Philosophers Clancy Martin and Alan Strudler debate whether humans are, as Martin argues, inherently good. “Clancy Martin sees people as ‘mostly good,’” Strudler counters. “His most persuasive reason seems quantitative: people much more often act rightly than wrongly…The idea that people are good because they do mostly good things makes sense only on a desperately low standard of goodness.”

everywhere we look we see examples of humans not only bearing the sufferings of others, but causing them, even taking pleasure in them. Surely we are both good and evil: it’s hard to imagine an argument or an experiment that would prove that we are wholly one or the other. But that we are both good and evil doesn’t mean we are an equal mix of the two. What Mencius intends is that we are mostly good — that good is our normal state of being and evil is an exceptional one, in much the way health is our normal state of being and sickness the exception.

To be good is fundamentally to have other people’s interests in mind, and not—as Mencius is concerned to point out (and after him the philosopher Immanuel Kant)—just because of the good they can do you in return.