How far can human beings be changed?
On the axis: Vision of humanity · the human capacity to change
The wager of education assumes we can remake people, soften them, better them. But are there immovable flaws, a "crooked timber" that no education ever straightens?
Justification
« Man is naturally good »: his vices lie not in his nature but in the history that has drawn him from it. In the state of nature, self-love and reign, not wickedness; it is property, comparison and that breed inequality and domination. Rousseau thus overturns the dogma of original sin and shifts the fault from nature to society: it is not men who must first be corrected, but institutions.
Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man.Emile, book I
Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality · Rousseau, Emile, book I
Justification
Kant maintains a : there is in human nature a propensity to subordinate the moral law to self-love, and "unsocial sociability" mixes in each a tendency to oppose others. This diagnosis, tempered by the predisposition to good and by perfectibility, leans toward a moderate anthropological pessimism.
Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason, Part One · Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose, Fourth Proposition
Justification
The moral demand is high: always act from duty and not from mere conformity, subjecting all one's maxims to the universal law. Kant tempers this by distinguishing perfect duties, strict and without exception, from imperfect duties such as beneficence or the cultivation of one's talents, which leave latitude to judgment, holding back from an extreme maximalism.
Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, section II · Metaphysics of Morals, Doctrine of Virtue
Anchors: Rousseau · Condorcet · Kant
leads to: Moral demandingness (What a human being can bear)