When Chinese people discuss human nature, they often return to an ancient question. Are human beings fundamentally good or fundamentally evil at birth?
Some believe that people are naturally good and become bad only under the influence of their environment. Others argue that people are naturally selfish and competitive, and must be constrained by education and social norms before they can become moral beings.
These two views appear to be opposites, yet they may share an unexamined assumption—that when a person is born, some fully formed moral attribute already exists within them. It may be good, evil, or a mixture of the two in some proportion.
Sustenesis Theory answers this question differently. At birth, a person does not possess an innate core of either good or evil.
This does not mean that human nature occupies a position somewhere between good and evil, or that the two are mixed together and cannot yet be distinguished. It means that before interaction between people has occurred, the distinction between good and evil has not yet come into being.
Good and evil first arise between people
We can imagine a person living in complete isolation.
This person has no parents, friends or social relationships of any kind. Their actions neither help nor harm anyone else. They neither build nor betray trust, neither accept nor evade responsibility.
They eat to stay alive, but this does not make them good. If they accidentally harm themselves, this does not make them evil. An action begins to acquire moral significance only when it enters relationships between people and affects the survival, choices and shared life of others.
Good and evil are therefore not fully formed attributes already contained within an isolated individual. They are directional differences that arise between people.
Where there are no relationships between people, good and evil are not present in equal measure, nor do they occupy some intermediate position. The difference between good and evil is zero.
A baby enters moral relationships from birth
In reality, of course, no one is born in complete isolation.
From the first moment of life, a baby enters a network of relationships formed by parents, family and society. The baby needs to be fed, cared for and protected, but may also experience neglect, indifference or even harm.
A baby does not yet understand moral rules and cannot bear moral responsibility in the way an adult can. Yet what happens to the baby already has a direction towards good or evil. Care and protection that enable the baby to survive and grow point towards good. Deliberate harm, prolonged neglect or treating the baby as a tool point towards evil.
This shows that moral relationships arise before personal moral awareness develops.
A baby does not yet know what good and evil are, but already lives within relationships that have a moral direction. The baby is first the recipient of moral actions and only later becomes an agent capable of understanding rules, making choices and accepting responsibility.
Innate tendencies are not the same as innate goodness or evil
Human beings are not blank slates without any innate structure.
Everyone is born with certain natural tendencies and developmental capacities, including attachment, self-protection, imitation, sympathy, possessiveness, competition and fear. But these tendencies are not themselves equivalent to good or evil.
Self-protection may lead a person to defend their own life and rights, but it may also become a willingness to sacrifice others in order to save themselves. Competition can encourage the development of abilities, but it may also turn into plunder and oppression. Attachment can produce care and trust, but it can also lead to the exclusion of outsiders.
The same tendency can enter different relationships and produce entirely different consequences.
Innate tendencies provide possibilities for behaviour, not a predetermined moral direction. Whether something points towards good or evil depends on how these tendencies affect others and what conditions they create for shared life.
Good and evil gradually differentiate through interaction
Once people begin to interact, differences emerge.
People differ in their needs, abilities, information and positions. These differences may lead to cooperation, but they may also produce conflict. For shared life to continue, people must establish constraints around what may and may not be done, who bears responsibility, how benefits are distributed, whether those who are harmed can speak, and whether rules can be questioned and revised.
Some actions build trust and allow cooperation to continue. Others destroy trust and make shared life increasingly difficult. Some rules allow different people to participate and express themselves. Others concentrate benefits in the hands of a few while shifting the costs over time onto those who are unable to resist.
The distinction between good and evil gradually becomes visible through these real consequences.
Individuals do not first form good and evil within themselves and then carry them into society. The process works in the opposite direction. Interaction between people causes good and evil to begin differentiating, while families and societies gradually transmit these differences to individuals through education, habits, evaluation and institutions.
How conscience enters our inner life
Adults often feel that conscience is something that has always existed deep within them. We feel uneasy when we see others suffer, ashamed when we do something wrong, and angry when we are treated unfairly. These feelings are so immediate that it is easy to believe they were already fully formed at birth.
But a feeling can be real and profound without being fully formed at birth.
Language has become part of our inner thought, yet we are not born with a complete language. Moral feelings develop in a similar way. Over the course of life, a person experiences care, responses, punishment, imitation, education and social judgement. The constraints present in external relationships are gradually internalised, forming stable emotional responses, habits of behaviour and a sense of responsibility.
Nor are individuals merely passive recipients of social norms. As people grow, they can compare the consequences produced by different rules, reflect on ideas they accepted in childhood, reject unreasonable demands imposed by a group, and change their families, organisations and societies through their own actions.
Groups shape individuals, and individuals in turn change groups. Morality is formed through this continuing interaction.
What a group approves is not necessarily good
If good and evil arise from social relationships, does this mean that whatever a group approves is good and whatever it opposes is evil?
Of course not.
A family can be highly stable while suppressing one of its members over a long period. An organisation can cooperate closely internally while gaining benefits by harming people outside it. An institution can persist for many years while continually excluding some people from making its rules.
Stability does not automatically equal goodness.
Difference, constraint and sustained coherence can explain how a structure forms and maintains itself. But the fact that a structure can persist is not enough to show that it is morally justified. We must also ask whose lives it sustains, who bears its costs, who is able to participate, speak, question and leave, and whether it treats other people as participants in shared life rather than as tools for achieving its own purposes.
At times, refusing to obey or disrupting a local order may appear to damage the stability of an organisation while actually protecting shared life across a broader scope and over a longer period.
Good therefore does not mean preserving every existing order, and evil does not mean causing any form of structural change.
Modern society magnifies the consequences of good and evil
In traditional small-scale societies, many moral actions occurred between people who knew one another. It was usually relatively easy to see who had been harmed by an act of deception or whether a promise had been kept.
Modern society is different. Major engineering projects, healthcare systems, supply chains, financial networks, public administration and artificial intelligence all depend on cooperation among large numbers of strangers, organisations and groups. A seemingly local decision may affect tens of thousands or even millions of people.
In such a society, cooperation is not merely an admirable personal quality. It is also a practical condition for the operation of complex systems. The consequences of deception, broken trust, evasion of responsibility and manipulation of rules can also be repeatedly amplified through organisations, institutions and technologies.
A person may have no direct intention of harming others, yet the procedures they carry out may shift costs onto many people they cannot see. An organisation may be orderly internally while forcing the wider society to bear the costs of pollution, risk or inequality.
Good and evil in modern society therefore cannot be judged solely by personal intentions or by whether an organisation is internally stable. We must also trace the actual consequences that actions and rules produce across different levels.
Why this question has been debated for thousands of years
Looking back, we can now understand why the debate over whether human nature is good or evil has been so difficult to resolve.
If good and evil are understood as attributes already present within a person at birth, people can always find observations that support opposing conclusions. Babies form attachments to their carers and respond to other people’s emotions, which appears to support the view that human nature is good. Babies also cry, compete over things and focus only on their own needs, which appears to support the view that human nature is evil.
Yet these observations show first of all that human beings possess certain natural tendencies, not that they already possess a fully formed moral direction.
Sustenesis Theory does not choose one side between innate goodness and innate evil, nor does it simply compromise by claiming that human nature is both good and evil. It changes the question itself.
What is truly worth asking is not which moral core a person carries at birth, but how natural tendencies enter relationships, how relationships form constraints, how those constraints are internalised by individuals, and how individuals in turn change groups and societies.
Good and evil begin when people meet
At birth, a person does not possess an innate core of either good or evil.
Innate human structures provide a range of possibilities. Interaction between people allows good and evil to begin taking distinct forms. The constraints of family and society then gradually stabilise these differences and bring them into a person’s emotions, habits and judgements.
Real people live in relationships from the moment they are born. Actions around a baby therefore already have a direction towards good or evil, but this does not mean that the baby is already capable of bearing full moral responsibility. Nor does being born with natural tendencies and developmental capacities mean that a person already possesses fully formed attributes of good or evil.
Good and evil are not two things hidden inside every person, waiting to be discovered. They arise in relationships between people, take shape through the constraints of shared life, and enter the individual through sustained interaction.
From this perspective, whether human nature is good or evil may not be a question that requires us to choose between two answers. The debate may have continued for thousands of years because we have kept searching for the answer inside the isolated individual, while the place where good and evil truly begin to appear is the moment people encounter one another.
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