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Hsün Tzu Nature Vs Nurture

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Human nature has been argued over for centuries, yet still, there seems to be no concrete answer. The controversy After gathering information from both sides and considering nature versus nurture one can conclude that humans are innately good, but outside forces can cause people to develop evil thoughts and ideas.
The debate whether humans are good or evil is seemingly endless as philosophers such as Hsün Tsu and Thomas Hobbes insist that humans are simply evil creatures filled with greed from the start. While Mencius or Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s say just the opposite of Tsu and Hobbes. A common topic that is brought up when discussing human nature is “nature versus nurture” which expresses the debate that humans are either simply born a certain …show more content…

Hsün Tzu makes this exact argument in his essay “Man’s Nature is Evil” (84). However, the outcome of the experiments done by Rand, Greene, and Nowak specifically shows the opposite of Tzu’s argument. In their experiments, when the subjects were given less time to think, they shared their money. These experiments contradict the statements that good comes from one’s conscious activity alone. When the subjects were given time to think, they actually chose to keep their money for themselves, confirming that greed and evilness comes from an individual’s conscious activity, while goodness and generosity is human instinct. The philosophers that argue that man is good typically touch on this by explaining that, yes, people may make evil decisions, but that is only in response to their environment, not their nature. Mencius was one of the philosophers that defended this idea that men are not instinctively evil, because you can see that evilness comes from time and age. Although, the experiments and the words of many philosophers show that nature is good, it can be agreed, on both sides of the argument, that a person’s environment alters and shapes one’s

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