Thread by @StatesWarring

I've had this thread brewing for a while, so let's talk about human nature. (1/n)

For Confucians, human nature is basically good. Even today, it's the one Confucian precept that everyone remembers, thanks to the Three Character Classic:

By contrast, legalists saw human nature as utility-maximising. Most people like luxury, sex and respect, and dislike pain, hard work and degradation. They will try to obtain the former and avoid the latter.

The former vision has certain advantages, not least of which being that it confers a certain moral lustre upon anyone who professes it. Even if you know yourself to be surrounded by shitheads, expressing a belief in human virtue makes *you* seem like a better person.

However, it also has practical implications. If humanity is essentially good, then anyone who doesn't match your criteria for virtue is not merely the victim of a momentary lapse, but is actively letting down his whole species.

It's a serious charge, and can be used to justify pretty much whatever you want to do to him by way of revenge.

We saw something similar during the Terreur and Stalin's show trials. If your side is defending progress towards perfection, then executing anyone who opposes you is not merely justified, but a humanitarian act.

Fortunately, Confucians tended to argue in favour of rehabilitation rather than execution. (Though in practice, both were applied, even under Confucius himself.)

Someone who considers human nature to be fundamentally self-interested looks somewhat shabby, by contrast. However objective he may be, he is assumed to be generalising from his own experiences. It has few social rewards.

However, this position also has judicial implications. If people are assumed to be amoral utility-maximisers, then when some guy steals the company credit card and goes to Vegas, he's not letting the species down, he's just responding naturally to the incentives on offer.

Crime is not a moral failing, in other words, it's just a natural response to the circumstances in which an individual finds himself.

If anything, crime is the government's fault: they should have tweaked the incentives in such a way as to render it unattractive. If people are still doing it, it is because government has failed.

This does not necessarily imply a more lenient judiciary: strict punishments are a significant component of any incentive scheme. However, it does imply more due process. I did a thread a while back that touches on this:

https://twitter.com/StatesWarring/status/1288771056270860288

If legislators are aware that they themselves would commit crimes given the right circumstances, they are going to be more inclined to consider the kind of judicial system that they'd like to be processed by in the event that this happens.

If they start from a position of dividing the world up into good people (us) and defective people (the criminals), they are going to take far less trouble over trifles like the rights of the accused, since there is little chance that they themselves will ever require such things.

Confucians feel free to strike back - @MichaelMjfm @Solzi_Sez etc.