The Calvinists thought that people were rotten through and through. But most people believe that humanity manifests both goodness and badness. Most people believe that some individuals are morally superb, that some are morally loathsome, and that most are morally good sometimes and in certain respects and morally bad at other times and in other respects.

Proponents of the Positive Answer are in the majority in thinking that humanity manifests both goodness and badness. Their distinctive claim is that the good aspects of humanity are natural and the bad aspects unnatural. If this claim is to have any substance, however, proponents of the Positive Answer have to draw a distinction between the natural and the unnatural that is conceptually independent of the distinction between the morally good and the morally bad. And if this claim is to be true, the distinction between the natural and the unnatural must track the conceptually independent distinction between the morally good and the morally bad.

Hume argued that proponents of the Positive Answer could not fulfill both of these requirements. But Hume's rejection of the Positive Answer should not lead us to conclude that he was a proponent of the Negative Answer. In fact, Hume thought the Negative Answer was just as misconceived as the Positive. And by rejecting the dichotomy the Human Nature Question posed, Hume was able to adopt insights from both sides and combine them into a new and improved position, one that effected a real advance in the “science of man” (THN Introduction 7).