HUMAN NATURE

The phrase "human nature" is multiply ambiguous. Some early modern thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau tended to mean by it the supposed nature of human beings before the advent of organized human society. But there is every reason to believe that human beings have always been highly social creatures, and that the idea of individuals coming together to form society is a myth.

Another ambiguity, exemplified in the opposition between Mencius and Hsun-tzu in the ancient Confucian tradition in China, and between differing traditions within Christianity, is over whether human nature is basically good and in need only of appropriate sustenance and education, or whether we are inherently evil and stand in need of discipline or radical transformation.

A further difference is between a conception of human nature as what is in each individual at birth (or, given modern understanding of genetics, at conception), as opposed to the nature of the fully formed adult after maturation, socialization and education. This has given rise to endless nature versus nurture debates.

The distinction between a priori and a posteriori truths allows us place both for philosophical analysis of concepts of human nature, and for the discovery of empirical facts in physiology, psychology, anthropology, sociology, and history.

A Priori Theory: Rationality

What is most distinctive of human beings as opposed to other animals—rationality, language, consciousness, self-consciousness, freewill, moral responsibility, the ability to love? (And must all these go together?) How would we recognize beings from outer space as having any of these capacities? Perhaps the most obvious criterion they would have to meet to count as rational thinkers and agents is that they should be able to give reasons for their beliefs and their actions, in language of some sort that we could come to understand.

What makes such rationality possible in us? Plato and René Descartes believed that we are essentially immaterial souls, so our distinctively rational nature lies beyond scientific investigation. But must minds, consciousness and rationality involve something nonmaterial, or are we made of matter alone? Aristotle saw our rationality as superimposed on what we share with the animals (perception and self-movement), which is itself superimposed on the basic functions of all life including plants (metabolism and reproduction). According to this understanding, we are animals of a special rational kind.

But even if we reject a dualism of substances, and say that mind or soul is whatever the brain enables us to do, we find an unavoidable duality of aspects. There are mental descriptions of our beliefs, desires, hopes and fears, and there are physical descriptions of neuron firings and chemical changes. We thus use an irreducible duality of explanations—justifying our actions and beliefs in terms of reasons, and explaining brain events in terms of their physiological causes.

Empirical Theory: Human Nature and Nurture

Into this a priori conceptual framework we can fit empirical discoveries about human nature (and perhaps one day, about other rational beings elsewhere). There are plenty of such facts about the structure and functioning of our bodies—it is surely the size and complexity of our brains that explains our linguistic and rational abilities. There are also facts about our mental capacities, for example our recognition of faces, our tendency toward pair-bonding, and the need of children for attachment to parents.

In the light of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, we can offer a scientific account of how the basic physical and mental commonalities of humans have evolved on this planet. With the aid of genetics and the fossil record, scientists are now piecing together the complicated story of how the faculties of rational thought and agency have come to be embodied in the human species. But we have to be very careful in applying Darwinian theory to human phenomena. Sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists have tended to exaggerate. It is highly disputable whether every detail of contemporary human behavior has an evolutionary explanation; for example, donations to charity, the pursuit of religious vocations, and politicians' decisions to go to war.

Our reasons for action involve our beliefs and values, expressed in terms of our culturally developed concepts. Culture is at least as crucial to the realities of our contemporary human nature as evolution. It is superimposed on basic human biology, of course. That there are some innate tendencies in human nature is indisputable—for example, our sexual behavior. But the forms sexuality takes vary considerably between societies, and over time, and in devotedly celibate individuals its expression may be suppressed. The details of our behavior depend on the particular culture we have been brought up in. In the high-tech capitalist economy that now dominates the world, much of the social influence is exerted through the power of money, advertising, and the media. But it should not be forgotten that much behavior depends on individual choices, as existentialists and religious traditions have emphasized.

Human Needs and Rights

Like Plato and Aristotle, Immanuel Kant offered an objective basis for ethics, appealing both to pure reason and to empirical facts about human nature. Though Kant seemed to want to derive morality from rationality alone, he can be seen as appealing to a fundamental moral principle of respect for all rational beings "as ends in themselves." In this, he was obviously inspired by the Judeo-Christian ideal of love for one's neighbor as oneself, whereas Plato and Aristotle were more selective in their bestowal of respect for others. Karl Marx's and Jean-Paul Sartre's sense of human possibilities and the injustice of their denial were surely also influenced by the Judeo-Christian tradition. The Confucian notion of benevolence, and the Hindu and Buddhist programs of detachment from self, seem to point in the same direction of universal compassion.

Respect for all rational beings implies recognition of the rights and needs of all human beings. Rights imply corresponding obligations on other people, and the most appropriate place for talk of rights is in the negative cases: the rights not to be killed, injured, tortured, enslaved, imprisoned without trial, or exploited for someone else's benefit.

In his "second ethics," Sartre thought of human needs as objective values which demand to be fulfilled, if human beings are to flourish. The notion of need applies at several levels. There are things we need to maintain life and health—air, water, carbohydrates, protein, vitamins, medicines. There are psychological needs—most fundamentally the need of children for loving care, and there are typical adult needs for friendship, for sexual fulfillment, and for children of one's own. There are also needs for education and group membership, and needs to work, or contribute in some way to society.

When a human need is not met, it does not follow that someone is to blame. But when a human right is abused, then some person or group or social agency has done or encouraged the killing or torture, the enslavement or exploitation. And why have they done it? The answer will typically involve their seeing some advantage to themselves. There may be sadistic individuals who find intrinsic pleasure in causing pain, and many more are prepared to inflict suffering in the name of a "greater" cause (nation, party, or church), but most people do what they see as best for themselves. As Kant said, there is a "radical evil" in human nature, which consists in the tendency to prefer one's own interests over those of everyone else. But this is consistent with saying that we also have a potential for goodness and love.

Love

In the light of scarcity of resources, and individual and social evils, can we still entertain any hope for ethical and social progress, like Kant and other Enlightenment thinkers? Scarcity may perhaps be alleviated by scientific discovery and technological ingenuity. But new affluence breeds new needs and demands. There is an inherently competitive streak in human nature; we constantly rank ourselves against others. Our competitive tendencies may be acceptable in business and sport and in scientific and artistic achievement, but they easily turn into ruthlessness, cheating or greed. They may help drive social and cultural progress, but they need limitation by higher ideals of compassion and the common good.

What remedies are there? The first step is surely to name the evils, to try to make people aware of what is wrong, in ourselves and in society. For we are adept at finding good names for what we do: there are many possibilities of self-justification, self-deception, Freudian repression or Sartrian bad faith, and what Marx called "ideology," which covers up exploitation.

The notion of rationality alone does not give us much guidance as to what is ultimately worth aiming at, which of our desires are to be encouraged and developed, and which should be suppressed or transformed. People can be superbly intelligent and energetically persistent in action, yet utterly selfish or perverse.

The notion of love is perhaps more promising, provided we distinguish it, as in the Christian tradition exemplified in C. S. Lewis, from erotic and parental love, and from merely human friendship (as in Aristotle). The New Testament presents us with the ideal of agape (divine love, traditionally translated as "charity"), as presented in I Corinthians 13, Galatians 5, and I John 4. Sigmund Freud thought it impossible to fulfill, but even that dour old pessimist Arthur Schopenhauer recognized the possibility of saintly renunciation of self (and also, aesthetic contemplation) as a way that human beings can sometimes escape the near-universal domination of biologically based "will."

See also Altruism; Egoism and Altruism; Evolutionary Ethics; Moral Psychology.

Bibliography

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Leslie Stevenson (2005)