Are People Born Good? 人性本善嗎？

🔊Mencius accepted the image and turned it. “Water indeed has no preference between east and west. But has it no preference between up and down? Human nature is good as water flows downward. There is no person who is not good, and there is no water that does not flow down.” You can splash water over your head by striking it, and you can force it up a hill by damming it, but that is what circumstance does to it. When people are made to do wrong, something similar has been done to their nature.

孟子接受了這個意象，然後把它轉了過來。「水信無分於東西，無分於上下乎？人性之善也，猶水之就下也。人無有不善，水無有不下。」你拍打水，可以讓它濺過額頭；你築壩擋水，可以逼它上山；但那是形勢對它造成的。人被弄到去做不善的事，他們的本性也是遭到了類似的對待。

🔊Mencius did not mean that people are born virtuous. His claim was about tendencies. Anyone who suddenly sees a child about to fall into a well, he says, feels alarm and compassion, and feels it before any thought of gain or reputation. That feeling is a sprout. There are four of them, compassion, shame, deference, and the sense of right and wrong, and from them grow humaneness, rightness, propriety, and wisdom. “These are not welded onto me from outside. I have them from the start.” A sprout can be tended or trampled. His most famous image is Ox Mountain, which was once covered in trees. It stood near a great city, and axes cut it down. The stumps put out new shoots with the night air and the rain, and cattle and sheep grazed them off. People who see it bare suppose that it never had timber. “But is that the nature of the mountain?”

孟子的意思並不是人生下來就有德行。他的主張是關於「傾向」的。他說，任何人突然看見一個小孩快要掉進井裡，都會感到驚懼與不忍，而且是在想到任何利益或名聲之前就感到了。那個感受是一個「端」，一株嫩芽。這樣的嫩芽有四個：惻隱、羞惡、恭敬、是非；從它們長出仁、義、禮、智。「仁義禮智，非由外鑠我也，我固有之也。」嫩芽可以被照料，也可以被踐踏。他最著名的意象是牛山；它曾經長滿了樹。它位在一座大城的郊外，斧頭把樹砍光了。殘留的樹樁靠著夜氣與雨露冒出新芽，牛羊又接著把它們啃掉。人們看它光禿禿的，就以為它從來沒有過木材。「此豈山之性也哉？」

🔊Two generations later Xunzi, the most systematic of the early Confucians, wrote a chapter that opens: “Human nature is bad. Its goodness is the product of deliberate effort.” People are born fond of profit, he observes, and if they follow that fondness there will be strife and no yielding. They are born with envy and hatred, and with desires of the ear and eye. To follow nature is to end in violence. “Crooked wood must be steamed and bent before it is straight, and dull metal must be ground before it is sharp.” Goodness comes from teachers, models, and ritual, which the sages invented because they saw what people are like without them. Xunzi was no pessimist about the result. He agreed with Mencius that the man in the street can become a sage. He located the capacity in intelligence and effort, where Mencius had located it in feeling. The practical difference is large. For Mencius education is gardening, and for Xunzi it is carpentry.

兩代之後，早期儒者當中最有系統的荀子，寫了一篇這樣開頭的文章：「人之性惡，其善者偽也。」（「偽」是「人為」的意思。）他觀察到：人生而好利，順著這份喜好，就會有爭奪而沒有辭讓。人生而有嫉妒與憎惡，生而有耳目之欲。順著本性走，結局是暴亂。「枸木必將待檃栝、烝、矯然後直，鈍金必將待礱、厲然後利。」善來自師、法與禮義；聖人之所以創制它們，是因為看到了人沒有它們的時候是什麼樣子。荀子對結果並不悲觀。他同意孟子：路上的普通人也可以成為聖人，「塗之人可以為禹」。只是孟子把這份能力放在情感裡，他把它放在知性與努力裡。實際上的差別很大。對孟子來說，教育是園藝；對荀子來說，教育是木工。

🔊Europe had the argument nineteen centuries later, and its two great voices line up with the Chinese ones closely. Thomas Hobbes, writing during a civil war, asked what life would be like with no government to keep people in awe. His answer is that every man would be the enemy of every other, and there would be “no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.” People are not wicked on his account. They are roughly equal, they want the same scarce things, and none can trust the rest. Order has to be imposed.

歐洲在十九個世紀之後才有了這場爭論；而它的兩個最響亮的聲音，跟中國的那兩個對得很整齊。霍布斯在一場內戰期間寫作；他問：如果沒有政府使人們有所畏懼，生活會是什麼樣子？他的回答是：每個人都會是每個人的敵人；那裡將「沒有技藝，沒有文字，沒有社會；而最糟的是，持續不斷的恐懼，以及暴死的危險；人的生活孤獨、貧困、污穢、野蠻而短暫」。照他的說法，人並不邪惡。他們大致平等，想要同樣稀少的東西，而誰也信不過其餘的人。秩序必須被強加上去。

🔊Jean-Jacques Rousseau replied in 1755 that Hobbes had described people as society has made them and mistaken the portrait for nature. Natural man, he argued, is solitary, healthy, and peaceable, with two instincts, a care for his own survival and a pity that makes him unwilling to see another creature suffer. Corruption begins with property. “The first man, who, after enclosing a piece of ground, took it into his head to say, ‘This is mine,’ and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society,” and of all the crimes and wars that followed. His book on education opens with the sentence: “God makes all things good; man meddles with them and they become evil.” Ox Mountain could not be put more briefly.

盧梭在 1755 年回應：霍布斯描述的，是被社會造就之後的人，卻把這幅畫像誤當成了本性。他論證：自然人是孤獨、健康而平和的，有兩種本能，一是對自己存活的關切，一是憐憫，使他不願看見另一個生命受苦。腐化始於財產。「第一個圈起一塊地、想到要說『這是我的』，並且找到一些頭腦簡單得肯相信他的人，就是文明社會真正的奠基者」，也是隨之而來的一切罪行與戰爭的奠基者。他談教育的那本書，第一句就是：「出自造物主之手的一切都是好的；一到了人的手裡，就全變壞了。」牛山的道理，沒辦法說得更簡短了。

🔊For most of history the question could be argued only from anecdote. In the last few decades psychologists have found ways to put it to infants, who have had little time to be taught. In experiments at Yale published in 2007, babies of six and ten months watched a puppet show in which one figure helped another up a hill and a third pushed it down. Offered the two afterward, most reached for the helper. In studies at Leipzig, toddlers of eighteen months who saw a stranger drop something and reach for it went and picked it up for him, unasked and unrewarded. These findings are Mencius’s child at the well, observed under controlled conditions.

在歷史上大部分的時間裡，這個問題只能靠軼事來爭論。過去幾十年，心理學家找到了向嬰兒提出這個問題的方法；嬰兒還沒有多少時間被教導。在耶魯大學 2007 年發表的實驗裡，六個月與十個月大的嬰兒看了一場玩偶戲：一個角色幫另一個角色爬上山坡，第三個角色把它推下去。事後把那兩個角色拿給嬰兒選，多數嬰兒伸手去拿幫忙的那一個。在萊比錫的研究裡，十八個月大的幼兒看見一個陌生人掉了東西、伸手去搆，就走過去替他撿起來，沒有人要求，也沒有獎賞。這些發現，就是在受控條件下觀察到的「孺子將入於井」。

🔊The same researchers have found the other side. Infants prefer those who resemble them, and they like to see a puppet who chose a different food from theirs treated badly. Small children help freely and share grudgingly. And adults are easily led. In Stanley Milgram’s experiments of the 1960s about two-thirds of ordinary volunteers, told to do so by a man in a gray coat, went on pressing switches that they believed were giving severe electric shocks to a stranger. The prison experiment run at Stanford in 1971 is cited for the same lesson, though later study of the records has shown that the guards were coached, and it is now treated with caution.

同一批研究者也發現了另一面。嬰兒偏好跟自己相像的對象；而且他們喜歡看到一個「選了跟他們不同食物」的玩偶被惡劣對待。幼兒幫忙很大方，分享卻很勉強。而成年人很容易被帶著走。在米爾格倫 1960 年代的實驗裡，大約三分之二的普通志願者，在一位穿灰色外套的人的指示下，持續按下他們相信正在對一個陌生人施加強烈電擊的開關。1971 年在史丹佛進行的監獄實驗也常被引來說明同一個教訓；不過後來對紀錄的研究顯示，那些「獄卒」是被指點過的，現在人們引用它時比較謹慎。

🔊The picture that emerges gives each ancient party something. Mencius was right that the beginnings of sympathy and of a sense of fairness are present before instruction, and Gaozi’s blank water is the view that has fared worst. Xunzi was right that we are also born with partiality, appetite, and readiness to follow, and that the first moral impulses are narrow: they extend to the helper, the kin, and the familiar face, and it takes training to carry them further. Both were right that everything depends on what is done next. They disagreed about which part of our equipment to call “nature,” and that is partly a dispute about a word. Mencius meant by nature what is distinctive of human beings and grows under good conditions. Xunzi meant what is present at birth without effort.

浮現出來的圖像，給了古代的每一方一些東西。孟子說對了：同情與公平感的開端，在教導之前就已經存在；而告子那潭沒有方向的水，是處境最糟的一種看法。荀子也說對了：我們同樣生而具有偏私、欲望與隨從的傾向；而最初的道德衝動是狹窄的，它們只及於幫忙的人、親屬與熟悉的臉，需要訓練才能推得更遠。兩人都說對的是：一切取決於接下來怎麼做。他們的分歧在於：把我們天賦裡的哪一部分叫作「性」？而這有一部分是關於一個字的爭論。孟子所說的「性」，是人之所以為人的特點、在良好的條件下會生長的東西。荀子所說的「性」，是生下來就有、不必費力的東西。

🔊Something real is left when the word is set aside, and it is the choice between the gardener and the carpenter. A parent or a state that believes people are shoots to be tended will rely on example, trust, and room to grow. One that believes people are crooked timber will rely on rules, incentives, and supervision. Each policy tends to produce the evidence that supports it, since people who are trusted often become trustworthy and people who are watched often give cause for watching. That may be the most important fact about human nature: it responds to what is believed about it.

把那個字擱在一邊之後，還剩下某個真實的東西，那就是「園丁」與「木匠」之間的選擇。一位相信人是有待照料的嫩芽的父母，或一個這樣相信的國家，會倚重榜樣、信任與成長的空間。相信人是枸木的，會倚重規則、誘因與監督。每一種方針，都傾向於製造出支持它的證據；因為被信任的人往往變得值得信任，被監視的人往往給出了該被監視的理由。這也許是關於人性最重要的一個事實：它會回應人們對它的看法。