Is man intrinsically selfish and competitive — as Hobbes and Locke would argue — or intrinsically social and altruistic — as Durkheim and Marx would argue.
Framing the question of human nature that way invites smugness and simplicity:
So this is how some saw (see) the divisions — such stark simplicity! Ah, some care and love humans; others don’t. The scripts and asides in class and subtle accusations in arguments write themselves. So, I tartly framed this for my students, observing that those who see man as altruistic have certainly proved it by murdering a hundred million of them in the last century.
The Britannica entry goes on to discuss the arguments of evolutionary psychology, which may begin to make those responses not only more scientifically accurate but more like the vision of those people of over two hundred years ago I teach. They observed human nature with honesty and brought to it skills (in some as strong believers and in others as merely immersed in a strongly Judao-Christian culture) of analysis enlarged by the histories and assumptions of their faith — man is fallen, rent from one another by that fall, but in love might repair that alienation. (Later, Pinker, certainly not a believer, would point out the wisdom that this long history gives if we but read it.)
Will Wilkinson cites Kant and a riposte from Denis Dutton:
As Immanuel Kant famously remarked, “from the crooked timber of humanity no truly straight thing can be made.” But, in the words of philosopher, Denis Dutton, “It is not… that no beautiful carving or piece of furniture can be produced from twisted wood; it is rather that whatever is finally created will only endure if it takes into account the grain, texture, natural joints, knotholes, strengths and weaknesses of the original material.”
David Foster cites Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz:
“To minimize suffering and to maximize security were natural and proper ends of society and Caesar. But then they became the only ends, somehow, and the only basis of law — a perversion. Inevitably, then, in seeking only them, we found only their opposites: maximum suffering and minimum security.”