If we assume that people are naturally good, and they behave badly, what has corrupted them?
If we assume that people are naturally bad, how do we prevent bad acts?
The answer to the first question could be: society, ideas or just some aspect of being alive in the world.
If society is made up of people, and people are naturally good, then how come it ends up corrupting people?
If ideas are invented by people - where else could they come from? Ah yes, something supernatural - an evil God. Bench that for a moment - but people are naturally good, how do they come up with bad ideas?
If God is bad, and that is what corrupts people, then I suppose we have a good reason to discourage religion.
If some aspect of being alive in the world - the need to survive - is what corrupts people, then... well... surely the answer to how to deal with that will be the same as if people were naturally bad.
So, to answer the second question. If people are naturally bad, or bad by virtue of being alive in the world, then how do we stop that? Well, if we are naturally bad, why would we care that people were naturally bad? We'd stop others being bad to us by fleeing them or killing, incarcerating or disempowering them but carry on being bad ourselves.
A good God might want us not to be bad and so He would give us rules. But if He's God, why did He create us bad? Ah, a God who is far from omnipotent and is not a creator, but is some benevolent supernatural agent who for some reason cares about whether we are good or bad. This stretches credulity somewhat, but then, who could account for the whims of even an impotent God?
What about if people had good and bad proclivities and wanted to live in a world where people limited their badness and emphasised their goodness, because that makes it easier for everyone? Finally, something that makes sense. To me at least.
So what do we do then? Have 2,500 years of moral and political philosophy? Try to discover the causes for bad actions and means to encourage good ones through science, psychology and man-created religion?
Ah, that seems to align to some extent with the situation we find ourselves in.
Now, wouldn't it be handy if we could all recognise that, as a general rule, people are neither bad nor good but have tendencies in both directions? All people? No doubt, even Donald Trump and Dominic Cummings have some redeeming features.
Perhaps then we can start to analyse the circumstances and the background to criminal acts, using empirical data and as much objectivity as fallible humans can muster. Perhaps then we can start to develop more fully - or regain - some conception of shared humanity, rather than just labeling people. Perhaps then we can come up with sensible hypotheses and workable means to make life better.
While we shout names at each other and condemn each other; while we refuse to consider evidence and facts in favour of feelings and assumptions, we are turning us into 'naturally good' and them into 'naturally bad'. History offers appalling testimony of where that kind of thinking takes us.
Now, as it happens, as I now know that's to Anthony Gottlieb's excellent The Dream of the Enlightenment, that Thomas Hobbes did not exactly think that people were naturally bad, nor did Jean-Jacques Rousseau believe that the noble savage was naturally good. In both cases, their thinking is a great deal more nuanced than that. I was listening to this while out on a rather lovely walk and so my recall of detail is a little hazy, but I think I can give you a sense of it.
Hobbes thought that where there is no state control, there are no laws and people act essentially in an unregulated way - but their prime motivation is self-preservation. He did believe that there were natural laws which people should act by, but that fear of being hurt or killed would lead to pre-emptive strikes and this lead to revenge and so on. The overall principle he drew from the natural laws was an entirely moral one: do not do unto others what you would not have them do unto you. What he believed was that reason would guide people to see that their self-preservation was beast served by being in a state of peace and that the only way to assure that was through a state that policed them and imposed limits on behaviour. His Leviathan concept has been used as a model for totalitarianism, but Hobbes rather charmingly believed that the state would not wish to act against the interests of the people and that if it did, while the people, somewhat surprisingly, have no right to retaliate, the state would be acting in defiance of God and against the divine order that had given in power, in the cause of creating a peaceful state.
It's relevant too that Hobbes lived in a very dangerous era. The world around him was chaotic and often at war. Knowing the history of the thinker as well as the history of the thought is important.
Rousseau created a four-part development of humanity. In the first state - where people are hairy and have no reason or desire for self-improvement, he did see them as essentially peaceable and unlikely to wage war - but that was only because they had no interest in or affinity for fellow humans. Not 'kind' then. In the next stage - where they start enclosing land - envy and jealousy arise, but so do positive things like creativity and learning and a desire for self-improvement. I forget the rest.
But, you get the point. We use them as short hand for views that they did not hold.
Theodore Dalrymple contends that Christianity offers a helpful perspective: we are all fallen and flawed, bearing the potential for evil, but we are also all deserving of mercy and bear the potential for good. Evolutionary science probably comes to much the same conclusion. Indeed, just consider Richard Wrangham's The Goodness Paradox, which considers the natural roots of violence - and our ability to limit it - versus Nicholas Christakis's Blueprint, which contends that our sociability is what marks us out. Then consider the engaging work of Franz de Waal, who argues that the seeds of morality can be seen in our primate cousins, while Joseph Heinrich's The Secret of Our Success claims that the secret lies in our ability for cultural learning. The list goes on and on. Good and bad, both. Let's quit the crazy dichotomies. Please.
But before I leave this topic, I wanted to consider something that anthropologist Joel Robbins brought up in a recent IAI podcast. He claims that hard science and the social sciences are trying to prove that our nature is inherently kind. He says this is displacing the older view (see the Christian ethos posited above) that we are inherently bad and that morality is there to help us overcome our flawed human nature. What is it, he asks, about these times that leads us to seek some form of consolation in the view espoused, as we've seen, by Rutger Bregman in Human Kind, suggesting that our nature is essentially good? If that is the case, then morality would be a peeling back, a limiting of exposure to the corrupting forces of education and society, a search for the natural inner self... this seems to me to be a retrograde step. I have argued before that I don't believe there is a truth within and also that I feel that moral development is related to widening horizons, rather than focussing on the self.
Further, if someone commits bad acts on a regular basis, and the belief is that as a human she is 'naturally' good, then how do we explain this? That she is a) unnatural (a psychopath - which then would be a category of the 'not naturally human'), b) sick (this would be defining criminal behaviour as a species of insanity) or c) corrupted by society.
This final one offers a positive possibility - as we would have to take seriously what in her family, upbringing, education, social situation 'caused' the behaviour. I do believe that this is both fruitful and beneficial. However, I think it is also important that while we consider the causes, and take real action to limit the recurrence of such causes within our society through various social and educational policies, that we also encourage an understanding that there remains a responsibility which the person has to bear (which may be in the form of incarceration or reparation) and that the role of morality (education, development) is seen as a benefit in long-term socialisation.
However, I feel that the risks of seeing some people as not-really-natural-humans, of medicalising too many criminal acts and of seeing bad actors as powerless victims of an evil society may be unhelpful.
Instead, if we view people as essentially mixed while appreciating both that the negative impacts of various life experiences (particularly those generated by economic and social inequality) are real causal factors that society needs to address and that an ethical education can assist in helping people to focus toward the good, then we are in some realm of effective realism.
NOTES
Added 15th August 2020: David Runciman gives an excellent analysis of Hobbes' Leviathan on his podcast series History of Ideas, which you can find here.
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