Is Everyone Evil — or, Deep Down, Is Everyone Good?

Because this is to be asserted in general of men, that they are ungrateful, fickle, false, cowardly, covetous, and as long as you succeed they are yours entirely; they will offer you their blood, property, life, and children, as is said above, when the need is far distant; but when it approaches they turn against you. — Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

A glass is good, and a lass is good,
And a pipe to smoke in cold weather;
The world is good, and the people are good,
And we’re all good fellows together. — Anonymous

How is it with us: Is human nature good? We seem to want a simple “Yes” or “No.” Evidence for “No” is found in the fact that we often behave dreadfully. Priests who hear confessions will tell you that nothing surprises them. C.S. Lewis asked his readers whether they could go for a week without a base thought or urge. No? How about a day? Still no? How about an hour? I’ve asked the question myself, going as far as, “How about fifteen minutes?” No one yet has told me he could do it. Lewis himself doesn’t conclude that people are just plain bad — but many do. Commenting on the declining birth rate, one writer describes the spirit of the age as “civilizational sadness,” “a belief that we’re just not good or that humans were a mistake.”¹

But on the “Yes” side, we do good things, too. Most of us have experienced kindness and friendship. Once past adolescence, most of us are deeply grateful to our parents. Isn’t it good that we can recognize and desire good? In some sense, isn’t it good just to be? And although we can do dreadful things, isn’t it good that we are sometimes sorry and try to make amends?

Facts like these require a complex answer to the question “Is human nature good?” But we want to keep it simple. The same urge to simplify rings through contemporary music. “I believe most people are good,” sings country-and-western performer Luke Bryan, “and most mamas oughta qualify for sainthood.”² Does this include the Hamas mamas who cheered on their sons in their mission of rape, mutilation, and beheading? Dave Gahan of the synth-pop group Depeche Mode goes to the opposite extreme, singing that when he tells himself people are good, he’s “fooling himself.”³ I’ve never heard a pop musician sing, “The answer is nuanced.”

Traveling east, we find that classical Chinese thinkers also tended to offer a simple “Yes” or “No,” and the lines their thoughts followed were much like ours. The two poles of opinion are well represented by Mencius, who thought our nature good, and Xunzi (or Hsün Tzu), who thought it thoroughly evil.

Mencius said, “Man’s nature is naturally good just as water naturally flows downward. There is no man without this good nature; neither is there water that does not flow downward.” By damming water, you can force it uphill, and in the same way, he thought, man can be made to do evil, but that is not his nature. As evidence, Mencius offered our natural feelings: commiseration, shame and dislike, respect and reverence, and the feeling of right and wrong. But can’t we commiserate with the wrong people, be shamed into doing wrong, and reverence power divorced from justice? And although feelings are valuable data, can’t they be mistaken? For the knowledge of right and wrong is not a feeling.

Criticizing Mencius, Xunzi said, “The nature of man is evil.” Following natural feelings “will inevitably result in strife and rapacity, combine with rebellion and disorder, and end in violence.” Therefore, “all propriety and righteousness are results of the activity of sages and not originally produced from man’s nature.” But why would we listen to these sages? Mustn’t our nature contain at least a desire to be good? Weirdly, Xunzi answered that “people desire to be good because their nature is evil.” Just as the mouth desires something flavorful because it doesn’t have it, so a bad man desires goodness because he doesn’t have it. Xunzi failed to see that a person who lacks goodness desires to have it only because he recognizes the lack as a fault. Surely, this ability is something good. Besides, how did the sages become sages? Didn’t they recognize truth and experience its attraction, and aren’t those inclinations also good?

Some Western thinkers have given more complex answers to the question of whether man’s nature is good or evil, but our desire to simplify their answers is so strong that we flatten out their nuances and read our own “Yes” or “No” into them. For example, the 16th-century French Protestant reformer John Calvin is supposed to have taught that human nature is evil, but this greatly distorts what he said. He did think we have a pull toward doing wrong, an inclination from which nothing in our nature is exempt — neither our feelings, nor our thoughts, nor our will.⁴ However, he also insisted that our good nature was not simply destroyed by this corruption. By nature, we still have a foggy awareness of God, and even the pagans were “sufficiently instructed in a right course of conduct by natural law,” Calvin insisted. As he said against the Manichees, a sect that really did believe humans are naturally evil, “It is not admitted that there is any thing naturally bad throughout the universe; the depravity and wickedness…and the sins thence resulting, being not from nature, but from the corruption of nature; nor, at first, did anything whatever exist that did not exhibit some manifestation of the divine wisdom and justice.” All this is misunderstood not only by some of Calvin’s opponents, but even by some of his followers, whose view of the inclination to sin is much more extreme than his.

Or consider the 18th-century Genevan Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who supposedly taught that human beings are naturally good and only society makes us bad. He did say we are naturally good, but he didn’t mean what you might think. Before civilization, he thought, we were like animals, good only in the sense that we were capable of neither vice nor virtue. We would have found it painful to witness others suffer, but our discomfort with their pain wouldn’t have prompted us to help but only to flee from the sight.⁵ Now that we are civilized creatures and have risen to being capable of vice or virtue, we mostly skip virtue and practice vice. Yet ever since Rousseau wrote, progressives have misread him as having held that if only civilization hadn’t corrupted us, we would all be virtuous. At the very least, this raises the question of why naturally virtuous beings have invented such wicked civilizations.

We tend to flatten nuance not only in the works of philosophers and theologians but also the findings of psychologists. Researchers who study babies have noticed that they have “glimmerings” of something that may later develop into virtue. For example, a baby may try to soothe another baby who shows signs of distress by patting and stroking him, and infants as young as three months old respond differently to someone who helps another than to someone who hinders another. Researcher Paul Bloom describes such remarkable findings carefully, concluding that “moral judgment might have very early developmental origins.” However, a science reporter who interviewed him put the matter much more strongly — and carelessly: “Morality is not just something that people learn,” but “something we are all born with.”⁶ This is misleading, for the research doesn’t show that babies are naturally moral but that they are born with a natural push toward morality, which is a very different matter. It’s very good that small children like to see people helping others, but does morality dictate that no one should ever be hindered from doing anything? Besides, we all know that angry children not only soothe but also hit other children on occasion.

G.K. Chesterton jested that although some theologians deny it, the doctrine of Original Sin is “the only part of Christian theology that can really be proved.”⁷ I don’t suppose he thought the story in Genesis actually can be proven. What he meant was nobody can fail to perceive that something in us is dreadfully askew — which is correct. But think: Evil cannot exist by itself. The only way to get something evil is to spoil something good. For example, we don’t say that health is a disorder in disease, but rather that disease is a disorder in health. Likewise, we do not say that harmony is not having enough dissonance, but rather that dissonance is not having enough harmony. Thus, if our condition is dreadful, there must be a wonderful of which dreadfulness is a perversion.

The conclusion to which I have been leading is that our nature is neither simply good nor simply evil but was created good and is now broken. It is bad that we are broken, good that we want to be fixed, good that we can mitigate some aspects of our condition, and bad that we can’t simply fix it. Moreover, it is tragic both when we cynically fail to mitigate what we can — and when we indulge the utopian fantasy that we can fix what we can’t.

For what’s wrong with a simple “Yes” or “No” — apart from the fact that both answers so obviously ignore the fact that our good and evil are so entwined? It is that the error of a simple “Yes” or “No” is not merely intellectual. All too easily, both cynicism and utopianism, so contrary in their verdict on human nature, tend to the same possibilities: either gray tyranny or red blood. Those in the camp of the cynics risk these outcomes because they have too low a view of human worth and good. Those in the camp of the utopians risk them because when they are up against the limits of fallen nature, they cannot stop pushing.

The milder forms of excessive pessimism and optimism are less dangerous, but they, too, have unfortunate results. When we are faced with evil, too dark a view of ourselves traps us in the dark den of despair, and too sunny an opinion blinds our dazzled eyes to what is wrong.

Curiously, we love nuance when our actions are at risk of being judged. How naïve, we say, to believe in a real right and wrong! How unsophisticated not to see that evil must sometimes be done for the sake of something good! No, those things aren’t true, and in those ways, nuance is misplaced. But the condition of our nature really is complicated. We are not an unstained beauty, nothing so pure; nor a sheer ugliness, nothing so plain. We are a beauty in ruins, gleaming through a coating of muck. Anyone who misses the muck is making an enormous mistake. Anyone who misses the beauty is making another.

1. Timothy P. Carney, quoted in an interview with Katrina Trinko, “What Our Baby Bust Says About Modern America,” The Daily Signal (March 26, 2024).

2. “Most People Are Good” (2017).

3. “People Are Good” (2023).

4. Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536).

5. Discourse on the Origin of Inequality Among Men (1754).

6. Gareth Cook, “The Moral Life of Babies,” Scientific American (Nov. 12, 2013).

7. Orthodoxy (1905).

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