The Child at the Well: Are We Born Good?

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A child is teetering at the edge of a well. No one is watching you, there is no reward and no punishment — yet your body lunges forward before you decide anything. Is that half-second proof that a human being is good in essence, or the mask of a well-trained reflex?

Picture a courtyard. A hot noon hour, a stone well-curb, its rim worn into grooves by years of rope. The mouth of the well is open. A little way off, a child who has only just learned to crawl, hands and knees on the ground, is making his way toward that dark circle. You are someone passing through. You do not know the child. You do not know his family. You have no business in this courtyard; two minutes from now you will walk out and be gone.

And something happens. Before you can even get a word out, your shoulders tighten, your breath catches, your foot takes a step forward on its own. You did not think. You did not weigh anything. You did no calculation. Your body moved before you did.

That half-second sits squarely in the middle of one of the most stubborn questions in the history of philosophy.

The man who built this scene was a thinker who lived in China some twenty-three hundred years ago: Mengzi, the name that comes into English as Mencius. Even the name of the age he lived in tells you something about human nature: the Warring States period. Small principalities swallowing one another, armies wiping out villages, alliances made in one season and broken in the next. Which is to say that Mencius defended the goodness of human beings in one of the eras when human beings were killing one another most. This matters. Because his claim is not a pure optimism; it is a claim that has seen blood.

Mencius says: in every person there is a heart that cannot bear the suffering of another. And to prove it he does not launch into a long theory. He simply describes that well and that child. Then he moves to the truly ingenious part: one by one, he eliminates what the thing stirring inside you is not.

That flinch is not about getting on good terms with the child's parents. You do not even know them. It is not about earning the praise of neighbours and friends, having them say what a fine man he is. Nobody is watching. Nor is it because you cannot stand to hear the child scream, because the sound would distress you; there is no scream yet, the child has not fallen. Mencius closes all three doors of self-interest. One thing is left: a stirring with no calculation, no motive, nothing covering it.

Here we have to be careful, because what Mencius says is usually taken to be a stronger claim than it is. He is not saying that every person dives into the well and saves the child. Maybe you go in, maybe you freeze, maybe you cannot swim and so you only shout. His subject is not what you do; it is what passes through you in that half-second before calculation arrives. He offers as evidence not a human being's behaviour, but the first reaction.

So what is that stirring evidence of? Here Mencius talks like a gardener. For him that feeling of pity is not humanity itself but the sprout of humanity. And he counts four such sprouts: the feeling of pity is the sprout of benevolence; the feeling of shame and disgust is the sprout of righteousness; the feeling of deference, of drawing back in respect, is the sprout of propriety; and the sense that distinguishes right from wrong is the sprout of wisdom. These are in a person from birth, he says, just like the four limbs. Anyone who says I cannot do it is crippling himself.

Let us stay a moment on the word sprout, because the whole matter is there. A sprout is not a tree. A sprout is not a promise; it is a possibility. Unwatered it dries; trampled it is crushed; left in shade it dies as a stunted thing. Mencius knows this perfectly well, and for it he builds a second scene, one less famous than the well but sadder than it: a mountain called Niu Shan, Ox Mountain.

Once, he says, that mountain was covered in forest. But it stood at the edge of a city. The axes came every day and cut the trees down. Herds were let loose and grazed the new shoots. The dew that fell at night, the tiny sprouts that came up in the morning, vanished into the mouths of the herd that arrived by day. Now someone looking at that mountain sees the bare rock and says, so there were never any trees on this mountain. But that was not the mountain's nature. That was what happened to the mountain.

Mencius's entire thesis about human beings is stretched between these two scenes: the half-second at the well, and the balded mountain. There is something inside us, but if that something is not protected it becomes invisible.

And yet, before the same century was out, another thinker raised within the same tradition would bring a very hard objection to this gardener's language.

That thinker's name was Xunzi. He lived a generation after Mencius, belonged to the same Confucian tradition, read the same texts. And targeting Mencius by name, he wrote this: human nature is bad; goodness is something made afterwards.

That phrase, made afterwards, is covered by a single word in Chinese, and it means done by human hands, brought about by effort. So Xunzi is not denying goodness. He is denying that goodness is natural. For him goodness is not a sprout but a product of craft.

Look where he goes for evidence: a human being is born with a love of gain, and if you leave him alone, quarrelling comes out. He is born with envy and hatred, and if you leave him alone, harm comes out. He is born with the desires of eye and ear and palate, and if you leave him alone, excess comes out. What comes of its own accord when you set your nature free is not order but chaos. Order appears not when nature is allowed to flow, but when it is resisted.

And to explain this Xunzi chooses the image of a carpenter: a warped board does not straighten itself. It is steamed, forced into a vise, pressed into a mould, and only after that is it straight. A dull blade does not sharpen itself; it is drawn across a whetstone. A person is the same: he is worked by a teacher, by rules, by ritual, by training.

Then he turns Mencius's own weapon against him. Picture a hungry man, he says. Food has been set before him, but his father and his elders are at the table. He does not reach out; he invites them first. Now, does this behaviour come from nature? No. Nature says eat. This behaviour is done in spite of nature, and it comes from wherever it was learned: from training, from custom, from propriety. Which means that the acts we consider finest appear precisely in the moments when we do not do what our nature tells us.

The strength of this objection lies in how hard it is to bury. Because Xunzi asks a cold question: if a human being is so good, then what are the locks on our doors? What is the receipt we take after a purchase? What are the cameras at the street corners, the deposit demanded when you rent, the invigilator pacing the room during an exam? Every inch of our daily life is built on the assumption that the person across from us might not behave properly. If we truly believed the story of the well, would we lock the doors of our houses?

This line of thought did not stay in China. Two thousand years later, in England, a man who had lived through the bloody years of a civil war would take hold of the matter from almost the same place. In the book he published in sixteen fifty-one, Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes describes what life is like when there is no common power over us: the war of every man against every man, and that famous description — solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

But Hobbes has to be read carefully; because he is not saying that people are devils. What he says is more unsettling: in a place where there is no security, even for a person in his right mind the most reasonable move is to strike first. So the thing that produces evil is not evil hearts but fear. Even two well-meaning people can shoot one another in an environment where neither can trust the other. That is the reason Leviathan exists: not because it takes a human being to be bad, but so as not to leave a human being alone with his fear.

A century later, in Königsberg, a philosopher who placed perhaps the greatest confidence in human reason in all of history would touch the same wound with a far more poetic sentence. In the essay on universal history he wrote in seventeen eighty-four, Immanuel Kant says: out of such crooked wood as a human being is made of, nothing entirely straight can be carved.

This sentence is not an insult; it is an observation about material. Kant does not consider the human being uncarvable; he considers him a knotty, grainy, cantankerous material. And precisely for this reason he says there is a need for law, for constitutions, for institutions. There is no need to write laws for angels.

Now we have two camps, and both of them look right. One points to that half-second at the well. The other to the locked door. And this argument went round and round for centuries inside the pair good or bad. Until another tradition changed the question.

In Islamic thought the word that circles this argument is fitrah. It appears in the thirtieth verse of Surah Ar-Rum in the Qur'an: that original constitution upon which the human being was created. The same idea is in the famous hadith transmitted by Bukhari: every child is born upon fitrah, and then its surroundings make it this or that.

The subtlety of fitrah lies here: fitrah does not mean good. Nor does it mean blank slate. Fitrah is an orientation. Like a tuning. A human being comes into the world equipped with an inclination toward the truth and toward the good; but this inclination is not a guarantee, it is an initial setting. It can be spoiled. It can be silenced. It can be covered over.

Do you notice that this description stands surprisingly close to Mencius's sprout, and yet takes Xunzi's objection inside itself as well? There is something given, yes. But that given thing is not enough on its own.

Al-Farabi puts this point with an almost technical coolness: a human being is born neither virtuous nor vicious. What comes at birth is a predisposition; in one person toward this, in another toward that. Virtue is acquired by habit, by repetition, by doing. Which is to say that your character is not given to you; what is given to you is the direction in which your character will bend more easily.

Ibn Miskawayh, in the work he wrote at the beginning of the eleventh century, The Refinement of Character, takes a step further. The very title of the book is his thesis: character is something that can be refined. He opposes the idea, held by certain physicians and philosophers before him, that disposition does not change, that a person is whatever he was born as, and he builds a very plain argument. If disposition never changed, there would be no such thing as upbringing. Advice would be nonsense, education a waste of time, raising a child would have no meaning at all. But we build our whole lives on the assumption that people can change. Therefore they change.

Al-Ghazali, in the section he devotes to the training of the soul in his great work known as The Revival of the Religious Sciences, knocks at the same door and gives more concrete examples. We train a wild horse and turn it into a mount. We accustom a bird of prey until it will settle on the back of a hand. If we can change an animal's disposition that much, can a human being not change his own at all? But al-Ghazali adds a warning here, and this warning separates him from cheap optimism: this change is not sudden, it does not happen by leaping, it is a long and tedious business of habituation; and it does not proceed at the same speed in everyone. Some dispositions soften with a slight effort; some resist for a lifetime.

Centuries later, this same line meets us in the laboratory in an entirely different language. In studies in developmental psychology, it has been shown many times over that children of only eighteen months, who cannot yet speak properly, will spontaneously help an adult who drops what he is holding, going to pick the object up and hand it over with no reward promised. In puppet experiments with even younger infants, there are findings that babies prefer the character who helps over the character who hinders; the debate in this second area is still going on, but the first findings stand uncomfortably close to Mencius's intuition about the sprout.

And right here, the same science turns over the other face of the coin. In an experiment carried out at the theology department of Princeton University in America, students were asked to give a short talk in another building. Some of them were told they would be speaking on the famous parable of the good-hearted stranger who helps the injured man by the road. So that subject was in their heads exactly. Then some were told hurry, you are late, and others were told you have plenty of time. And along the way, someone was placed in a doorway, coughing and groaning, appearing to be in need of help.

The result is this: sixty-three percent of those who were not in a hurry stopped and attended to him. Of those told they were late, only ten percent. Some of them stepped over the man in need of help in order to make it to a talk about helpfulness.

This experiment does not refute Mencius. It adds a piece of ground-level information to him. That half-second at the well may be real; but in order to hear that half-second, a person's life has to contain that half-second of space. Haste, fear, exhaustion, crowds, the fact that responsibility has been spread among others — all of these are more than enough to suppress that stirring inside us. The sprout may be standing there; but remember, too, Mencius's balded mountain. If the herd passes by every day, no one can see what grew there.

So the answer is neither angel nor monster. The answer is that a human being is born with a predisposition, and that predisposition grows or withers according to what is built around it. And this stops being a philosophical refinement and turns into an extremely practical question: if the environment is this decisive, who builds the environment?

This is where the real price of the argument about human nature is paid. Because the answer you give to this question does not stay inside your head. It founds schools, writes laws, collects taxes, runs companies, raises children.

Mencius says this quite openly. A ruler who has a heart that cannot bear the suffering of the people builds a government that cannot bear it either. The things he defended standing in front of kings were not abstract virtues: do not take the people's fields from them, do not tear the peasant away from his field in the season of war, fill people's bellies first, education comes after that. He went so far as to hold that deposing a ruler who crushes his people was legitimate. Because for him the foundation of politics was the ability to grow that feeling at the well.

Xunzi's followers arrived somewhere else entirely. If a human being is a warped board, who will hold the vise? Xunzi had thought of this vise as ritual, custom and education; he was a Confucian to the end. But two students raised alongside him, Han Fei and Li Si, drew a far harsher conclusion from the same premise: people are brought into line not by training but by punishment. Li Si became chief minister of the Qin dynasty, which unified China for the first time, and that dynasty went down in history for its severe laws and heavy penalties. Out of the same diagnosis, an order far more merciless than the teacher's was born.

Ibn Khaldun, in the Muqaddimah, looks at the matter with a historian's eye. It is necessary for human beings to live together, he says; alone a man can neither feed himself nor protect himself. But when they come together, the tendency toward aggression and injustice inside them comes with them. For this reason every community needs a restrainer to hold people back from one another — that is, an authority. Ibn Khaldun writes this not as wishful thinking but as an observed law. And the man who writes this also describes how civilisation produces the finest human skills, arts and sciences. His human being, too, is not one-sided.

Now let us bring this argument into our own day, because something very clear happens there.

A study carried out in ten daycare centres in Israel gave what may be the most striking evidence on this question. Some parents were late picking up their children, and the teachers were forced to wait past their hours. The centres imposed a small fine for lateness. What was expected was that the fine would reduce the lateness. What happened was the exact opposite: lateness increased, roughly doubling. The reason was this. Before the fine, being late was a disgrace; you were keeping a teacher waiting, you were embarrassed. After the fine, being late became a service, a thing with a price. I am paying for it, so I am comfortable.

The most unsettling part came afterwards. When the fine was removed, lateness did not go back to its old low level. That is: an institution used an instrument because it assumed people were self-interested, and that instrument actually made people more self-interested. And permanently.

This is a far smaller scene than any grand theory of politics. But that is exactly why it is instructive. Because all of us design at this scale every day. A manager who assumes his employees will slack off installs cameras, brings in a sign-in book, counts minutes; and after a while he finds in his hands a team that really does no more than fill out its minutes. An examination system that assumes the student will cheat turns the student into someone trying less to learn than to avoid being caught. The reverse is true as well: on some roads in Anatolia there are still stalls with nobody standing over them, vegetables laid out on top, a tin can beside them; you leave the money, take the goods and go. That stall makes a type of human being possible in the place where it is set up, and that human being, more often than not, really does appear.

So the real matter is not to answer the question is a human being good from birth once and then shelve it. We answer this question every day; not with words, but with the things we build. With the regulation we write, the penalty we impose, the look that makes plain whether or not we trust our own child.

And right here, that child at the well takes on another meaning. In Mencius's scene there is a child waiting to be saved, yes. But in that scene there is also an adult who notices something stirring inside himself. Perhaps the real question is not whether the child was saved. The real question is whether the adult is living inside a life in which he can hear that stirring. If you build a world that takes that half-second away from a person, then you will never be able to find out whether a human being is good from birth.

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