Is Mankind Inherently Good

What is more innocent than a newborn baby? At birth, humans are all pure and innocent, their actions and reactions are not driven by anything conscious, babies do not think about how they are going to ask for food, or think about why they are crying in the middle of the night. It is therefore intriguing to think about how humans become 'good' or 'bad' people, and whether we are all born with the same extent of 'goodness' inside of us. The question of whether humans are inherently good has been discussed for centuries, dating for example to Confucius (551 B.C), who preached these famous words; “Do not do to others what you do not want done to yourself”. But it is well known that some acts committed by Humanity lead many to believe that some

Others, such as Mencius (289 B.C) argued that man is inherently good but that society corrupts him and challenges him to become bad. A very well known French philosopher expressed much interest to this question; Jean Jacques Rousseau was a firm believer that “man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains” (Rousseau, Dunn and May, 2002) which is understood as man is born good but is corrupted by his surroundings, which in a way relates very much to the ideas of Confucianism. Indeed, Rousseau advocated for man to return to his original state, without a society that tries to corrupt him and make of him a 'bad' person, an immoral being. In the words “human is good by nature”, one would indeed think of it rather directly, as Rousseau argued that man was best when at peace with nature, with his surroundings and not in society, but other philosophers such as Voltaire considered his ideas as too regressive, which was the case of Voltaire for example, who said after reading Rousseau's The social contract, “One longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours. But as I have lost that habit for more than sixty years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it.” (Howard,

Man is constantly challenged to remain his true self, to have his own judgment and to not fail to remain loyal to his good nature, even though in today's society, humans constantly create new connections between each other and most cannot survive without these connections. Rousseau's main thesis was that man is born as a 'blank state' (John Locke) and that without society's corruption, he will remain good the rest of his life. Nevertheless, it is impossible for Man to remain a 'blank state', because, again according to the philosopher, man is born weak and needs help to become the 'best' version of himself. Admittedly, man's true good inherent nature is revealed and proved through his constant struggle to preserve their natural and pure self-love, which Rousseau made a notion of called “amour-propre”, which he distinguishes from “amour de soi”, which is a form of self love that permits the other to see themselves through the eye of others, and that, to Rousseau, is negative. In philosopher John Locke's works can be found the idea that humans experience things before they think, that emotions are pure and not conditioned, but that what humans think is a product of what society dictates, which relates evidently to Rousseau's ideas once again, moreover it also questions in a