Human nature practice questions.

A writer claims that people are not aggressive to begin with, but grow competitive and vain once settled property and constant comparison with others enter human life. This account of human nature is closest to

• Rousseau, for whom natural self-love is corrupted into vanity only by society
• Hobbes, for whom the natural condition is already a war of every man against every man
• Aristotle, for whom human beings are by nature political animals completed by the city
• Xunzi, for whom human nature is bad and becomes good only through ritual and teaching

Answer: Rousseau, for whom natural self-love is corrupted into vanity only by society

Rousseau separates amour de soi, a harmless concern with one's own preservation, from amour-propre, the comparative self-regard that arises with society and property. Hobbes is the standard contrast: he locates conflict in the natural condition itself, so for him society is the remedy rather than the cause.

A teacher argues that anyone who saw a small child about to fall into a well would feel alarm before working out any advantage to themselves, and that this shows morality grows out of tendencies already in us. This reasoning belongs to

• Xunzi, who takes moral conduct to be the product of deliberate effort against our nature
• Hobbes, who takes such reactions to be disguised calculations of the agent's own advantage
• Sartre, who denies that human beings have any given nature for morality to grow out of
• Mencius, who takes such spontaneous reactions to be the sprouts of virtue

Answer: Mencius, who takes such spontaneous reactions to be the sprouts of virtue

Mencius argues from an immediate, uncalculated reaction to the claim that the beginnings of virtue are innate and need cultivating rather than installing. Xunzi accepts the same Confucian goal but denies the premise: for him nature pulls the other way, and goodness is the achievement of ritual and teaching.

A politician argues: 'Competition is part of human nature, so schools ought to be organised around competition.' Which criticism identifies the logical gap in the argument?

• It attacks the character of the people who defend cooperative schooling rather than the reasons they give
• It draws a conclusion about what ought to be done from purely descriptive premises
• It presents only two options where more are available
• It assumes in its premise the very conclusion it is meant to establish

Answer: It draws a conclusion about what ought to be done from purely descriptive premises

The inference needs a suppressed evaluative premise, namely that natural tendencies ought to be encouraged, and it is exactly that step Hume's is-ought point says cannot be taken for granted. This is not the same as Moore's naturalistic fallacy, which concerns defining 'good' by a natural property rather than crossing from is to ought.

A psychologist argues that talk of an inner nature is idle, because conduct is fully explained by the schedule of reinforcement a person has been exposed to. This position is closest to

• Skinner's behaviourism, which puts the environment rather than an inner nature in charge
• Aristotle's naturalism, which treats character as the completion of a capacity given at birth
• Mencius's account, which treats moral responses as sprouts already present in every person
• Sartre's existentialism, which denies that any given nature settles what a person becomes

Answer: Skinner's behaviourism, which puts the environment rather than an inner nature in charge

Behaviourism and existentialism both refuse a fixed human essence, but they part company over freedom: Skinner replaces nature with conditioning, while Sartre insists that nothing, inner or outer, settles what a person makes of her situation. Denying a nature is therefore not by itself a claim about how unfree we are.

Hobbes concedes that a condition in which everyone is at war with everyone else has probably never held across the whole world. Which account of the work the state of nature does in his argument fits that concession?

• It is a historical report of an early stage that every society has passed through
• It is a prediction that any society will collapse into war within a generation
• It is a device that isolates what people would face without a common authority
• It is a claim that human beings are naturally incapable of keeping any agreement at all

Answer: It is a device that isolates what people would face without a common authority

Read as a device, the state of nature is an argument about what political authority is for, not a piece of anthropology, so evidence about early societies does not refute it. The neighbouring error is to treat Locke's and Rousseau's very different descriptions as rival historical claims rather than as rival ways of setting up the same question.

A writer argues: 'Helping behaviour evolved because it benefited close relatives who carried the same genes. So when people believe they are acting generously, they are really pursuing their own genetic interest.' The philosophical fault in this reasoning is that

• the evolutionary account is empirically disputed, so no conclusion can be drawn from it as it stands
• evolutionary explanations cannot be given for any human behaviour that involves deliberation
• generosity is by definition disinterested, so it is a contradiction in terms to explain it at all
• an account of why a disposition spread is treated as an account of what the agent is now aiming at

Answer: an account of why a disposition spread is treated as an account of what the agent is now aiming at

This is a version of the genetic fallacy: the causal history of a trait is one question and the content of an agent's motive is another, and a gene has no intentions that a person could be secretly serving. The conclusion would need the further premise that origins fix aims, which is precisely what is in dispute.