HUMAN NATURE

Theories of human nature offer systematic and comprehensive accounts of human beings' most significant distinguishing characteristics. Such accounts are central in people's perennial attempts to organize their understandings of the cosmos; to figure out their relation to God, to nature, and to each other; and to uncover the possibilities, meanings, and purposes of human life.

Western Understanding of Human Nature

Modern Western theories of human nature, which will be the focus of this essay, typically differ from their classical and medieval predecessors in appealing to the findings of a variety of life and social sciences, including anthropology, medicine, physiology, psychology, economics, sociology, and even ethology. Nevertheless, although these sciences undeniably help us to understand specific aspects of human life, even contemporary theories of human nature are never simply summaries of the results of empirical research—despite their frequent claims to scientific authority.

One reason that theories of human nature are not simply generalizations from the conclusions of scientific study is that they enter into empirical investigations not only as conclusions but also as presuppositions, structuring the conceptual frameworks within which research programs are conducted. Contemporary psychological investigation, for instance, proceeds with a variety of models of the human mind, including the Freudian, the behaviorist, the existentialist or humanist, and the computer models. Empirical research cannot fully evaluate the adequacy of its own framework relative to others; determining the adequacy of an entire framework requires reference to considerations beyond empirical data, including how the framework coheres with other respected theories and even its moral and political implications.

A related reason that theories of human nature go beyond ordinary scientific claims is that typically they aspire to provide a comprehensive conceptual framework that will render coherent the contributions of all those disciplines and discourses that investigate various aspects of human life. These often represent human beings in ways that, at least on the surface, appear quite incompatible with each other; for instance, lawyers assume that people ordinarily are responsible for their actions, while psychologists may suggest that people's behavior is determined ultimately by factors outside their control. Theories of human nature endeavor to resolve these incompatibilities in a variety of ways, ranging from reinterpreting the meaning of a discourse, such as the religious, to setting limits on the domain within which its claims are accepted; occasionally, a theory of human nature may even proclaim the invalidity of a whole realm of discourse, such as the parapsychological. Rather than simply summarizing the conclusions of the various life and social sciences, therefore, theories of human nature typically perform a regulatory function, authorizing some methodological approaches while delegitimating others.

Yet another respect in which theories of human nature differ from scientific theories, at least as science is ordinarily understood, is in the prominence of their normative or evaluative component. Even if one contends that all knowledge is to some degree value-laden, the evaluative element is far more evident in theories of human nature than it is, for instance, in modern theories of the physical universe. All theories of human nature provide a general account of human capacities and human needs, human potentialities and human well-being, and thus contain at least an implicit, and often an explicit, diagnosis of human malaise and a prescription for human flourishing.

Like all theoretical constructions, theories of human nature are developed in specific historical circumstances and are designed to address specific conceptual puzzles or practical concerns; consequently, they shift their emphasis according to the scientific, moral, and political preoccupations of the time. Despite variations in focus and emphasis, however, the Western project of understanding human nature historically has centered on two questions. The first of these addresses the human aspect of human nature: How can human be distinguished from nonhuman nature? The second addresses the natural aspect: How can what is natural for humans be distinguished from what is unnatural, abnormal, or artificial? The concerns inherent in these two questions constitute continuing themes that link the variety of Western inquiries into the nature of human beings.

Reflection on these themes reveals that the Western project of providing a systematic theory of human nature has been predicated historically on certain assumptions. They include the following: (1) that it is possible to discover specific qualities or features that characterize human beings universally and transhistorically; (2) that these characteristics decisively distinguish humans from all other beings, notably nonhuman animals; and (3) that, from the discovery of these characteristics, it is possible to derive specific prescriptions about the proper conduct of human life. In other words, the Western project of understanding human nature generally has been motivated by a desire to derive from it universal and unchanging values.

These assumptions went unquestioned and often unarticulated throughout most of Western history. Once they are made explicit, however, it is easy to see that they are all contestable; and we shall see how, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, each of them was contested. For instance, Karl Marx (1818–1883) and John Dewey (1859–1952) challenged the first assumption; Charles Darwin (1809–1882) and the twentieth-century sociobiologists challenged the second; and the theorists of positivism and neopositivism challenged the third.

Since the 1970s not only these assumptions but the whole project of developing a comprehensive theory of human nature has been subjected to more fundamental critiques, launched by poststructuralist or postmodern French writers such as Michel Foucault (1926–1984), Jacques Derrida (1930–), and Jean-François Lyotard (1924–). While these authors differ on many points, they are united in rejecting the possibility of any overarching philosophical framework capable of unifying and legitimating the specific disciplines. Such totalizing frameworks or discourses, they claim, reflect unrealizable aspirations to discover universal and absolute truths in morals, politics, or science. These authors deny that any genuinely universal truths can be found, and assert that claims to them typically are propounded by groups who wish to use them for promoting their own political agendas. Truth, they argue, is relative to specific discursive practices that are historically contingent and self-justifying. Consequently, there is no need for, as well as no possibility of, a master discourse designed to be the ground or foundation of these more specific discourses.

As described so far, the dominant tendency in Western thought has been to conceptualize human nature as both universal and transhistorical. Its conceptualizations typically take the form "All human beings throughout history have characteristics x, y, z," implying that x, y, and z are necessary, as well as universal, characteristics of human nature. However, the Western tradition also includes conceptions of human nature that are not universalistic although they are transhistorical. These relational theories take the form "Group x is inferior to group y with respect to characteristics x, y, z"; typically, relational theories are used to justify the dominance of one group over another. Finally, some Western conceptions of human nature are historical rather than transhistorical, used within theories that claim that as human cultures change, so do certain important human characteristics. Some theories contain elements both universal and relational—for example, the theories of Aristotle and the sociobiologists—or both transhistorical and historical—for example, the theories of Karl Marx and John Dewey.

Three Classic Western Approaches

ARISTOTLE. The origins of Western philosophy, in the sense of systematic and rational inquiries into the nature of reality, knowledge, and value, are often traced to the reflections of ancient Greek thinkers in the fifth and fourth centuries b.c.e. Plato (ca. 428–347) and Aristotle (384–322), two of the three philosophical giants of this period (the third being Socrates, ca. 470–399), developed systematic theories of human nature. Aristotle's view has been particularly influential on the Western tradition because it was incorporated into the Scholastic philosophy that dominated Europe in the Middle Ages and early Renaissance, and continues to shape the thinking of the Roman Catholic Church.

Aristotle conceptualized human beings as complexes of soul and body. The soul was the distinctively human element—the essence or form or intelligible principle of the body—but it existed only in conjunction with a living human body. Aristotle's conceptualization of the soul as inseparable from its body contrasted with Plato's view that human beings were souls united only temporarily with bodies, but Aristotle also acknowledged the possibility of the actively knowing and thinking part of the soul, the mind or intellect, being "set free from its present conditions … immortal and eternal." When this happened, however, Aristotle asserted that the mind remembered nothing of its former embodied activity and, because all connection with a specific human body was thus lost, he did not regard the human soul as personally or individually immortal.

Aristotle's view of human nature, like Plato's, was teleological, which is to say that he regarded human beings, like other things in the world, as having a "function" or activity peculiar to them. He further assumed, again like Plato, that the good life, or eudaimonia, consisted in the successful or efficient performance of that function. For Aristotle, the distinctive function of human beings was reasoning, or "an active life of that which possesses reason," and so he inferred that the good life was one in which the rational part of the soul governed the appetitive or desiring part, thus avoiding excess and living in accordance with virtue.

For Aristotle, human beings were, by nature, political animals who needed to live in a community: "He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need of it because he is sufficient to himself, must be either a beast or a god." Within human communities, however, not everyone was capable of citizenship: The nature of some was to rule and of others to be ruled. Among those whose nature was to be ruled were children, barbarians, and Greek women; thus, while Aristotle posited a universal standard for human nature, he simultaneously asserted that some groups of humans were less than fully human. The theme of dominance and subordination runs not only through Aristotle's account of the relations between human beings but even through his account of the nature of individual humans. He compared the controlling relation between form and matter with the relation between male and female, and he asserted that the proper relation between mind and body was like that of master to slave.

AQUINAS. The dominant philosophical figure of the Middle Ages was Thomas Aquinas (1226–1274), later Saint Thomas, who synthesized Greek thought and church doctrine into a Christian philosophy. He conceptualized human nature in terms that were basically Aristotelian, with some (often Platonic) modifications made in order to adapt Aristotelian views to church doctrine.

Aquinas believed, like Aristotle, that there was a distinctive and essential human nature that could be understood teleologically; he also shared the Aristotelian belief that the good life or eudaimonia was action in accordance with this function. A proper understanding of the ends or purposes of human life was therefore essential to morality and should be achieved by discovering the precepts of natural law. Natural law, as Aquinas conceptualized it, was universal and unchanging. It described supposedly universal human tendencies, such as preserving life, but presented them not simply as empirical facts about human nature but also as manifestations of God's design for humanity. For Aquinas, therefore, natural law simultaneously described how things were and prescribed how they should be. It was discoverable by reason, which, because it gave insight into God's purposes, provided guidance on how humans should live.

Like Aristotle, Aquinas saw humans as combinations of soul and body, with the soul as the form of the body. To allow for the possibility of personal or individual immortality, however, Aquinas diverged from Aristotle, declaring that the soul was a "substantial" form, capable of existing separately from matter. Not only was personal immortality conceptually possible, according to Aquinas; it was humans' destiny. God would not have implanted the universal—and therefore natural—human desire to live forever unless this desire had an object.

While Aquinas shared the Aristotelian view that human nature had an end or purpose, he believed, in accordance with church doctrine, that this end was supernatural rather than natural: It was to spend eternity united with God in heaven, where alone perfect happiness might be enjoyed. Human life as we know it was no more than a preparation for life after death, and this world was simply a testing ground for the next. So long as humans inhabited this world, however, they should strive to live in accordance with natural law, which provided a test for the moral validity of the laws of the state.

DESCARTES. The thought of René Descartes (1596–1650) is generally considered to mark the beginning of modern philosophy. Refusing to accept the authority of tradition, Descartes developed "rules for the direction of the understanding" and a "method for rightly conducting reason" designed to enable each individual to establish certain truth in science and philosophy. He wrote in the vernacular (French) as well as in Latin, in order to reach lay as well as clerical readers.

Descartes's conception of human nature was even more dualistic than that of Aristotle and Aquinas. Living human beings, for Descartes, were composed of two entirely different kinds of entities: souls, which were active, intellectual substances, immaterial and immortal; and bodies, which were unthinking, passive mechanisms, spatially extended and temporally finite. Individual humans were to be identified not with their bodies but with their souls, which were able to survive the death of the body. While Descartes's model allowed for the soul's separation from the body after death, it rendered problematic the relation of the soul to the body during life, since it was unclear how material and immaterial substances could have a causal influence on each other. Descartes never succeeded in providing a satisfactory explanation of mind-body interaction.

As a scientist, Descartes wanted his theory of human nature to be compatible with both the new developments in physical science and the doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church. He attempted to reconcile these two worldviews by postulating two spheres of reality, each governed by entirely different laws or principles. The laws of God governed spiritual or mental reality; the laws of science governed physical reality, understood by Descartes in mechanical terms. Although Descartes never developed a systematic moral philosophy, his assertion that all "men" were potentially equal in their capacity to reason laid the foundation for later egalitarian moves in ethics and politics. Simultaneously, his conceptualization of animals as mere stimulusresponse mechanisms, lacking consciousness because they lacked souls, justified the exclusion of animals from moral consideration. Cartesian biologists, in defense of vivisection, have compared the howls of cut-up dogs to the squeaks of unlubricated machines.

SHARED FEATURES OF DOMINANT PRE-DARWINIAN CONCEPTIONS OF HUMAN NATURE. There are at least six common features of pre-Darwinian conceptions of human nature:

1. Human nature is the same transhistorically.
2. It is distinguished primarily by possession of a soul.
3. Human souls are characterized by their capacity to reason. This capacity exists, perhaps in varying degrees, as a potential innate in all humans, sharply distinguishing them from all other beings, including animals.
4. Humans' possession of a rational soul gives them special moral worth.
5. Lacking such a soul, animals lack comparable moral worth or value. Those biological features that are similar in humans and animals comprise humans'"lower" nature, which humans should strive to rise above.
6. Developing our potential to reason is a key to the good life for humans. Reasoning not only tells us how to live well but actualizes our distinctively human potential. Thus, the concept of human nature is clearly normative: Our task is to realize our humanness by fulfilling our potential for rationality; those who are incapable of fulfilling this potential are less than human.

The Materialist Tradition and the Darwinian Pivot

The features listed above as characterizing pre-Darwinian conceptions of human nature represent the dominant Western tradition prior to the nineteenth century. Running counter to this rationalist and dualist tradition, however, Western thought also includes a less prominent materialist or naturalist tradition.

Anaximander (ca. 500 b.c.e.), an early pre-Socratic philosopher, developed a speculative theory of evolution in which human beings were descended from lower forms of animal life. Democritus (460–370 b.c.e.), a contemporary of Socrates, developed a speculative atomic theory in which even the human soul was composed of atoms. The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) assimilated individual behavior and politics to the laws of mechanics, regarding desire as motion toward an object, and human beings as motivated entirely by self-interest. The French philosopher Julien de La Mettrie (1709–1751) accepted Descartes's assertion that animals were like machines but insisted that so, too, were human beings. The German philosopher Baron Paul Henri d'Holbach (1723–1789) argued that thinking could be reduced to the functioning of the brain and explicitly denied the existence of a soul. Another of the French philosophes, Claude-Adrien Helvétius (1715–1771), argued that all mental faculties were ultimately reducible to physical sensation and that all humans were motivated by the desire to achieve physical pleasure and reduce pain. This latter idea was developed into an elaborate ethical calculus by the nineteenth-century British utilitarians, Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), James Mill (1773–1836), and the latter's more famous son, John Stuart Mill (1806–1873). Collectively, these philosophers suggested an alternative understanding of human nature—one that focused more on the body than on the soul, on the emotions and desires more than on reason, and on the similarities rather than the differences between humans and animals. It remained for Charles Darwin to give this materialist tradition a scientific basis by providing a naturalistic analysis of the relations between humans and animals.

In his landmark work, On the Origin of Species (1859), Darwin argued that the distinctive features of human nature were not divinely created in an instant but had evolved over many millennia through a process he called "natural selection". Although the word selection suggested conscious purpose, Darwin's use of it was metaphorical, since nature selects only in the sense that certain new traits or mutations that appear accidentally are sufficiently adaptive to the environmental conditions within which the organism lives for the new organism to survive. The view that human beings had evolved through accidental mutations implied that there was no preordained nature, no ultimate meaning or cosmic purpose for human life to fulfill. In an attempt to escape this conclusion and reconcile science with Christianity, some later theorists postulated a direction and a goal in evolution, characterizing more recently evolved species as higher or otherwise superior; but such teleological and evaluative interpretations were ultimately alien to the basically antiteleological spirit of the concept of natural selection.

When Darwin first proposed his theory of evolution, the wife of the canon of Worcester Cathedral was said to have remarked, "Descended from the apes! My dear, we will hope it is not true. But if it is, let us pray that it may not become generally known." Indeed, the church denounced Darwin, recognizing that his theories challenged not only the beliefs in divine creation and a radical discontinuity between humans and animals but also the idea of an immortal soul with special moral worth. Darwin argued that morality had developed from the social instincts of animals; and he construed the uniquely human capacity for rationality, which Aristotle had seen as the telos of human existence, as the outcome of natural selection operating on accidental mutations.

Biological Determinism: A Critique

Once Darwin had demonstrated an evolutionary continuity between humans and other animals, questions arose about the causal role of human biology in relation to other aspects of human life. For many scientists, the project became the reductionist one of showing how the various psychological and social characteristics of human beings were causally determined by human biology.

Many biological determinist theories have negative social implications because they present human characteristics like aggression and dominance as biologically determined and therefore inescapable. For instance, Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), the founder of psychoanalysis, insisted that all human motivation could be reduced to two basic drives—the sexual drive, or libido; and the aggressive drive, an ineradicable instinct to hurt, torture, or kill other human beings (Freud). The German ethologist Konrad Lorenz (1903–1989) also posited an aggressive instinct in humans similar to that he found in his study of various animal species in their natural habitats. In each species, the instinct had evolved to serve one or more life-preserving functions, such as territorial dispersion, selection of the strongest for reproduction, defense of the young, and the establishment of a hierarchy that could provide the group with social cohesion. In species armed with sharp teeth, claws, or beaks, the aggressive instinct was generally coupled with an inhibitory mechanism preventing fighting animals from killing each other; Lorenz argued that there had been no need for such an inhibitory mechanism to evolve in humans because they were not naturally armed. With the development of weaponry, however, the absence of such a mechanism was often lethal, and the advent of nuclear weapons made it a threat to the survival of the species (Lorenz).

More recent studies of animal behavior have generated a new form of biological determinism called sociobiology. Two precursors of sociobiology, anthropologists Lionel Tiger (1937–) and Robin Fox (1913–1971), proposed the concept of a "biogram," a code or program genetically "wired" into the brain that produced certain forms of social behavior, including patterns of dominance and submission—hierarchy among males and dominance of males over females. Both of these were assumed to be the evolutionary heritage of the hunting life of early hominids (Tiger and Fox). The same general line of thinking was employed by entomologist Edward O. Wilson (1929–), who first coined the term sociobiology. Wilson insisted that "genes hold culture on a leash" and play a significant role in determining such human social behavior as altruism toward kin, communal aggression, nationalism, racism, homosexuality, and the dominance of males over females. Wilson has conceded that these biologically based tendencies might be counteracted through extreme social measures, but he argues that humans would pay a high price for doing so (1977).

While Wilson's assertion of a universal genetic tendency toward ethnocentric and racist attitudes was not an attempt to justify racism, there is a long Western tradition of using evolutionary theory to denigrate certain racial or ethnic groups. In the nineteenth century, some scientists in this tradition asserted that Caucasians and Orientals had crossed the Homo sapiens threshold before "Negroes," or that Homo sapiens had begun in Asia and migrated to Africa, where the original stock had degenerated. Others sought to prove racial, ethnic, and class inequalities in intelligence through the use of IQ (intelligence quotient) theory. Frances Galton (1822–1911), a cousin of Darwin who coined the term eugenics, attempted to show that the upper classes had superior intellectual capacities and that blacks were "two grades" below whites. Many of the early IQ theorists in the United States made similar claims about various immigrant groups.

After World War II, when the Nazis had shown the possible social consequences of eugenic ideas, such theories fell into disrepute. They were revived in 1969 when educational psychologist Arthur Jensen (1923–) published an article in the Harvard Educational Review arguing as follows: Intelligence testing has demonstrated that whites score on average about fifteen IQ points above blacks; IQ is 80 percent heritable; therefore, the mean difference between the scores proves a hereditary difference in innate intelligence between the two groups (Jensen). Shortly after Jensen's article appeared, Harvard psychologist Richard Herrnstein (1930–) made a similar argument concerning the difference in IQ scores between upper-class and lower-class people. He concluded that humans should give up any aspirations to democratic equality and accept the idea of a natural meritocracy (Herrnstein).

Biological determinist theories were highly controversial in the late 1960s and 1970s, but in the 1980s and 1990s they became increasingly fashionable—claiming, for instance, genetic factors in alcoholism; locating homosexuality in the structure of the brain; and asserting that men with XYY chromosomes have a tendency toward criminal violence. However, biological determinist theories of human nature are problematic in a number of respects.

Empirically, the evidence for such theories is at best inconclusive. Even within the psychoanalytic tradition, some theorists have argued against Freud that aggressive desires may be explained as derivative manifestations rather than primary instincts, resulting from situations that frustrate other, nonaggressive desires. Ethologists and sociobiologists typically move incautiously from observations of certain animal species or conjectures about early hominids to claims about modern human beings. Sometimes, like Lorenz, they focus on the behavior of fish, birds, and other animals considerably removed from humans—while they ignore studies indicating that many higher mammals, especially primates, display almost no hierarchical organization or intraspecies aggression, being instead peaceful and cooperative. Finally, regardless of how nonhuman species behave, similarities in behavior between humans and nonhuman animals do not establish that the human behavior in question is biologically determined; it may still be a learned response.

Claims for the universality of human aggression, hierarchy, and male dominance also are not confirmed by anthropological evidence. Many hunter-gatherer societies are reported to be remarkably lacking in aggressive behavior, and some enjoy an exceptionally high degree of social equality. Assertions of women's natural dependence on men are undermined by evidence that gathering, a task often performed predominantly by women, is a more reliable food source than hunting in many hunter-gatherer societies. The sexual division of labor varies widely cross-culturally, and even where certain constants are observed, such as a tendency for women rather than men to care for young children, this may be a social adaptation to prevailing conditions rather than a biological predetermination.

Claims about the genetic basis of racial and ethnic differences in IQ are equally suspect. The idea of different evolutionary paths for different races is contradicted by the paleontological evidence; indeed, the concept of race itself is now widely discredited, with anthropologists preferring instead to talk about the statistical frequency of certain characteristics within a geographical population. Further, the idea that IQ tests measure innate intelligence is undermined by the recognition that all tests are culturally biased, since they all require prior learning, and that learning experience can significantly raise IQ. Finally, the very concept of heritability is a technical one, designating a ratio of the contribution of heredity to environment within a given population; it cannot be used, therefore, to compare one population against another.

Biological determinist theories of human nature are not just empirically unconfirmed; they also fail to acknowledge what is most distinctive of our species. The human genetic constitution determines highly developed learning and cognitive capacities that allow humans to respond flexibly rather than instinctively to environmental problems, as well as to develop a range of distinctively human cultural characteristics. The implications of this were noted by one of the world's foremost geneticists, Theodosius Dobzhansky (1900–1975), who wrote, "In a sense, human genes have surrendered their primacy in human evolution to an entirely new, nonbiological or superorganic agent, culture. However, it should not be forgotten that human culture is not possible without human genes" (p. 113). In short, what has developed in the human evolutionary process is a primate with a genetic structure capable of a new kind of evolution, cultural evolution.

Biological determinist theories of human nature contrast sharply in content with their pre-Darwinian counterparts, but they are often inspired by the same motivation of discovering universal and unchanging social values. Typically, they describe as natural aspects of behavior thought to be biologically determined; though few would assert that natural behavior is always to be encouraged or even permitted, characterizing some behavioral tendencies as natural provides a certain legitimation for them. Because they are understood as resulting from natural selection, such tendencies are regarded as having been necessary at least at some time for human survival; in consequence, they cannot be entirely deplored, and they may even be romanticized as clues to a more natural way of life. Thus, biological determinist approaches to understanding and evaluating human nature may be seen as secular analogues of Aquinas's theory of natural law.

It may be the social function of biological determinist theories of human nature, rather than their scientific credentials, that accounts for their continuing popularity. Put simply, these theories tend to rationalize existing manifestations of aggression and inequality: Biological determinist analyses of violence, war, and crime tend to deflect attention from the social and economic causes of these phenomena, just as theories about the biological determinants of male and female behavior distract us from the ways in which men and women are socialized for their respective roles. The implication often drawn from biological determinist theories is that significant social movement in the direction of peaceful cooperation and equality is impossible because it is alleged to go against human nature. Clearly, those in power benefit from such an assumption and are likely to encourage the development of such theories.

Behaviorism: Another Form of Post-Darwinian Reductionism

The Western materialist or naturalist tradition has not always moved in a biological determinist direction. It also includes thinkers who claim that environmental or cultural factors are the primary determinants of the human mind or behavior. The philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) saw the human mind as a kind of blank tablet to be written upon by sensory impressions, while Enlightenment figures like Helvétius assumed that education could shape human beings into almost any form.

In the first part of the twentieth century, environmentalist ideas became popular in the United States through a psychological movement known as behaviorism. John B. Watson (1878–1958), who first systematically developed the theory, insisted that in order for psychology to become a rigorous experimental science, it must give up its introspective orientation. It should no longer take its task to be analyzing private mental states, such as feelings, desires, and thoughts, but instead should study the relation between publicly observable behavior and the environment. For Watson, the two basic forms of this relation were the unconditioned and the conditioned reflex. The former was the basic human physiological endowment, consisting of automatic responses to environmental stimuli, such as salivating in the presence of food and contracting pupils in the presence of light. Watson based his analysis of the conditioned reflex on the work of the Russian experimental psychologist Ivan Petrovich Pavlov (1849–1936), who had demonstrated that a hungry dog, repeatedly presented with both food and the ringing of a bell, would eventually salivate at only the bell-ringing. The sound of the bell had become a substitute stimulus, and the salivation was now a conditioned response. For Watson, all human behavior could be reduced to these two kinds of reflexes.

Watson's version of behaviorism was superseded by that of B. F. Skinner (1904–1990), who argued that reflex action could account for only a small part of human behavior. For Skinner, human behavior was primarily shaped by what he called operant conditioning, which reinforced certain spontaneous movements of the organism. For example, when a pigeon raised its head above a certain height and food was released into its cage, the result was a higher frequency of that behavior. Unlike the stimulus in Watson's model, the "reinforcer" (the food) was introduced after the "response" (the raising of the head to the desired height) occurred. For Skinner, most human behavior other than automatic reflex action, even human language, could be explained as the result of positive or negative reinforcement, which, by adding something to the situation (food, sex, money, praise, etc.)—or by removing something from it—increased the frequency of some behavior. While not denying that feelings and thoughts existed, Skinner refused to characterize them as residing in a special mental domain, consciousness, and claimed that they had no causal effect on human behavior (Skinner, 1953).

Both Watson and Skinner believed that human beings could be conditioned to develop almost any pattern of behavioral responses. Watson boldly declared that he could take almost any infant "at random and train him to become … doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief, and, yes, even a beggar man and thief." Skinner insisted that operant conditioning "shapes behavior as a sculptor shapes a lump of clay." One evident consequence of the behaviorist program was that human freedom was an illusion. For Skinner, in particular, such concepts as freedom, moral responsibility, and human dignity were the conceits of a prescientific age (Skinner, 1973).

Behaviorism, just as much as biological determinism, is heir to the evolutionary paradigm because human behavior is still explained in terms of genetic dispositions regarded as having survival value. For behaviorism, however, these predispositions are not instincts or drives. Instead, specific unconditioned reflexes have evolved in the human species because they have survival value, while the human organism's susceptibility to conditioning helps it survive by allowing it to adapt to environmental changes more rapidly than its genetic structure could.

There are a number of difficulties with the behaviorist conception of human nature. First are the primary data of consciousness, such as desires, feelings, reflection, and decision making; it is hard to believe that these do not have at least some causal influence on human activity. Second, the fact that pigeons, rats, and human beings can sometimes be controlled by operant conditioning does not mean that all human behavior can be understood in this way. Linguist Noam Chomsky (1928–), for example, has argued against Skinner that linguistic competence requires creativity that goes beyond responses to prior conditioning because we are constantly constructing sentences that we have never before encountered. Finally, there is no room in the behaviorist model for human agency: The environment acts, human beings merely react. In this, behaviorism may be seen as ideologically reflecting a world in which people are continually managed and manipulated by technocratic and bureaucratic elites.

Social and Historical Conceptions of Human Nature

Social and historical conceptions of human nature offer an alternative to seeing human beings either as primarily determined by their biological drives or as passive clay to be molded by their physical and social environment. These approaches, while not ignoring human biology or the role of social conditioning, emphasize the importance of human social activity within specific historical contexts. The work of the revolutionary social theorist Karl Marx, together with his collaborator Friedrich Engels (1820–1895), and of the U.S. pragmatist philosopher John Dewey, provides two examples of this approach.

Marx and Engels's view of human nature (Schmitt) was embedded in their more general theory of human history, historical materialism. Human history, they contended, began with humans' attempt to satisfy their basic biological needs through producing their means of subsistence, so that human beings were, first and foremost, producers. Human production differed from that of nonhuman animals in that it was deliberate rather than instinctive, involving imagination, planning, and tool use. It was also inherently social, not only in requiring the coordination of human effort but also in utilizing skills and knowledge transmitted from one individual, group, or generation to another. In societies producing a surplus beyond that needed for immediate survival, human production typically involved a division of labor going beyond a division into separate tasks, to a division between intellectual and physical work and between work considered appropriate for men and for women. Most important for Marx and Engels was the class division of labor between those groups who owned the means of production and those who had to work for them, a division generating the class struggles regarded by Marx and Engels as the motor force in history.

Different economic systems, or what Marx and Engels called modes of production, established forms of social life through which human beings individuated and understood themselves. Peasants and artisans, ladies and gentlemen, merchants and professionals, corporate capitalists and industrial workers would tend to think and act differently from each other. Changes in the mode of production would generate new forms of social life, new ways of understanding the world, and new ways of thinking and acting—in effect, new kinds of individuals. Thus, human nature itself would change. Since human beings were active in the class struggle that caused these social and economic changes, however, it could also be said that human beings actively changed their own natures over the course of history.

For John Dewey, as for Marx and Engels, human beings were neither governed by instincts nor passive recipients of environmental forces; rather, they were social agents who changed their own natures in the process of changing their societal conditions. However, in contrast to Marx and Engels, Dewey regarded the motor force of social change not as class struggle but as the product of reflective intelligence.

Dewey acknowledged that human beings had instincts—or impulses, as he preferred to call them in order to discourage associations of inflexibility. Impulses, in his view, were extremely flexible in that they could take on a variety of meanings, depending on the social context. Thus, the impulse of fear might become cowardice, caution, reverence, or respect; while the impulse of anger might become rage, sullenness, annoyance, or indignation. Impulses took on these meanings as habits, predispositions to certain kinds of thinking and acting, ultimately embodied in social customs and institutions. The content of these habits constituted our historical nature. However, when the habits proved inadequate to new social problems, humans could employ their reflective intelligence to redirect their impulses into new habits. For example, as war became increasingly problematic or as certain economic institutions become increasingly outmoded, human impulses could be rechanneled, creating new institutions embodying new habits.

To make sense of the claim that human nature changes, we need to remember the distinction between transhistorical and historical conceptions of human nature. For both Dewey and Marx, it is precisely because a certain transhistorical human nature exists—socially productive and reflectively intelligent—that the content of human nature can be changed historically. To put this point in a more contemporary idiom: Our distinctively human capacity to transform social institutions transforms social roles and, in so doing, transforms historically specific character structures.

Giving more weight to the social and historical aspects of human nature offers a new model of the relation between genetic determination and social conditioning, on the one hand, and social behavior, on the other. What is determined by our genes is our capacity to learn, reflect, and work for change. Humans can, thus, be agents of their own history. Biology determines certain potentialities, but it is only through concrete historical activities that humans develop certain specific cultural and psychological characteristics. Genes dictate the ability to develop general modes of response, such as learning languages, engaging in productive labor, and developing forms of social relatedness; but they do not dictate that humans learn English, produce nuclear weapons, or become selfish and competitive as opposed to altruistic and cooperative. Thus, historical and social conceptions of human nature do not deny biology but refuse to privilege it as the primary cause of human action. Similarly, they do not deny conditioning but equally refuse to privilege it in explaining human action. Certain social conditions undoubtedly encourage the development of certain habits, but these are not merely behavioral responses; instead, they are social patterns of meaning that connect thought to action. Furthermore, human beings do not merely react to social conditions but individuate themselves within them and can reflect intelligently on them. Thus, both individually and collectively humans can decide to change their habits and work to transform the social conditions from which they arose.

A Social and Historical Conception of the Human Body

Although many theorists are willing to acknowledge that people's character or personality or behavior is socially shaped, at least to some degree, the biological constitution, the body, is often viewed as a presocial given, the universal and unchanging foundation on which elaborate cultural edifices are erected. According to this way of thinking, the body constitutes the most natural aspect of human nature. Itself a product of natural selection, the body sets the natural, that is, biologically determined, limits of social variability.

While it may be true that there is less systematic crosscultural and transhistorical variation in people's bodies than there is in their personalities and social institutions, it is too simple to regard the human body as a presocial given. Although the human body may sometimes be experienced as a given, in fact, like the mind or the personality, bodies are socially and historically shaped on several levels.

It is not difficult to recognize some of the ways in which human bodies are influenced by their social context. Different kinds of work and living conditions develop or distort the body in various ways. For instance, scarcity of food results in stunted growth, so that body size and development vary systematically not only between cultures but often also between social classes. While many of these bodily marks are unintended side effects of social practices, others are deliberately induced. Social norms are consciously inscribed on the body in a variety of ways, ranging from foot-binding and circumcision to diet clinics and cosmetic surgery. The varying social meanings assigned to bodily characteristics and functions influence a person's experience of his or her body, which, depending on the social context, may become a source of pride, joy, pain, or embarrassment.

Social influences on the human body operate not only on the level of observable physical structure, the phenotype; in the past, they have also influenced the genotype, our genetic inheritance, and they continue to do so. While human prehistory is highly speculative, it seems likely that some genetically heritable characteristics have been selected not only naturally, as adaptive to such nonsocial circumstances as climate and food availability; but also socially, as adaptive to certain forms of social organization or perhaps even as the results of conscious social preferences. For instance, the average size difference between human males and females may have been a consequence as much as a cause of male dominance: If the dominant males fed first and most, only smaller-framed women could survive on the leftover food. Even today, the human gene pool continues to be influenced by social factors. For instance, exposure to environmental pollutants sometimes leads to genetic mutations, and modern medicine now makes it possible for people to survive and reproduce with genetic conditions that otherwise would have led to their early deaths. Finally, genetic engineering is rapidly becoming a real possibility.

The recognition that even the genetic constitution is influenced by social factors has far-reaching consequences for understanding human nature. The point is not simply that most versions of biological determinism are false because they fail to give sufficient weight to the social determinants of human characteristics. It is, rather, that the usefulness of the whole nature-culture distinction as an analytical framework for understanding human beings comes into question. Just as we cannot identify any cultural or social phenomena uninfluenced in some way by human biology, neither can we identify any human biological or natural features that are independent of social influence. The biological and the social are so intertwined in the human past and present that it becomes impossible in principle to distinguish the natural from the social or cultural components in the constitution of human beings. As far as human beings are concerned, the relation between nature and culture is mutually constitutive: To oppose one to the other is incomprehensible. Everything that we are and do is revealed as simultaneously cultural and natural.

Ethical Implications for the Life Sciences: A Cautionary Tale

What are the bioethical implications of these various conceptions of human nature? First, a cautionary note. Practical ethics reflects on a host of considerations in practical contexts and cannot simply deduce specific moral conclusions from general ethical principles, let alone from some general conception of human nature. Thus, the relation between the various conceptions of human nature and any specific bioethical position is unlikely to be one of logical entailment. This does not mean, however, that concepts of human nature have no relevance to bioethical issues. They may serve as starting points for bioethical analysis, raise suspicions about certain bioethical claims, or even rule out certain bioethical positions. In general, certain conceptions of human nature may be said to cohere, or provide a better fit, with certain bioethical stances than with others.

The dominant pre-Darwinian conceptions of human nature view physical nature, including the human body, as the realm of the material, the immanent, and the profane, and identify God with the spiritual, the transcendent, and the sacred. It is only because human beings are endowed with a soul that they are regarded as capable of partaking in the sacred, and their mission is to transcend their bodies and realize their spiritual nature. Insofar as they are part of God's creation, nonhuman animals are sometimes assigned a degree of moral worth, but the view that they lack souls typically rationalizes the claim that nonhuman animals are merely resources to serve human purposes. Saint Francis of Assisi notwithstanding, the dominant view of the Judeo-Christian tradition is that God created nonhuman animals and, indeed, all of nonhuman nature, primarily for the use of human beings. This sharp bifurcation between human and nonhuman nature not only permits but even legitimates the human subjugation and exploitation of all nonhuman nature, and may therefore contribute to the contemporary ecological crisis.

Within this ontology, the human body occupies a unique and somewhat ambiguous moral status. Although material, and therefore a source of temptation, the body is nevertheless sacrosanct because it is indispensable to human life. God is thought to have a divine plan for humanity, and any attempt to subvert this plan by tinkering with the human body is regarded as at least prima facie wrong. When applied to humans as opposed to nonhuman animals, therefore, reproductive technology, genetic engineering, and euthanasia are viewed with suspicion, if not censure; and brain death may not be considered sufficient reason to switch off a life-support system, depending on when the soul is believed to leave the body. If, for example, the soul is thought to remain in the body until the last breath of life, then euthanasia can never be justified: Even the suffering and dying body must be revered as the house of the soul. Finally, because humans are morally distinguished by the possession of a soul, abortion is condemned at whatever point the fetus is believed to acquire a soul. It is interesting to note that the Catholic Church has not always held that fetal ensoulment occurs at the moment of conception: Saint Thomas Aquinas, for instance, argued as an Aristotelian that the fetus did not have a soul until it assumed human form, which he thought occurred after three months' gestation for the male fetus and six months' for the female.

In contrast with the pre-Darwinian dichotomies between human and nature, spiritual and material, sacred and profane, post-Darwinian conceptions of human nature posit an evolutionary continuity between human and nonhuman animals. This continuity is sometimes used as a basis for moral challenges to the human exploitation and domination of animals, especially animals that are close to human beings in evolutionary terms. It is precisely those nonhuman animals most like humans, however, that are most useful for many purposes, such as medical experiments and organ transplants; in consequence, some philosophers have sought to undercut moral challenges to the human exploitation of nonhuman animals by arguing that beings lower on the evolutionary scale may be sacrificed for the good of higher species. Opposing this position is a growing minority in the bioethics community that argues that such a position is an example of unwarranted human chauvinism or speciesism, a term invoked to suggest parallels with racism and sexism.

Although post-Darwinian assumptions of an evolutionary continuity between humans and nonanimals may be used to challenge the view that animals are simply a resource for human use, they have also been used to justify radical interventions in human life processes. If it is legitimate to experiment on nonhuman animals, for instance, it may be equally legitimate to experiment on human beings. If Homo sapiens is the accidental outcome of natural selection, if there is no inherent purpose for which we are created, then there is no a priori reason to assume that further modifications in human biological processes should not be made via reproductive technologies or even genetic engineering. Since the human nervous system is a defining component of human life, the fetus at an early stage of brain development is likely to have a different moral status than it does once the brain has developed. Certainly, the post-Darwinian conception of human nature would generally assume that brain dead means dead.

These conclusions reflect the absence of the concept of a soul in post-Darwinian views of human nature, since it was the soul that, in earlier conceptions, provided the philosophical grounding for human dignity. Unless an adequate substitute for the concept of the soul can be found, post-Darwinian conceptions of human nature may permit the drastic manipulation of human beings. Behavior regarded as undesirable may be treated either as a biological abnormality or as a failure of social conditioning. Biological determinists may regard alcoholism, addictive gambling, violent criminal behavior, schizophrenia, depression, and even homosexuality as candidates for treatment with a variety of biological techniques: psychosurgery, shock therapy, hormonal therapy, psychopharmacological interventions, and perhaps, in the future, even genetic manipulation. Behaviorists, of course, emphasize the use of various conditioning techniques to modify human behavior, raising the prospect of a Clockwork Orange world. Skinner, in fact, wrote a utopian novel, Walden Two (1948), in which behavioral managers conditioned people from birth to make choices in accord with the goals and institutions of that society. Both biological and behavioral interventions often work toward the same goal—direct control of human behavior.

But who will control the controllers, and how far will such control be allowed to extend? There are already biological determinists who advocate the use of genetic manipulation to raise IQ or to alter certain undesirable tendencies in the human species, perhaps to create a Superman. Others would clone the embryo and store it for future use, perhaps in case of some failure of the original stock. Brave New World may be just around the corner unless we can reclaim the concept of human dignity. Social and historical conceptions of human nature offer a secular basis for doing so.

Although people who accept a social and historical conception of human nature may still utilize some concept of naturalness in describing various human activities, such as conceiving or giving birth, they recognize that what is taken to be natural or unnatural changes historically and culturally, so that ethical decisions cannot be grounded in some unchangeable concept of human nature. However, this does not prevent us from ethically evaluating various attempts to manipulate and control human nature. Indeed, those who accept social and historical conceptions of human nature are likely to urge caution in the use of biological interventions and conditioning techniques for the purposes of altering human behavior. They will be suspicious of all treatment and research modalities that fail to respect human agency, reflective intelligence, and decision-making capabilities, since it is precisely these transhistorical capacities that make possible the continuous transformation of our historical natures. In short, social and historical conceptions of human nature will tend to reaffirm the concept of human dignity. In the sphere of medicine, for instance, they are likely to insist on the dignity of medical subjects and emphasize informed consent and coparticipation in physician-patient relationships.

The recognition that human beings individuate themselves within and through social processes may also have implications for the abortion controversy; at the very least, it suggests that women and fetuses cannot have the same moral status. Moreover, social and historical conceptions of human nature emphasize that consideration of bioethical problems must be sensitive to concrete social and political contexts; in a society with an expressed commitment to human equality, for example, questions like procreative technology or contract parenting must be evaluated with special reference to their implications for people of different classes, genders, abilities, races, and ethnicities. Finally, social and historical conceptions regard human beings as transhistorically creative, productive, social, and capable of reforming their habits through reflective intelligence; and people who accept these conceptions are likely to valorize those capacities and seek to develop social institutions—including healthcare, psychiatric, and research institutions—through which they would be enhanced.

The open-ended nature of these last implications serves as a reminder that ethical conclusions are not strictly entailed by any general conception of human nature, especially by social and historical conceptions. In addressing particular bioethical problems, therefore, the values implicit in these conceptions must be supplemented by explicitly ethical criteria, such as historically specific understandings of justice, freedom, and human well-being.

alison m. jaggar

karsten j. struhl (1995)

bibliography revised

SEE ALSO: Behaviorism; Enhancement Uses of Medical Technology; Eugenics; Freedom and Free Will; Genetics and Human Behavior; Genetics and Human Self-Understanding; Human Dignity; Natural Law; Nanotechnology; Transhumanism and Posthumanism

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