Human Nature and Moral Development
in Mencius, Xunzi, Hobbes, and Rousseau
Eric Schwitzgebel
Department of Philosophy
November 18, 2005
Mencius, Xunzi, Hobbes, and Rousseau were all political philosophers well known for their views on “human nature”. I will argue in this essay that, to some degree of approximation, their views about human nature can be interpreted as, or even reduced to, views about the proper course of moral education, and that, consequently, a view of moral education stands near the center of each man’s philosophy. I will then suggest that we can explore empirically which philosopher was nearest the truth.
1. The “State of
The dispute between the 17th century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes and the 18th century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau regarding human nature is generally cast – and was indeed by Rousseau himself cast – as a dispute about what people (or “man”) would be like in the “state of nature”, a state without social structures or government. Hobbes famously writes in the Leviathan (1651/1996) that the “naturall condition of mankind” (p. 60/86) – his condition prior to establishment of the state – is one of misery and “Warre, where every man is Enemy to every man” and the life of man is “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short” (p. 62/89). We are propelled into violent competition by the desire for limited goods and for glory, and due to our relative indifference to the suffering of others. A man in the state of nature will see something he wants – such as the goods or wife of another man – and will seek to obtain it, if he can do so consistently with his own safety, regardless of whatever pain or death it may bring upon others. Inevitably, the result is continual insecurity and strife, and the failure of any stable agriculture or industry, until men are eventually persuaded to submit themselves to a government for their own protection.
Rousseau, equally famously, paints a very different picture of the “state of nature” in his Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men (1755/1994). Man in the state of nature “breathes only peace and freedom; he wishes only to live and remain idle” (p. 83). “[H]is heart yearns for nothing; his modest needs are easily within reach” (p. 35). He is moved only by the urge for self-preservation and by basic biological needs, and by a natural pity for others. Sufficient food is easily enough obtained. Sexual couplings are brief and without social complication. He thinks only of the here and now, not planning for the future, not attempting to elevate himself in the eyes of others, not fearing death, and lacking the bloated desires for prestige and luxury that are nearly universal among civilized men.
It is sometimes suggested that Rousseau is less sanguine about the state of nature in his later work, The Social Contract (1762/1987). He certainly does, there (in Chapter 6), envision that the time may come where the survival of man requires exiting the state of nature and entering some sort of civil society. Perhaps, though, Rousseau is only recognizing here that the state of nature portrayed in his Discourse on Inequality requires a ready abundance of food and may be unsustainable if food becomes scarce. And there may be reasons for thinking that Rousseau felt man’s behavior in conditions of plenty better reflects his “nature” than his behavior in conditions of scarcity – if, for example (to anticipate somewhat the next section of this essay), Rousseau regards the environment of plenty as the “normal” environment of humankind. In any case, in Emile (1762/1979), published the same year, Rousseau appears still to hold human nature in high esteem – we will return to Emile later – and in his essay to Christophe de Beaumont that same year, he writes that “the fundamental principle of all morals, on which I have reasoned in all my writings, and which I have developed in them with all the clarity I was able, is that man is a naturally good being, liking justice and order; that there is no original perversity in the human heart; and that the first movements of nature are always correct” (1762/1969, p. 935-936).
The famous claims about “human nature” in the Leviathan and the Discourse on Inequality appear to pertain, as I have said, to how human beings would behave without government or stable social structures. But it is, in a way, very strange to suppose that our behavior absent social structures is our natural behavior. Biologists do not, for example, separate the ant from the colony or the wolf from the pack to see how they behave “naturally”. The ant and the wolf are naturally social. Their behavior within their social structures is their natural behavior – the isolated ant or wolf is an aberration. Human beings are, of course, the same in this respect.
If the reader agrees with me in this matter, she may also consequently agree that the “state of nature” thought experiment is, at best, misnamed. If Hobbes’s and Rousseau’s aim in conducting this thought experiment is to begin an inquiry into the value (or disvalue) of society and government, it may have some purpose; but it would be less misleading to call the conditions they imagine “governmentless” or “societyless” than “natural”. With this thought in mind, for years I dismissed Hobbes’s and Rousseau’s comments on “human nature” as being perhaps important as political philosophy but as only marginally related to the biological or psychological or ethological study of what patterns of thought and behavior are truly natural to human beings. Mencius and Xunzi seemed to me quite different in this respect, much closer to a proper sense of the “natural”. My opinion on this matter has changed somewhat, however, as the reader will see.
2. A Developmental Approach to the “Natural”.
Let’s think more carefully, then, about what it means to call a human trait “natural”. Consider some intuitive examples: My brown hair is its “natural” color, while my friend Jeanette’s black hair is not. My sexual attraction to women, which began in adolescence (if not earlier), is natural; a crack addict’s indifference is not. My wife’s small feet are natural; a traditional Chinese woman’s feet, if their growth was constricted by tight binding, may be unnaturally small. A trait may be natural to an individual but not, generally speaking, natural for the species: The limited early social attachments in a child with autism may be natural for her but not what we would consider natural for human beings in general. There is some merit in thinking about the “natural” as essentially relative to individuals, as indeed I have in all my examples thus far. However, our four authors aim to make broad generalizations about human nature. Thus (though not only for this reason), it will be useful in this essay primarily to think about what is generally natural to human beings, such as hair color within a certain typical range, adult foot size within a certain typical range, attachments of a certain sort in early childhood, etc.
I propose that we consider a trait natural to an individual just in case it arises in that individual through a normal process of development in a normal, nutritive environment, rather than as a result of injury, disease, malnutrition, or (especially) external imposition. A trait is then natural to a species if it is natural to normal members of that species in a broad range of normal environments. A trait need not be present at birth to be natural: Adult size, sexual attractions, secondary sexual characteristics, etc., are not present at birth. Nor need a trait be genetically determined to arise in all environments – what phenotypic trait could possibly arise in all environments, anyway? – just in normal, nutritive ones. In abnormal or deficient environments a “natural” trait may generally be absent: For example, normal individuals may have white hair or no hair in environments with enough background radiation. In environments with severe nutritive deficiencies, people may not grow to their natural heights or develop their natural sexual characteristics. Even in normal, nutritive environments, some aberrant individuals may not acquire a particular “natural” human trait (though the alternative traits they do acquire may be natural for them), as in the case of the autistic child’s social development. A trait may be common among normal individuals yet not natural because, in some sense, it is “externally imposed” – for example, the cropped ears of Dobermans.
This characterization of the natural is both normative and flexible. It assumes that we can distinguish “normal” individuals from abnormal ones; “normal” and “nutritive” environments from abnormal and deficient ones; injury, disease, and malnutrition from healthy processes; and “external imposition” from its absence. All sorts of objections may be raised against the use of such terms. There may often be no determinate answers, or only political answers. But that is no objection to this definition of “natural”, since (I think!) the reader will find that the intuitive application of the word “natural” also generates such worries. So, for example, whether we consider homosexuality “natural” depends on whether we think it arises without external imposition in normal members of the population in normal, nutritive environments. Those who deny the naturalness of human homosexuality, for instance, will be apt to assert that it is “imposed” on people, or that homosexual individuals are aberrant, or that homosexuality arises only if the individual’s developmental environment was abnormal or deficient in some way. Is the massive overweight of many Americans “natural”? That depends on whether you think we should consider a sedentary environment with superabundant refined sugars and fats a “normal, nutritive” environment for human beings, or whether you think that environment distortive and defective in some way.
If you are concerned about what might be hidden in decisions about what counts as “normal”, etc., you have my sympathy: But the proper answer to this concern, if you find it overriding, is not to redefine “natural” in some more objective way, but simply to avoid the word. The definition I propose has at least the merit of making explicit the normative presuppositions often implicit in calling a trait “natural”. Too many people employ the word as though the matter of naturalness could be decided by objective and apolitical biological measurements alone.
With this understanding of the “natural” in hand, let me reframe the key idea of the previous section. A relatively stable social system is part of a normal, nutritive environment for human beings (and for all social animals). Even in times of political revolution, much of one’s social environment remains the same. The traits that arise among people raised outside such environments are not our natural traits, but often quite the opposite. The most extreme case of this is, of course, the occasional “wild child”, starved of human interaction through much of her childhood. Such children may lack language, fear people, and so forth; but that is hardly the natural condition of humankind. The “state of nature” thought experiment thus misses its target completely if its target is the isolation of our natural traits.
Here, then, is how I would like to interpret the question about whether human beings are “naturally” violently competitive or placidly compassionate: Look at how those character traits arise in human development. Must standards of good behavior be imposed on people from outside, by artificial means, as we might, say, impose the shaving of chins and legs, or the stretching of necks or the dyeing of hair? Or does morality emerge without external imposition from a normal process of human maturation, drawing on the environment principally for nutrition and support?
These two alternatives are of course too stark, and they are not exhaustive. Among other possibilities, human nature could be mixed, with some elements driving us toward compassion and others driving us toward violence, or different people might have different natures, some naturally more inclined toward violence some naturally more inclined toward compassion, so that we cannot say there is a single “human nature” on this head. And of course compassion and violence are not entirely exclusive: One can perpetrate violence in a compassionate way. Finally, by using violence and compassion as examples (because of the role they play in my simple portrayal Hobbes and Rousseau), I don’t wish to focus unduly on compassion and violence as the fonts of morality and immorality. Certainly the relationship between compassion, violence, and broad issues of human morality (for instance) is a mixed and complicated one.
3. Mencius and Xunzi on Human Nature.
What I have said about how to approach questions of
human nature – that is, in terms of development within a normal social
environment – certainly seems to be in tension with Hobbes and
Rousseau. (How much it actually is so,
we will see.) It comports rather better
with the classical Chinese philosophers Mencius and Xunzi in the 4th
and 3rd centuries B.C.E., respectively, and indeed arose in part
from my reflections on their famous dispute about whether human nature (xing
性) is good (shan 善) or bad (e
惡 – bad, ugly,
unappealing). In this section, I will try
to convey the general flavor of the views associated with their takes on human
nature. At the end will I suggest what I
take to be the unifying thread.
Mencius says:
Human
nature’s being good is like water’s tending downward. There is no human who does not tend toward
goodness. There is no water that does
not tend downward. Now, by striking
water and making it leap up, you can cause it to go past your forehead. If you guide it by damming it, you can cause
it to remain on a mountaintop. But is
this the nature of water?! It is that
way because of the circumstances. That
humans can be caused to not be good is due to their natures also being like
this (6A2, 4rd BCE/2001).
Also:
The trees of
Ox Mountain were once beautiful. But because
it bordered on a large state, hatchets and axes besieged it. Could it remain verdant? Due to the rest it got during the day or
night, and the moisture or rain and dew, it was not that there were no sprouts
or shoots growing there. But oxen and sheep
then came and grazed on them. Hence, it
was as if it were barren. People, seeing
it barren, believed that there had never been any timber there. Could this be the nature of the
mountain?! When we consider what is
present in people, could they truly lack the hearts of benevolence and
righteousness?! (6A8, 4rd BCE/2001).
These passages establish that Mencius
adopted the slogan that “human nature is good”.
They do not yet give us a full picture of what that slogan means, but
Mencius clearly wants to make one thing plain: To say that human nature is good
is not to say that all people behave well. Water can be dammed up and kept on a
hillside. A mountain that naturally
tends to be verdant can actually be bald.
Indeed, Mencius thought the decadent times he lived in were rife with
wickedness. Rousseau did also, for that
matter. It is an undergraduate mistake
to think that the view that human nature is good is in any straightforward way
undermined by the prevalence of evil in the world. The question is not whether evil abounds;
it’s whether evil is “natural” or, instead, a perversion.
But what, exactly, is it for us to “tend toward
goodness”, if many (even most) of us do not achieve it? According to Mencius, just as all (normal)
feet are roughly the same and all (normal) palates prefer roughly the same
tastes, all normal hearts delight in righteousness (6A7) (yi 義 – moral
rightness). Mencius builds a case for
this claim on the basis of what he takes to be normal, spontaneous reactions to
circumstances in which what is right or wrong is plain and in one’s face, as it
were. The first impulse of the beggar
who is given food in an insulting manner is to reject the food, even though
doing so may cost him his life (6A10); the first impulse of anyone who suddenly
sees a child about to fall into a well is to want to save the child (2A6); the
first impulse of people on seeing the dead bodies of their parents eaten by
foxes and bugs is to want to bury the bodies (3A5). Such universal impulses are the seeds or sprouts
(duan 端) of righteousness, benevolence, and propriety. Moral development results from attending to,
cultivating, and “extending” (1A7, 2A6, 7A15) these natural moral impulses,
noticing and acting upon the heart’s pleasure in right action; evil results
from suppressing the heart’s natural desires, subverting the desires of the
heart to the desires of lesser parts of oneself such as one’s stomach or eyes
or limbs, or failing to think through the similarities between nearby cases and
those farther away (1A7, 6A14, 6A15, 7A15).
Xunzi begins his essay “Human Nature Is Bad” like
this:
People’s
nature is bad. Their goodness is a
matter of deliberate effort [wei 偽 – deliberate effort, conscious activity,
the artificial]. Now people’s nature is such
that they are born with a fondness for profit.
If they follow along with this, then struggle and contention will arise,
and yielding and deference will perish therein.
They are born with feelings of hate and dislike. If they follow along with these, then cruelty
and villainy will arise, and loyalty and trustworthiness will perish
therein. They are born with desires of
the eyes and ears, a fondness for beautiful sights and sounds. If they follow along with these, then
lasciviousness and chaos will arise, and ritual and the standards of
righteousness, proper form and good order, will perish therein. Thus, if people follow along with their
inborn nature and dispositions [qing 情 –
dispositions, emotions, essence], they are sure to come to struggle and
contention, turn to disrupting social divisions and disorder, and end up in
violence (3rd BCE/2001, p. 284, ch. 23).
So for example, Xunzi says that when we are
hungry, our natural emotions or dispositions lead us to want to eat before
others. It is only by artificial social
convention that we come to accept waiting our turn (3rd c. BCE/1963,
p. 159-160). Unless you find this essay
unusually gripping, your natural emotions or dispositions probably incline you
to leave off reading and take a rest. It
is only by artificial social means that you are driven to work as hard as you
should. Moral rules are an invention
of the Sage Kings, a set of artificial constraints imposed on people for
the proper functioning of society. With
time, one can transform one’s desires so as to align with the proper
strictures, but this is a slow, difficult, and unnatural process, one that does
not comport with our original impulses (ch. 1 and 2).
However, despite the starkly different mottoes, it
can come to seem unclear where the difference between Mencius and Xunzi
lies. Mencius and Xunzi agree on one key
point: That people often behave badly when they act from basic bodily impulses,
and moral behavior requires the regulation of those impulses by heart or mind (xin
心 – literally
the organ of the heart, supposed to be the organ of cognition and at least some
emotions [see Wong 1991]). In light of
this agreement it is sometimes suggested that Mencius and Xunzi are much closer
together than it may at first seem: They disagree only (or primarily) in how to
define the “natural”. Xunzi thinks
anything arising from the activity of the heart is artificial, and thus that
morality is artificial. Mencius thinks
the best products of the heart are natural, and thus that morality is
natural. But the difference is merely
semantic. (See Lau’s introduction to
Mencius 4th c. BCE/1970 for a partial endorsement of this view.)
I strongly disagree with this interpretation. But where, then, should we locate their
disagreement? The reader will recall my
preference for interpreting questions about human nature developmentally. I believe that Mencius and Xunzi implicitly
accept this approach (despite Xunzi’s occasionally simplistic remarks about the
“natural” being what is present at birth in chapters 22 and 23). The core question on which they disagree, I
would suggest, is this: Is morality something imposed on people from
outside (Xunzi) or something that arises in the normal process of human
development if people are encouraged to reflect for themselves (Mencius)? In other words, is moral development a
process more of indoctrination or self-discovery?
4. Metaphors for Moral Development.
One can get a better hold of the conflict between
Mencius and Xunzi on this point by looking at the different metaphors they use
for moral development. Mencius
repeatedly compares moral development to the cultivation or growth of a sprout
(e.g., 2A6, 6A6, 6A8, 6A9, 6A14). Xunzi
compares moral development to straightening a board or sharpening metal
(chapters 1, 23). These metaphors can be
made to do a lot of work for both authors (as in Ivanhoe 1993, 2002b).
Both vegetative growth and the straightening of
wood are slow processes, suggesting that moral development is also a slow
process (unlike, say, some ways of understanding Buddhist enlightenment or
Christian conversion and rebirth). Both
involve permanent change and incremental progress, barring toxic or distortive
factors in the environment, rather than a pattern of continual relapse and
relearning. So also moral development,
in the view of both philosophers.
Environment plays a strikingly different role in
the two metaphors, however. A sprout
grows into an oak tree (for example) more or less of its own accord, if the
environmental conditions are sufficiently nutritive and non-hostile. Crooked, raw timber does not similarly
straighten of its own accord: Both the impetus for change and the final
structure come from outside. Cultivation
and growth work in harmony with the pre-existing inclinations of the sprout,
while steaming and pressing work against the hard resistance of the board.
These metaphors thus suggest very different
pictures of moral education. The
cultivation metaphor suggests what we might, in contemporary parlance, call a liberal
model of education: Students are encouraged to reflect for themselves, to
discover their own values. They need not
be told explicitly what is right and wrong. They are perfectly capable of discovering it
for themselves, if they reflect carefully on their pre-existing impulses and
judgments. The inclination toward
morality already exists within them (as the inclination to grow into an oak
tree exists within the sprout), as long as the environment is sufficiently
supportive. The environment need not be
particularly directive: Just as the pattern for the oak tree is in some
sense implicit in the sprout, so also a mature sense of right and wrong is in
some sense implicit in the small child, and will emerge in the normal course of
growth.
This liberal model of education captures, I think,
much of the spirit of Mencius’ view, and is seen at work in such passages as
1A7, where Mencius invites the vicious King Xuan to reflect on why he felt an
urge to save an ox from slaughter yet allowed his innocent subjects to perish. However, I don’t want to overplay the
point. Mencius was a Confucian, after
all, who valued the study of the classic texts and adherence to traditional
rituals. He held people to very high
standards of moral conduct; he would not let the morally undeveloped run wild. He would not be liberal in the sense of
failing to enforce strict rules – only in the sense of encouraging
self-discovery.
The straightening and sharpening metaphors of Xunzi
suggest, in contrast, what we might today call a more conservative style
of education. Children (and the morally
underdeveloped in general) are not to be encouraged to think for
themselves. They cannot be expected to
know what is right. Free reflection, for
them, is at best a waste of time, and at worst an opportunity for the rationalization
of one’s immoral impulses. While Mencius
repeatedly urges us to think (si 思 – think, reflect, ponder, concentrate), Xunzi declares “I once spent the whole
day pondering, but it wasn’t as good as a moment’s worth of learning” (p. 249,
Hutton trans., 2001, ch. 1). The morally
immature cannot discover for themselves right from wrong. Only someone of sagely genius could do
that. Instead, they must be explicitly
instructed. The shape of morality cannot
be found implicitly within them; it must be given them from outside. Indeed, it must be imposed – against
their impulses, against their inclinations.
The process of moral education is not the pleasant matter, as it seems
to be for Mencius, of discovering what truly pleases one’s heart. It is instead a matter of being forced
against one’s will – and then later forcing oneself, by acts of will – to
suppress and redirect one’s prior inclinations.
In Chapters 1 and 2, Xunzi attempts to inspire the
reader toward further moral development.
He thus seems implicitly to hope that the reader has the desire to
improve himself, or can be inspired to that desire; and this may seem to
conflict with the picture of moral development just described, on which
morality has to be forced from outside.
The resolution of this difficulty, I believe, is to read Xunzi here as
speaking principally to people who have already come some considerable distance
in their development – to the point, perhaps, where their inclinations have
some moral merit and they can see the value in further moral development. Adapting the metaphor, one might imagine that
Xunzi’s wood, after having been straightened to a considerable extent, can
itself contribute to the final part of the straightening process. For the young and the vicious, however, it
may still be permissible to interpret Xunzi as preferring rote conformity
(“reciting the classics”: p. 250, Hutton trans., 2001, ch. 1) and the rod; real
understanding comes only near the end.
Thus, I read the disagreement between Mencius and
Xunzi regarding human nature as principally a disagreement about the proper
means of moral education. Moral
education is no small thing to them: It was their profession (whether in
teaching the young or in attempting to coax virtuous behavior from the vicious rulers
of the “Warring States” period they lived in) and their principal concern.
5. Hobbes and Rousseau on Moral Education.
As it happens, Rousseau wrote extensively about
moral education in Emile, a story of the idealized education of a boy
from birth to adulthood. Hobbes also
makes a number of remarks about moral education in the Leviathan. I am thus prompted to wonder whether we can
recast their claims about “human nature” in developmental terms as I have
suggested we do for Mencius and Xunzi.
Does Rousseau, who thinks that “human nature is good”, support a vision
of moral education as the cultivation of pre-existing, nascent inclinations
toward morality? Does Hobbes support a
vision of moral education as the external imposition of rules and moral knowledge
upon minds without general inclinations in that direction? I would like to suggest that the answer to
both questions is yes.
It is clear in Emile that Rousseau means his
claims about “human nature” to pertain not just to the fictional state of nature
but also to the developing child. He
writes, for example, “a young man raised in happy simplicity [as is Emile] is
drawn by the first movements of his nature toward the tender and affectionate
passions” (1762/1979, p. 220). Pride and
vanity (which Rousseau thinks responsible for a large part of our conflict and
unhappiness) does not “have its germ in children’s hearts, cannot be born in
them of itself; it is we alone who put it there, and it can never take root
except by our fault” (p. 215). Also:
[T]he first
voices of conscience arise out of the first movements of the heart…. [J]ustice and goodness are not merely abstract words
– pure moral beings formed by the understanding – but are true affections of
the soul enlightened by reason, and hence only an ordered development of
our primitive affections (p. 235, emphasis added).
Rousseau states that his goal in educating
Emile is to “cultivate nature” (and not “deprave” it) and “to form the man of
nature” but not “a savage [relegated] to the depths of the woods” (p.
254-255). In the mouth of the Savoyard
Vicar, he puts the view that our soul’s conscience follows the “order of
nature” regardless of the laws of man (p. 267) and that in following it, we
follow the “impulse of nature” (p. 286), though it speaks with a quiet voice
and “[t]he world and noise scare it” (p. 291).
That the first impulses of the heart are good, but
that they can easily be overridden by louder desires, that they require
cultivation – in such matters Rousseau and Mencius agree. These are not remarks simply about how things
stand only for the “savage” in the “state of nature” absent society; they are
about how moral development proceeds or fails in the normal human being. To a considerable extent, the model of moral
education offered in Emile resembles the model in Mencius: Specific
moral rules are not imposed on Emile.
He discovers for himself (in a nurturing, supportive environment – by no
means the state of nature) the moral impulses we all share. He wants to act on them, and by acting
on them they are nourished, so that a mature moral sense grows from
within. Rousseau shares with Mencius,
then, what I have called a “liberal” model of education.
Rousseau and Mencius diverge, however, in important
ways. Where Mencius assumes a child
always fully embedded in society, Rousseau takes great pains to shield Emile
from most of society – so much so that in early adolescence Rousseau can say
that
He knows no
attachments other than those of habit.
He loves his sister as he loves his watch, and his friend as his
dog. He does not feel himself to be any
sex, of any species. Man and woman are
equally alien to him. He does not
consider anything they do or say to be related to himself (p. 219).
Even allowing for some overstatement, this
passage is disturbing and seems to me hardly to reflect a process I would call
“natural”. Indeed, throughout Emile,
Rousseau has his tutor take enormous pains to manipulate Emile’s
environment. Rousseau appears to think
the sprouts of human goodness are so fragile that the slightest chill could
cripple them, in contrast to Mencius, who sees them as always reasserting
themselves (as in the parable of Ox Mountain, 6A8). Rousseau aims, for example, to assure that
the infant and the child judge the failures to get what they want to be due
only to the resistance of things, never of wills (p. 66); and it seems to me to
require great artifice to ensure this.
Without this artifice, he seems to fear the child will become
permanently spoiled. Amour-propre,
or the kind of self-love that involves comparing oneself to others, Rousseau
calls both “the most natural of all passions” (p. 208) and a “useful but
dangerous instrument” (p. 244). When amour-propre
starts its inevitable bloom into vanity, Rousseau requires his tutor to
contrive humiliations to cut it down (p. 173-175, p. 244). The tutor works to present Emile instead only
with situations in which, when he compares himself with others, he finds
compassion for others’ suffering and the impulse to improve himself. Similarly, when Emile awakens sexually, the
tutor is much exercised, by what seems to me largely artificial imposition, to
prevent disasters of vanity, licentiousness, impulsiveness.
I am thus somewhat torn in my assessment of Rousseau’s
claim about the goodness of human nature, where that claim is construed as a
claim about the whether proper moral development is a natural phenomenon. On the one hand, the impulses and forms of
morality are found within Emile rather than imposed from without; but on the
other, they seem to flourish only in a highly artificial environment. My criteria for the “natural” thus appear to
diverge. Or, more properly speaking,
although Rousseau clearly avoids the most salient defeater of the view that
morality is natural (on my definition of “natural”) – that it is externally
imposed, the question might arise whether the condition that morality emerge in
a broad range of normal environments is satisfied. This difficulty might be avoided if we allow
Rousseau to suggest that the artifices of his tutor are principally necessary
to counteract the highly unnatural toxicity of French civilization, to restore
something closer to what Rousseau might regard as a normal, as opposed to a
distortive and perverted, human environment.
Metaphorically speaking, Rousseau’s tutor may be doing something like
providing a post to a growing vine in an environment stripped of trees. In any case, if we construe the key question
as whether moral education proceeds by the cultivation of pre-existing, nascent
impulses toward morality, Rousseau clearly thinks it does. If, perhaps, Rousseau’s cultivation is more
like the work of the French gardener, who constantly prunes and shapes, than like
the work of the Chinese rice or barley farmer, there is still much they share
in common.
Hobbes, in contrast, seems to envision moral
education principally as the imparting of official doctrine:
And (to
descend to particulars) the People are to be taught, First, that they ought not
to be in love with any forme for Government they see in their neighbor Nations,
more than with their own, nor (whatsoever present prosperity they behold in
Nations that are otherwise governed than they,) to desire change….
Secondly, they are to be taught that they
ought not to be led with admiration of the vertue of any of their fellow
Subjects … so as to deferre to them any obedience, or honour, appropriate to
the Soveraign onely….
Thirdly, … they ought to be informed, how
great a fault it is, to speak evill of the Soveraign Representative … or to
argue and dispute his Power… (1651/1996, p. 177-178/233-234).
This education proceeds, not by providing an
environment supportive of reflection and self-discovery but rather (for most
adults) from the pulpit:
Fourthly,
seeing people cannot be taught this, nor when ’tis taught, remember it, nor
after one generation past, so much as know in whom the Soveraign Power is
placed, without setting a part from their ordinary labour, some certain times,
in which they may attend to those appointed to instruct them; It is necessary
that some such times be determined, wherein they may assemble together, and
(after prayers and praises given to God, the Soveraign of Soveraigns) hear
those their Duties told them, and the Positive Lawes, such as generally concern
them all, read and expounded…. To this
end had the Jewes every seventh day, a Sabbath … (p. 178/234-235).
Indeed, private reflection is condemned:
As for the
Means, and Conduits, by which the people may receive this Instruction, wee are
to search, by what means so many Opinions, contrary to the peace of Man-kind,
upon weak and false Principles, have neverthelesse been so deeply rooted in
them. I mean those, which I have in the
precedent Chapter specified: as That men shall Judge of what is lawfull and
unlawfull, not by the Law it selfe, but by their own Consciences; that is to
say, by their own private Judgements… (p. 179/236).
Hobbes’ metaphor for education in the Leviathan
is not, of course, cultivation. He
compares education, rather, to writing on paper:
the
Common-peoples minds, unlesse they be tainted with dependance on the Potent, or
scribbled over with the opinions of their Doctors, are like clean paper, fit to
receive whatsoever by Publique Authority shall be imprinted in them (p.
176/233; see also 1650/1994, I.X.8, p. 62-63).
Paper does not resist writing in the
same way a board resists straightening, but neither do the words written on
paper gain any particular support from the paper’s antecedent
inclinations. Hobbes does perhaps
suggest that that which conforms with the principles of Reason is more easily
inscribed (p. 177/233), but the passage about the pulpit, quoted above – and
indeed his authoritarianism generally – suggest that he is not especially
sanguine about the common people durably retaining, or even entirely
comprehending, what is taught. Perhaps a
better metaphor for Hobbes than writing on paper would be writing in sand?
Hobbes’s remarks about the education of children
are less extensive, but I interpret them as similar in spirit (especially given
Hobbes’s comparison of paternal and maternal dominion to the sovereign’s
dominion over the state), emphasizing obedience and the imposition of doctrine
(p. 101-107/138-145 and 178/235) – and on the whole being very different from
the sort of education envisioned by Rousseau.
Hobbes, like Rousseau, writes repeatedly about the
“nature” of humankind outside of the context of the “state of nature” thought
experiment that has received so much emphasis in interpretations their
work. Hobbes, in fact, has an entire
essay titled “Human Nature” (1650/1994).
This work discusses our “natural faculties”, including both faculties of
the body and faculties of the mind. It
is clear that Hobbes takes himself to be treating the normal, mature, adult
human being as he (or she) actually develops in a normal environment containing
society – and not (or not just) as he would develop in a state of anarchy. Of particular interest is Hobbes’s treatment
of the passions and what delights the mind (ch. VII-IX). One sees here more of Xunzi than of Mencius
or Rousseau: Hobbes emphasizes self-interest and the sort of desires that would
lead to strife without some sort of external or internal suppression or
regulation. Where he discusses passions
others might see as unselfish, he generally gives them an egoistic
interpretation: “Honour” consists not in moral virtue but in signs of power
(I.VIII.5-6); repentance is not characterized as following from a sense of
moral failure but only as “the passion that proceedeth from opinion or
knowledge that the action they have done is out of the way to the end they
would attain” (I.IX.7); charity appears to arise not so much from innate
compassion as from the fact that “There can be no greater argument to a man of
his own power, than to find himself able, not only to accomplish his own
desires, but also to assist other men in theirs” (I.IX.17). Pity appears to involve a genuine desire for
(some) others to do well, independently of one’s own condition (I.IX.10), but
it is counterbalanced by “Laughter” at other men’s “infirmities and absurdity”
(I.IX.13) and is not uncommonly outweighed by the pleasure that arises, in
watching others suffer, from feeling one’s own security and superior position,
as when we watch a battle or a shipwreck (I.IX.19).
We have thus ample evidence, I suggest, to
interpret Hobbes and Rousseau, when they speak of human nature as good or as
leading to violent strife, as speaking not just of how we would behave in the
“state of nature”. They are much closer
to Mencius and Xunzi than a superficial examination of a few of their most
famous passages suggests. To say that
human nature is good, for Mencius or Rousseau, is to say that our first and
most basic impulses, if we avoid the corruption of distortive environments,
point us in the direction of morality, and that consequently moral education
consists in careful attention to and cultivation of those impulses. To deny that it is good, for Xunzi or Hobbes,
is to say that the most basic and dominant body of impulses in normal, mature
individuals would impel us to conflict and disorder if they were not forcibly
restrained, and thus that moral development requires the persistent imposition
of rules and doctrines that have little basis in the untutored impulses of the
ordinary men. That, at least, is my
suggestion.
What, then, to make of Hobbes’s and Rousseau’s
thought experiments about the state of nature?
I do think they have an interest besides that of revealing the value (or
disvalue) of living in a civil society.
For Rousseau, the value is also partly in undermining the idea that
contemporary society, especially urban
6. Moral Education and Authoritarian Government.
One might suppose that advocates of liberal models
of moral education, those who think that human nature is good, would be drawn
toward comparatively democratic forms of government in which voting or other
expressions of popular opinion play a large role, and that those who are drawn
toward conservative models of moral education would incline more toward
authoritarianism. Plainly, Rousseau in The
Social Contract advocates a less authoritarian style of government than
Hobbes in the Leviathan; arguably, also, Mencius advocates a less
authoritarian style of government than Xunzi.
There may be some truth in this idea.
The liberal educator and the democrat agree that ordinary people are
best left to form their own judgments (perhaps aided and supported in various
ways), without the external imposition of doctrines by an authority.
But of course Mencius is no democrat. Like the other major early Confucians, he
endorses an enlightened monarchy. Perhaps
the better predictor of authoritarian politics is the expense of moral
education. If proper moral education
requires extensive resources unavailable to the general public, then one might
find an aristocratic ruling structure attractive, at least as a utopian
possibility. In the early Confucian
tradition, moral education is not cheap.
Although anyone (or at least any man) can enter it, it requires long
devotion to learning ancient ritual and studying classic texts, and is
incompatible with the life of labor that must be most people’s lot. If the education has been successful, those
who have run through it will have better moral character and better judgment
than the masses of people. It is, then,
their judgment, and not popular opinion, that should guide the state (though
early Confucians generally thought the masses possessed enough good sense to be
attracted to virtuous rulers and to despise the wicked). I am reminded here, also, of Plato’s Republic. Plato can, I think, be classified with
Mencius and Rousseau as endorsing the goodness of human nature and seeing
education as the drawing out, through guided reflection, of innate and
universal impulses. Nonetheless, for
Plato, true knowledge of the good is no common thing (recall the analogy of the
cave in Book VII of the Republic).
Those occupied daily with manual labor cannot have the moral education
of the philosopher-king, and the guidance of the state should ideally not
derive from their judgment.
Rousseau, in contrast, though he imagined the education
of Emile to require a private full-time tutor, appeared to believe that, in
general, moral development is better attained in a life of rural labor than
among the privilege of the elite.
Likewise, it seems to me, most contemporary dwellers in Western-style
democracies see proper moral education as broadly attainable, not requiring the
cessation of daily labor – perhaps even enhanced by manual labor. Perhaps also pessimists about moral
education, who think a ruling elite will necessarily be corrupt, will be drawn
toward more democratic forms of government as best suited to keep our
viciousness in check.
That Hobbes did not go in this last direction,
given what some see as a pessimistic strain in his work, has often been held
against him. On the other hand, he
emphasizes that both the gentry and the educators of the masses are to receive
their education in proper doctrine from the universities (1651/1996, p. 180/237
and p. 395/491), which perhaps suggests that he thinks the best moral education
requires resources available only to the elite.
There may be room to interpret him as less than completely pessimistic
about the positive moral effect of these more expensive institutions, if
properly reformed and subject to the sovereign.
I am certain there are counterexamples to the
generalizations I have made in this section.
Supposing I am right, however: This is one way in which a view of moral
education can drive a political philosophy.
Is it too much to see a vision of moral education – that is, a stance on
the extent to which morality is natural to us and the conditions of its
flourishing – as the engine driving each of our four authors’ overall social,
political, and ethical work? Well, yes,
it probably is too much, especially for Hobbes.
But still: A well-developed view of moral education can motivate not
only a view of political and familial authority and subordination, but also a
view of the nature of self-constraint and willpower, of the proper role of
ritual, custom, and law, of the origin and character of the emotions, of the
ideal structure of society, of the role and value of reason and reflection, of
the nature of moral character. Equally,
the stances one takes on these issues can motivate thoughts on the proper
structure for moral education. I can
make no causal claims here, but simply point out the entanglement. Rousseau, more than our other authors, makes
that entanglement explicit: Emile beautifully displays the
interrelations between all these issues (and others), with a program of moral
education standing at the center.
Indeed, near the end of his life, surveying his work, Rousseau wrote
that Emile was the key to understanding all the rest (1776/1990, p.
932-933/211; also O’Hagan 1999).
7. Who Is Right?
Despite Rousseau’s famous claim, near the beginning
of his Discourse on Inequality to be “setting aside all the facts, for
they have no bearing on this question” (1755/1994, p. 24), claims about human
nature are clearly at least partly empirical: They involve assertions
about the way human beings are, in fact.
People could be one way or another; it is not a matter of
conceptual necessity that we are as we are.
This needn’t entail that there is any single, straightforward, empirical
test that will definitively reveal whether morality is natural to us or imposed
from outside. (Little, indeed, of broad
general interest in human psychology can be revealed by a single test.) But the question is empirically explorable. There are empirical facts that are relevant
to it, that comport more harmoniously with one view or another, that fit one
picture nicely and require explaining away on another. These facts must all be tempered with a
normative understanding, not only of what is “good”, but also as I suggested
earlier of what is normal or abnormal, supportive or distortive – but so also
must the empirical explorations of all the human (and perhaps biological)
sciences.
We can thus attempt some judgment about who is
closest to the truth about human nature.
Since I have characterized the issue as at its core an issue about the
proper course of moral education, that is the natural place to begin. I suppose that reasonable people can in
general more or less agree about standards of moral goodness. (I am thus taking a stand against strong
versions of [descriptive] moral relativism.)
We can then ask an empirical question: What sort of moral education best
engenders moral maturity, one that imposes morality on children from the
outside or one that encourages children to reflect on their own?
Now in practice, this will be a very difficult
assessment, since even without the complications of moral relativism, the
assessment of moral maturity is no easy thing.
We can perhaps look at some extreme cases (people convicted of hideous
offenses, or moral exemplars of the type profiled in Colby and Damon [1992]),
but it seems a mistake to focus only on exceptional people. Long-term, controlled studies are impossible;
while short term laboratory tests may reveal little. Although there appears to be a general consensus
among scholars of moral development that reflection is salutary and its
suppression is harmful (e.g., Piaget 1932/1965; Kohlberg 1981; Damon 1988;
Staub 1989), the advocate of a darker view of human nature may legitimately
wonder whether structured reflection, with adults nearby whom the child knows
will approve of one answer and disapprove of another, isn’t really just a form
of imposition, more effective for its being subtle and parading as the
individual’s own independent judgment.
Fortunately, we can look also for other signs of
natural goodness, or its lack, that may bode well, or ill, for a roughly
Mencian view. So, for example, do we see
nascent moral impulses – and a comparative lack of nascent immorality – in very
young children and in non-human primates, who presumably are less influenced by
the imposition of an external code? Do
the perpetrators of terrible evil (such as the Holocaust), when they reflect on
their deeds, find themselves morally revulsed, regardless of their prior
doctrines, or are malignant values relatively stable to the reflection of
ordinary non-philosophers? When people
are encouraged to reflect on their emotional reactions to their own and others’
actions, are they thereafter (at least immediately thereafter) more or less
likely to commit misdeeds?
Let me take my stand. I think, overall, the evidence favors a
roughly Mencian view, in which ordinary reflection in a supportive but
non-directive environment constitutes the best spur to moral development. Besides the scholars of moral development
cited above who seem to favor views of roughly this sort, let me mention the
work on early childhood emotional contagion and sympathy by Zahn-Waxler and
others (Zahn-Waxler and Radke-Yarrow 1990; Zahn-Waxler, Radke-Yarrow, Wagner,
and Chapman 1992); de Waal’s (1996) work on the origins of morality in
non-human primates (and Darwin’s [1871/1981] reflections on social animals in
general); Arendt’s (1963) suggestion that evil tends to flow from a failure to
think in her study of Eichmann; and work on juvenile delinquents that suggests
reduced recidivism when encouraged to reflect (Schwitzgebel 1964 [my father!];
Samenow 1984).
The evidence is by no means unequivocal, and an
absolutely pure and uniform goodness in human nature is too much to hope
for. Some delight in the suffering of
insects seems quite natural to young boys, and a certain kind of pleasure in
the small misfortunes of others seems nearly universal. (I think here especially of our reactions to
the kinds of mishaps portrayed in shows like America’s Funniest Home Videos.) The aggression of ingroups against outgroups
(from small cliques and sports teams to races and nations) seems too universal
and too heartily approved to be anything but natural. Think of all the “great men” of history
(after whom our children are often named) whose principal achievement was in
aggressive warfare. But counterbalancing
this, it seems to me, is a natural intolerance of inappropriate aggression
within the ingroup. Nazis are often
surprisingly unrepentant, even in the face of the vast social disapproval of
their actions; but perhaps this can be explained by psychological self-defense
mechanisms. Ethics professors, despite
what seems like ample opportunity for moral reflection, in my experience behave
no better than other members of their social class – Rousseau himself famously
abandoned his children – but perhaps their reflection is too intellectual and
too far removed from local particulars to foster their own moral development.
This last concern, actually, is the one that
worries me most. Unless one is an
absolute pessimist about moral reflection or about value of morality, it seems
that one should hope and expect that those who are praised for their talent in
thinking through moral issues, who do so in their daily work and who,
presumably, habitually extend this into their daily lives, should achieve some
moral improvement thereby. Else what is
moral reflection for?
Acknowledgements:
For helpful conversation, thanks to Eric
Hutton, Chris Laursen, Adam Morton, Kwong-loi Shun, Bryan Van Norden, and
audiences at U.C. Riverside (in developmental psychology), Cal State San Marcos
(in political theory), and Cal State Fullerton.
My debt to Kwong-loi Shun’s (1997) and especially P.J. Ivanhoe’s (1993,
2002a-b) view of Mencius is large, and will surely be evident to those already
familiar with their writings on the topic.
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