Mencius argued in the Mencius that human nature is fundamentally good.
Mencius, also called Mengzi, was a Confucian thinker who lived during the Warring States period. He taught that people possess beginnings or sprouts of moral feeling, including compassion, shame, courtesy, and a sense of right and wrong. These tendencies must be cultivated rather than ignored.
His famous example is the claim that anyone seeing a child about to fall into a well would feel alarm and compassion. For Mencius, this immediate response illustrates an inborn moral impulse, not a calculation of personal advantage.
His view differs sharply from that of Xunzi, another major Confucian thinker, who argued that human nature tends toward selfish desires and requires education and ritual discipline. Both philosophers influenced later Confucianism, but Mencius’s optimistic account became especially prominent in Neo-Confucian thought.