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Saint Augustine's Argument Analysis

1591 Words7 Pages

Throughout the history, humankind was consistently concerned with the basic nature of the human beings. Consequently, there has always been a debate on the attitudes of the philosophers and scientists towards competing ideas that whether humans are intrinsically good or evil, whether humans are natured or nurtured, whether humans are fundamentally selfish or altruistic, whether it is all about our inner states that make us to behave in a certain way or it is mostly associated with external factors such as our environment that shape our identity. In this paper, compelling arguments of the above-mentioned different schools will be analyzed, evaluated, discussed and concluded. The initial school of thought suggests that, humans are inherently bad, selfish and egoistic beings. Origin of this view roots back to ancient times. One of the supporters of this idea is Saint Augustine. In his theory of evil, Augustine put an emphasize on the relationship between nature, …show more content…

In his most well-known work Leviathan, Hobbes dictates that all humans are similar, they have same objective and adopt the same means of obtaining it. When he talks about the reasons why people want to create a legal state, he refers to the basic nature and behavior of humans. He mentions state of nature which is hypothetical condition of no-government. In the state of nature, every man would have whatever he could obtain by whatever means and property would be one’s own only as long as one could keep it. There is no restriction, no morality, no law in the state of nature, and people are consistently engaged in the “war of every man against every man”. So that humans enter to s social contract because of the continual fear, and danger of violent death poor, nasty, and short life. They give up their freedom in order to have an authority who would have the coercive power to protect them( J.Hobbes, 1909,

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