturally capable of virtue, which we acquire by habituation as we realize our characteristic function. Human flourishing (eudaimonia) is the activity of the soul in accordance with reason and excellence.
Nicomachean Ethics; Politics I.
Renaissance humanism
Man alone has no fixed nature or place in the hierarchy of being; God set him at the center as his own free sculptor, able to sink toward the beasts or rise toward the divine. Human dignity consists precisely in this indeterminacy and self-fashioning freedom, a striking anticipation of later self-creation views.
Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486).
Early modern / social contract
By nature humans are roughly equal, driven by appetite, aversion and above all the fear of death and desire for power after power. Without a common authority this yields a war of all against all, in which life is 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.' Morality and peace are artifacts of a sovereign, not gifts of nature.
Leviathan (1651), esp. chs. 11 and 13.
Enlightenment / Romanticism
Natural man is neither good nor evil but self-loving and compassionate, peaceful in his simplicity; it is society, property and comparison that awaken vanity (amour-propre) and corrupt him. Human nature is not fixed but historical: 'man is born free,' yet institutions deform the innocence of the original condition.
Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755).
Empiricism
'Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions.' Human nature is governed by sentiment and custom rather than pure intellect; sympathy, a natural fellow-feeling, is the source of our moral distinctions. We are neither wholly selfish nor wholly benevolent but a mixed, sociable creature knowable by an empirical 'science of man.'
A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40).
Critical philosophy
Humans are rational beings with a 'radical evil' — a propensity to subordinate the moral law to self-love — yet also with the predisposition to good and the freedom to reform. Our nature is dual: sensuous and rational, phenomenal and free. What matters morally is the capacity for autonomy, which grounds a dignity beyond all price.
Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason (1793); Groundwork.
Historical materialism
There is no timeless human essence; the human being is the ensemble of social relations, and 'species-being' is realized through free, conscious, cooperative labour. Capitalism alienates us from that nature; what we are is largely historical, shaped by modes of production, and therefore transformable by changing material conditions.
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (1844); Theses on Feuerbach (VI).
Evolutionary biology
Human beings descend from earlier animals and differ from them in degree, not kind; even the 'moral sense' and intellect evolved through natural and sexual selection. Social instincts and sympathy, favored because they aided survival in groups, are the biological roots of conscience. Human nature is a product of a long, undesigned natural history.
The Descent of Man (1871).
Psychoanalysis
Beneath the civilized surface lies an unconscious of instinctual drives — eros and, later, a destructive aggression — that the ego must manage against the demands of reality and conscience. Civilization is built on renunciation, which breeds discontent; human nature is a battleground of id, ego and superego rather than a rational unity.
Civilization and Its Discontents (1930); The Ego and the Id (1923).
Existentialism
For human beings existence precedes essence: there is no fixed human nature because there is no divine artisan who conceived us in advance. We first exist and then define ourselves through free choice, bearing total responsibility; to appeal to 'human nature' as an excuse is bad faith. We are nothing other than what we make of ourselves.
Existentialism Is a Humanism (1946).