Relation to the world· Nature and the livingnamed middle
Moral plasticity
Axis: Vision of humanity — Are human beings fundamentally good or inclined toward evil?
Human beings are neither good nor evil by nature: they are malleable. Neither angel nor beast, a person becomes what upbringing, habit and institutions make of them. Our defining trait is this plasticity, this capacity to be shaped, for better and for worse.
Philosophers 2
Show inferred positions (2)
Beauvoirinferable
For Beauvoir, the human being is neither good nor bad by nature, since it has no nature: it is what it makes of itself, capable of the noblest engagement as of the basest complicity with oppression. Moral worth depends on the use one makes of one's freedom, which forbids any blanket verdict, optimistic or pessimistic, on human nature.
The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947), freedom between engagement and evasion
Marcus Aureliusinferable
Marcus oscillates: the forecasts meddling, ungrateful and violent men, an unillusioned look at conduct; yet he holds their fault to be a correctable ignorance, not a malice of nature. This tension places him at the median point, where human nature is neither good nor evil but educable.
Meditations, II, 1 · Meditations, IX, 42 · Meditations, XI, 18
Argument
- Both camps rely on the same facts, reversed: one shows saints, the other torturers; one mutual aid, the other war. Yet these opposing facts are equally real.
- For no fixed nature explains them: what is proper to man is to be unfixed, to learn, to contract habits, to be shaped. Virtue comes to him neither by nature nor against nature: he is by nature able to receive it, and habit brings it to completion.
- So the same being becomes gentle or ferocious depending on what, in him, is cultivated or awakened: the question 'good or evil?' is ill-posed; the real question is 'by what is he formed?'.
Therefore So man is neither angel nor beast, but capable of both: his nature is this very plasticity, which makes education decisive and forbids betting either on a given goodness or on a fated wickedness.
See the pageObjectionAttacks the position
- Plasticity bets that education and institutions can shape man almost without limit, for the better.
- But certain traits recur everywhere, in every age and under every culture: the fear of death, the attachment to one's own against the stranger, envy, the thirst for status. This constant bedrock resists every education.
- And the attempts to manufacture a 'new man', by remaking mores from top to bottom, have produced not angels but, often, terror: the timber of humanity is too crooked for any straight plank ever to be cut from it.
Therefore So malleability has bounds: education can discipline this depth, not abolish it. To count on a limitless plasticity is to court its return, all the more violent for having been denied.
See the page- DescriptiveIs there a human nature?
Asking whether humans are good or evil assumes they have a nature. But perhaps there is no given essence: humans would then make themselves, with no received model.
a human nature - DescriptiveDoes genuine altruism exist?
Do our most generous acts always hide an interest, a need to be loved, a vanity? If no truly disinterested act exists, talk of goodness loses its meaning.
our best actions - PrescriptivePolitical & legalInstitutions for angels, or for devils?
Should laws be designed counting on citizens' virtue, or built so that "even a nation of devils" would be forced to act well? One's vision of humanity governs the kind of institutions one deems necessary.
institutions