hypothesis about human nature

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Human Nature

Talk of human nature is a common feature of moral and political discourse among people on the street and among philosophers, political scientists and sociologists. This is largely due to the widespread assumption that true descriptive or explanatory claims making use of the concept of human nature have, or would have, considerable normative significance. Some think that human nature excludes the possibility of certain forms of social organisation—for example, that it excludes any broadly egalitarian society. Others make the stronger claim that a true normative ethical theory has to be built on prior knowledge of human nature. Still others believe that there are specific moral prohibitions concerning the alteration of, or interference in, the set of properties that make up human nature. Finally, there are those who argue that the normative significance derives from the fact that merely deploying the concept is typically, or even necessarily, pernicious.

Alongside such varying and frequently conflicting normative uses of the expression “human nature”, there are serious disagreements concerning the concept’s content and explanatory significance—the starkest being whether the expression “human nature” refers to anything at all. Some reasons given for saying there is no human nature are anthropological, grounded in views concerning the relationship between natural and cultural features of human life. Other reasons given are biological, deriving from the character of the human species as, like other species, an essentially historical product of evolution. Whether these reasons justify the claim that there is no human nature depends, at least in part, on what it is exactly that the expression is supposed to be picking out. Many contemporary proposals differ significantly in their answers to this question.

Understanding the debates around the philosophical use of the expression “human nature” requires clarity on the reasons both for (1) adopting specific adequacy conditions for the term’s use and for (2) accepting particular substantial claims made within the framework thus adopted. One obstacle to such clarity is historical: we have inherited from the beginnings of Western philosophy, via its Medieval reception, the idea that talk of human nature brings into play a number of different, but related claims. One such set of claims derives from different meanings of the Greek equivalents of the term “nature”. This bundle of claims, which can be labelled the traditional package , is a set of adequacy conditions for any substantial claim that uses the expression “human nature”. The beginnings of Western philosophy have also handed down to us a number of such substantial claims . Examples are that humans are “rational animals” or “political animals”. We can call these claims the traditional slogans . The traditional package is a set of specifications of how claims along the lines of the traditional slogans are to be understood, i.e., what it means to claim that it is “human nature” to be, for example, a rational animal.

Various developments in Western thought have cast doubt both on the coherence of the traditional package and on the possibility that the adequacy conditions for the individual claims can be fulfilled. Foremost among these developments are the Enlightenment rejection of teleological metaphysics, the Historicist emphasis on the significance of culture for understanding human action and the Darwinian introduction of history into biological kinds. This entry aims to help clarify the adequacy conditions for claims about human nature, the satisfiability of such conditions and the reasons why the truth of claims with the relevant conditions might seem important. It proceeds in five steps. Section 1 unpacks the traditional package, paying particular attention to the importance of Aristotelian themes and to the distinction between the scientific and participant perspectives from which human nature claims can be raised. Section 2 explains why evolutionary biology raises serious problems both for the coherence of this package and for the truth of its individual component claims. Sections 3 and 4 then focus on attempts to secure scientific conceptions of human nature in the face of the challenge from evolutionary biology. The entry concludes with a discussion of accounts of human nature developed from a participant perspective, in particular accounts that, in spite of the evolutionary challenge, are taken to have normative consequences.

1.1 “Humans”

1.2 unpacking the traditional package, 1.3 essentialisms, 1.4 on the status of the traditional slogan, 2.1 the nature of the species taxon, 2.2 the nature of species specimens as species specimens, 2.3 responding to the evolutionary verdict on classificatory essences, 3.1 privileging properties, 3.2 statistical normality or robust causality, 4.1 genetically based psychological adaptations, 4.2 abandoning intrinsicality, 4.3 secondary altriciality as a game-changer, 5.1. human nature from a participant perspective, 5.2.1. sidestepping the darwinian challenge, 5.2.2. human flourishing, 5.3. reason as the unique structural property, other internet resources, related entries, 1. “humans”, slogans and the traditional package.

Before we begin unpacking, it should be noted that the adjective “human” is polysemous, a fact that often goes unnoticed in discussions of human nature, but makes a big difference to both the methodological tractability and truth of claims that employ the expression. The natural assumption may appear to be that we are talking about specimens of the biological species Homo sapiens , that is, organisms belonging to the taxon that split from the rest of the hominin lineage an estimated 150,000 years ago. However, certain claims seem to be best understood as at least potentially referring to organisms belonging to various older species within the subtribe Homo , with whom specimens of Homo sapiens share properties that have often been deemed significant (Sterelny 2018: 114).

On the other hand, the “nature” that is of interest often appears to be that of organisms belonging to a more restricted group. There may have been a significant time lag between the speciation of anatomically modern humans ( Homo sapiens ) and the evolution of behaviourally modern humans, i.e., human populations whose life forms involved symbol use, complex tool making, coordinated hunting and increased geographic range. Behavioural modernity’s development is often believed only to have been completed by 50,000 years ago. If, as is sometimes claimed, behavioural modernity requires psychological capacities for planning, abstract thought, innovativeness and symbolism (McBrearty & Brooks 2000: 492) and if these were not yet widely or sufficiently present for several tens of thousands of years after speciation, then it may well be behaviourally, rather than anatomically modern humans whose “nature” is of interest to many theories. Perhaps the restriction might be drawn even tighter to include only contemporary humans, that is, those specimens of the species who, since the introduction of agriculture around 12,000 years ago, evolved the skills and capacities necessary for life in large sedentary, impersonal and hierarchical groups (Kappeler, Fichtel, & van Schaik 2019: 68).

It was, after all, a Greek living less than two and a half millennia ago within such a sedentary, hierarchically organised population structure, who could have had no conception of the prehistory of the beings he called anthrôpoi , whose thoughts on their “nature” have been decisive for the history of philosophical reflection on the subject. It seems highly likely that, without the influence of Aristotle, discussions of “human nature” would not be structured as they are until today.

We can usefully distinguish four types of claim that have been traditionally made using the expression “human nature”. As a result of a particular feature of Aristotle’s philosophy, to which we will come in a moment, these four claims are associated with five different uses of the expression. Uses of the first type seem to have their origin in Plato; uses of the second, third and fourth type are Aristotelian; and, although uses of the fifth type have historically been associated with Aristotle, this association seems to derive from a misreading in the context of the religiously motivated Mediaeval reception of his philosophy.

A first , thin, contrastive use of the expression “human nature” is provided by the application of a thin, generic concept of nature to humans. In this minimal variant, nature is understood in purely contrastive or negative terms. Phusis is contrasted in Plato and Aristotle with technē , where the latter is the product of intention and a corresponding intervention of agency. If the entire cosmos is taken to be the product of divine agency, then, as Plato argued (Nadaf 2005: 1ff.), conceptualisations of the cosmos as natural in this sense are mistaken. Absent divine agency, the types of agents whose intentions are relevant for the status of anything as natural are human agents. Applied to humans, then, this concept of nature picks out human features that are not the results of human intentional action. Thus understood, human nature is the set of human features or processes that remain after subtraction of those picked out by concepts of the non-natural, concepts such as “culture”, “nurture”, or “socialisation”.

A second component in the package supplies the thin concept with substantial content that confers on it explanatory power. According to Aristotle, natural entities are those that contain in themselves the principle of their own production or development, in the way that acorns contain a blueprint for their own realisation as oak trees ( Physics 192b; Metaphysics 1014b). The “nature” of natural entities thus conceptualised is a subset of the features that make up their nature in the first sense. The human specification of this explanatory concept of nature aims to pick out human features that similarly function as blueprints for something like a fully realised form. According to Aristotle, for all animals that blueprint is “the soul”, that is, the integrated functional capacities that characterise the fully developed entity. The blueprint is realised when matter, i.e., the body, has attained the level of organisation required to instantiate the animal’s living functions (Charles 2000: 320ff.; Lennox 2009: 356).

A terminological complication is introduced here by the fact that the fully developed form of an entity is itself also frequently designated as its “nature” (Aristotle, Physics 193b; Politics 1252b). In Aristotle’s teleological metaphysics, this is the entity’s end, “that for the sake of which a thing is” ( Metaphysics 1050a; Charles 2000: 259). Thus, a human’s “nature”, like that of any other being, may be either the features in virtue of which it is disposed to develop to a certain mature form or, thirdly , the form to which it is disposed to develop.

Importantly, the particularly prominent focus on the idea of a fully developed form in Aristotle’s discussions of humans derives from its dual role. It is not only the form to the realisation of which human neonates are disposed; it is also the form that mature members of the species ought to realise ( Politics 1253a). This normative specification is the fourth component of the traditional package. The second, third and fourth uses of “nature” are all in the original package firmly anchored in a teleological metaphysics. One question for systematic claims about human nature is whether any of these components remain plausible if we reject a teleology firmly anchored in theology (Sedley 2010: 5ff.).

A fifth and last component of the package that has traditionally been taken to have been handed down from antiquity is classificatory. Here, the property or set of properties named by the expression “human nature” is that property or property set in virtue of the possession of which particular organisms belong to a particular biological taxon: what we now identify as the species taxon Homo sapiens . This is human nature typologically understood.

This, then, is the traditional package:

The sort of properties that have traditionally been taken to support the classificatory practices relevant to TP5 are intrinsic to the individual organisms in question. Moreover, they have been taken to be able to fulfil this role in virtue of being necessary and sufficient for the organism’s membership of the species, i.e., “essential” in one meaning of the term. This view of species membership, and the associated view of species themselves, has been influentially dubbed “typological thinking” (Mayr 1959 [1976: 27f.]; cf. Mayr 1982: 260) and “essentialism” (Hull 1965: 314ff.; cf. Mayr 1968 [1976: 428f.]). The former characterisation involves an epistemological focus on the classificatory procedure, the latter a metaphysical focus on the properties thus singled out. Ernst Mayr claimed that the classificatory approach originates in Plato’s theory of forms, and, as a result, involves the further assumption that the properties are unchanging. According to David Hull, its root cause is the attempt to fit the ontology of species taxa to an Aristotelian theory of definition.

The theory of definition developed in Aristotle’s logical works assigns entities to a genus and distinguishes them from other members of the genus, i.e., from other “species”, by their differentiae ( Topics 103b). The procedure is descended from the “method of division” of Plato, who provides a crude example as applied to humans, when he has the Eleatic Stranger in the Statesman characterise them as featherless bipeds (266e). Hull and many scholars in his wake (Dupré 2001: 102f.) have claimed that this simple schema for picking out essential conditions for species membership had a seriously deleterious effect on biological taxonomy until Darwin (cf. Winsor 2006).

However, there is now widespread agreement that Aristotle was no taxonomic essentialist (Balme 1980: 5ff.; Mayr 1982: 150ff.; Balme 1987: 72ff.; Ereshefsky 2001: 20f; Richards 2010: 21ff.; Wilkins 2018: 9ff.). First, the distinction between genus and differentiae was for Aristotle relative to the task at hand, so that a “species” picked out in this manner could then count as the genus for further differentiation. Second, the Latin term “species”, a translation of the Greek eidos , was a logical category with no privileged relationship to biological entities; a prime example in the Topics is the species justice, distinguished within the genus virtue (143a). Third, in a key methodological passage, Parts of Animals , I.2–3 (642b–644b), Aristotle explicitly rejects the method of “dichotomous division”, which assigns entities to a genus and then seeks a single differentia, as inappropriate to the individuation of animal kinds. Instead, he claims, a multiplicity of differentiae should be brought to bear. He emphasises this point in relation to humans (644a).

According to Pierre Pellegrin and David Balme, Aristotle did not seek to establish a taxonomic system in his biological works (Pellegrin 1982 [1986: 113ff.]; Balme 1987, 72). Rather, he simply accepted the everyday common sense partitioning of the animal world (Pellegrin 1982 [1986: 120]; Richards 2010: 24; but cf. Charles 2000: 343ff.). If this is correct, Aristotle didn’t even ask after the conditions for belonging to the species Homo sapiens . So he wasn’t proposing any particular answer, and specifically not the “essentialist” answer advanced by TP5. In as far as such an answer has been employed in biological taxonomy (cf. Winsor 2003), its roots appear to lie in Neoplatonic, Catholic misinterpretations of Aristotle (Richards 2010: 34ff.; Wilkins 2018: 22ff.). Be that as it may, the fifth use of “human nature” transported by tradition—to pick out essential conditions for an organism’s belonging to the species—is of eminent interest. The systematic concern behind Mayr and Hull’s historical claims is that accounts of the form of TP5 are incompatible with evolutionary theory. We shall look at this concern in section 2 of this entry.

Because the term “essentialism” recurs with different meanings in discussions of human nature and because some of the theoretical claims thus summarised are assumed to be Aristotelian in origin, it is worth spending a moment here to register what claims can be singled out by the expression. The first , purely classificatory conception just discussed should be distinguished from a second view that is also frequently labelled “essentialist” and which goes back to Locke’s concept of “real essence” (1689: III, iii, 15). According to essentialism thus understood, an essence is the intrinsic feature or features of an entity that fulfils or fulfil a dual role: firstly, of being that in virtue of which something belongs to a kind and, secondly, of explaining why things of that kind typically have a particular set of observable features. Thus conceived, “essence” has both a classificatory and an explanatory function and is the core of a highly influential, “essentialist” theory of natural kinds, developed in the wake of Kripke’s and Putnam’s theories of reference.

An account of human nature that is essentialist in this sense would take the nature of the human natural kind to be a set of microstructural properties that have two roles: first, they constitute an organism’s membership of the species Homo sapiens . Second, they are causally responsible for the organism manifesting morphological and behavioural properties typical of species members. Paradigms of entities with such natures or essences are chemical elements. An example is the element with the atomic number 79, the microstructural feature that accounts for surface properties of gold such as yellowness. Applied to organisms, it seems that the relevant explanatory relationship will be developmental, the microstructures providing something like a blueprint for the properties of the mature individual. Kripke assumed that some such blueprint is the “internal structure” responsible for the typical development of tigers as striped, carnivorous quadrupeds (Kripke 1972 [1980: 120f.]).

As the first, pseudo-Aristotelian version of essentialism illustrates, the classificatory and explanatory components of what we might call “Kripkean essentialism” can be taken apart. Thus, “human nature” can also be understood in exclusively explanatory terms, viz. as the set of microstructural properties responsible for typical human morphological and behavioural features. In such an account, the ability to pick out the relevant organisms is simply presupposed. As we shall see in section 4 of this entry, accounts of this kind have been popular in the contemporary debate. The subtraction of the classificatory function of the properties in these conceptions has generally seemed to warrant withholding from them the label “essentialist”. However, because some authors have still seen the term as applicable (Dupré 2001: 162), we might think of such accounts as constituting a third , weak or deflationary variant of essentialism.

Such purely explanatory accounts are descendants of the second use of “human nature” in the traditional package, the difference being that they don’t usually presuppose some notion of the fully developed human form. However, where some such presupposition is made, there are stronger grounds for talking of an “essentialist” account. Elliott Sober has argued that the key to essentialism is not classification in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions, but the postulation of some “privileged state”, to the realisation of which specimens of a species tend, as long as no extrinsic factors “interfere” (Sober 1980: 358ff.). Such a dispositional-teleological conception, dissociated from classificatory ambitions, would be a fourth form of essentialism. Sober rightly associates such an account with Aristotle, citing Aristotle’s claims in his zoological writings that interfering forces are responsible for deviations, i.e., morphological differences, both within and between species. A contemporary account of human nature with this structure will be discussed in section 4 .

A fifth and final form of essentialism is even more clearly Aristotelian. Here, an explicitly normative status is conferred on the set of properties to the development of which human organisms tend. For normative essentialism, “the human essence” or “human nature” is a normative standard for the evaluation of organisms belonging to the species. Where the first, third and fourth uses of the expression have tended to be made with critical intent (for defensive exceptions, see Charles 2000: 348ff.; Walsh 2006; Devitt 2008; Boulter 2012), this fifth use is more often a self-ascription (e.g., Nussbaum 1992). It is intended to emphasise metaethical claims of a specific type. According to such claims, an organism’s belonging to the human species entails or in some way involves the applicability to the organism of moral norms that ground in the value of the fully developed human form. According to one version of this thought, humans ought be, or ought to be enabled to be, rational because rationality is a key feature of the fully developed human form. Such normative-teleological accounts of human nature will be the focus of section 5.2 .

We can summarise the variants of essentialism and their relationship to the components of the traditional package as follows:

Section 2 and section 5 of this entry deal with the purely classificatory and the normative teleological conceptions of human nature respectively, and with the associated types of essentialism. Section 3 discusses attempts to downgrade TP5, moving from essential to merely characteristic properties. Section 4 focuses on accounts of an explanatory human nature, both on attempts to provide a modernized version of the teleological blueprint model ( §4.1 ) and on explanatory conceptions with deflationary intent relative to the claims of TP2 and TP3 ( §4.2 and §4.3 ).

The traditional package specifies a set of conditions some or all of which substantial claims about “human nature” are supposed to meet. Before we turn to the systematic arguments central to contemporary debates on whether such conditions can be met, it will be helpful to spend a moment considering one highly influential substantial claim. Aristotle’s writings prominently contain two such claims that have been handed down in slogan form. The first is that the human being (more accurately: “man”) is an animal that is in some important sense social (“zoon politikon”, History of Animals 487b; Politics 1253a; Nicomachean Ethics 1169b). According to the second, “he” is a rational animal ( Politics 1253a, where Aristotle doesn’t actually use the traditionally ascribed slogan, “zoon logon echon”).

Aristotle makes both claims in very different theoretical contexts, on the one hand, in his zoological writings and, on the other, in his ethical and political works. This fact, together with the fact that Aristotle’s philosophy of nature and his practical philosophy are united by a teleological metaphysics, may make it appear obvious that the slogans are biological claims that provide a foundation for normative claims in ethics and politics. The slogans do indeed function as foundations in the Politics and the Nicomachean Ethics respectively (on the latter, see section 5 of this entry). It is, however, unclear whether they are to be understood as biological claims. Let us focus on the slogan that has traditionally dominated discussions of human nature in Western philosophy, that humans are “rational animals”.

First, if Pellegrin and Balme are right that Aristotelian zoology is uninterested in classifying species, then ascribing the capacity for “rationality” cannot have the function of naming a biological trait that distinguishes humans from other animals. This is supported by two further sets of considerations. To begin with, Aristotle’s explicit assertion that a series of differentiae would be needed to “define” humans ( Parts of Animals 644a) is cashed out in the long list of features he takes to be their distinguishing marks, such as speech, having hair on both eyelids, blinking, having hands, upright posture, breasts in front, the largest and moistest brain, fleshy legs and buttocks (Lloyd 1983: 29ff.). Furthermore, there is in Aristotle no capacity for reason that is both exclusive to, and universal among anthropoi . One part or kind of reason, “practical intelligence” ( phronesis ), is, Aristotle claims, found in both humans and other animals, being merely superior in the former ( Parts of Animals , 687a). Now, there are other forms of reasoning of which this is not true, forms whose presence are sufficient for being human: humans are the only animals capable of deliberation ( History of Animals 488b) and reasoning ( to noein ), in as far as this extends to mathematics and first philosophy. Nevertheless, these forms of reasoning are unnecessary: slaves, who Aristotle includes among humans ( Politics 1255a), are said to have no deliberative faculty ( to bouleutikon ) at all ( Politics 1260a; cf. Richter 2011: 42ff.). Presumably, they will also be without the capacities necessary for first philosophy.

Second, these Aristotelian claims raise the question as to whether the ascription of rationality is even intended as an ascription to an individual in as far as she or he belongs to a biological kind. The answer might appear to be obviously affirmative. Aristotle uses the claim that a higher level of reason is characteristic of humans to teleologically explain other morphological features, in particular upright gait and the morphology of the hands ( Parts of Animals 686a, 687a). However, the kind of reason at issue here is practical intelligence, the kind humans and animals share, not the capacity for mathematics and metaphysics, which among animals is exercised exclusively by humans. In as far as humans are able to exercise this latter capacity in contemplation, Aristotle claims that they “partake of the divine” ( Parts of Animals 656a), a claim of which he makes extensive use when grounding his ethics in human rationality ( Nicomachean Ethics 1177b–1178b). When, in a passage to which James Lennox has drawn attention (Lennox 1999), Aristotle declares that the rational part of the soul cannot be the object of natural science ( Parts of Animals 645a), it seems to be the contemplative part of the soul that is thus excluded from biological investigation, precisely the feature that is named in the influential slogan. If it is the “something divine … present in” humans that is decisively distinctive of their kind, it seems unclear whether the relevant kind is biological.

It is not the aim of this entry to decide questions of Aristotle interpretation. What is important is that the relationship of the question of “human nature” to biology is, from the beginning of the concept’s career, not as unequivocal as is often assumed (e.g., Hull 1986: 7; Richards 2010: 217f.). This is particularly true of the slogan according to which humans are rational animals. In the history of philosophy, this slogan has frequently been detached from any attempt to provide criteria for biological classification or characterisation. When Aquinas picks up the slogan, he is concerned to emphasise that human nature involves a material, corporeal aspect. This aspect is, however, not thought of in biological terms. Humans are decisively “rational substances”, i.e., persons. As such they also belong to a kind whose members also number angels and God (three times) (Eberl 2004). Similarly, Kant is primarily, indeed almost exclusively, interested in human beings as examples of “rational nature”, “human nature” being only one way in which rational nature can be instantiated (Kant 1785, 64, 76, 85). For this reason, Kant generally talks of “rational beings”, rather than of “rational animals” (1785, 45, 95).

There is, then, a perspective on humans that is plausibly present in Aristotle, stronger in Aquinas and dominant in Kant and that involves seeing them as instances of a kind other than the “human kind”, i.e., seeing the human animal “as a rational being” (Kant 1785 [1996: 45]). According to this view, the “nature” of humans that is most worthy of philosophical interest is the one they possess not insofar as they are human, but insofar as they are rational. Where this is the relevant use of the concept of human nature, being a specimen of the biological species is unnecessary for possessing the corresponding property. Specimens of other species, as well as non-biological entities may also belong to the relevant kind. It is also insufficient, as not all humans will have the properties necessary for membership in that kind.

As both a biologist and ethicist, Aristotle is at once a detached scientist and a participant in forms of interpersonal and political interaction only available to contemporary humans living in large, sedentary subpopulations. It seems plausible that a participant perspective may have suggested a different take on what it is to be human, perhaps even a different take on the sense in which humans might be rational animals, to that of biological science. We will return to this difference in section 5 of the entry.

2. The Nature of the Evolutionary Unit Homo sapiens and its Specimens

Detailing the features in virtue of which an organism is a specimen of the species Homo sapiens is a purely biological task. Whether such specification is achievable and, if so how, is controversial. It is controversial for the same reasons for which it is controversial what conditions need to be met for an organism to be a specimen of any species. These reasons derive from the theory of evolution.

A first step to understanding these reasons involves noting a further ambiguity in the use of the expression “human nature”, this time an ambiguity specific to taxonomy. The term can be used to pick out a set of properties as an answer to two different questions. The first concerns the properties of some organism which make it the case that it belongs to the species Homo sapiens . The second concerns the properties in virtue of which a population or metapopulation is the species Homo sapiens . Correspondingly, “human nature” can pick out either the properties of organisms that constitute their partaking in the species Homo sapiens or the properties of some higher-level entity that constitute it as that species. Human nature might then either be the nature of the species or the nature of species specimens as specimens of the species.

It is evolution that confers on this distinction its particular form and importance. The variation among organismic traits, without which there would be no evolution, has its decisive effects at the level of populations. These are groups of organisms that in some way cohere at a time in spite of the variation of traits among the component organisms. It is population-level groupings, taxa, not organisms, that evolve and it is taxa, such as species, that provide the organisms that belong to them with genetic resources (Ghiselin 1987: 141). The species Homo sapiens appears to be a metapopulation that coheres at least in part because of the gene flow between its component organisms brought about by interbreeding (cf. Ereshefsky 1991: 96ff.). Hence, according to evolutionary theory, Homo sapiens is plausibly a higher-level entity—a unit of evolution—consisting of the lower-level entities that are individual human beings. The two questions phrased in terms of “human nature” thus concern the conditions for individuation of the population-level entity and the conditions under which organisms are components of that entity.

The theory of evolution transforms the way we should understand the relationship between human organisms and the species to which they belong. The taxonomic assumption of TP5 was that species are individuated by means of intrinsic properties that are individually instantiated by certain organisms. Instantiating those properties is taken to be necessary and sufficient for those organisms to belong to the species. Evolutionary theory makes it clear that species, as population-level entities, cannot be individuated by means of the properties of lower-level constituents, in our case, of individual human organisms (Sober 1980: 355).

The exclusion of this possibility grounds a decisive difference from the way natural kinds are standardly construed in the wake of Locke and Kripke. Recall that, in this Kripkean construal, lumps of matter are instances of chemical kinds because of their satisfaction of intrinsic necessary and sufficient conditions, viz. their atoms possessing a certain number of protons. The same conditions also individuate the chemical kinds themselves. Chemical kinds are thus spatiotemporally unrestricted sets. This means that there are no metaphysical barriers to the chance generation of members of the kind, independently of whether the kind is instantiated at any contiguous time or place. Nitrogen could come to exist by metaphysical happenstance, should an element with the atomic number 14 somehow come into being, even in a world in which up to that point no nitrogen has existed (Hull 1978: 349; 1984: 22).

In contrast, a species can only exist at time \(t_n\) if either it or a parent species existed at \(t_{n-1}\) and there was some relationship of spatial contiguity between component individuals of the species at \(t_n\) and the individuals belonging to either the same species or the parent species at \(t_{n-1}\). This is because of the essential role of the causal relationship of heredity. Heredity generates both the coherence across a population requisite for the existence of a species and the variability of predominant traits within the population, without which a species would not evolve.

For this reason, the species Homo sapiens , like every other species taxon, must meet a historical or genealogical condition. (For pluralistic objections to even this condition, see Kitcher 1984: 320ff.; Dupré 1993: 49f.) This condition is best expressed as a segment of a population-level phylogenetic tree, where such trees represent ancestor-descendent series (Hull 1978: 349; de Queiroz 1999: 50ff.; 2005). Species, as the point is often put, are historical entities, rather than kinds or classes (Hull 1978: 338ff.; 1984: 19). The fact that species are not only temporally, but also spatially restricted has also led to the stronger claim that they are individuals (Ghiselin 1974; 1997: 14ff.; Hull 1978: 338). If this is correct, then organisms are not members, but parts of species taxa. Independently of whether this claim is true for all biological species, Homo sapiens is a good candidate for a species that belongs to the category individual . This is because the species is characterised not only by spatiotemporal continuity, but also by causal processes that account for the coherence between its component parts. These processes plausibly include not only interbreeding, but also conspecific recognition and particular forms of communication (Richards 2010: 158ff., 218).

Importantly, the genealogical condition is only a necessary condition, as genealogy unites all the segments of one lineage. The segment of the phylogenetic tree that represents some species taxon begins with a node that represents a lineage-splitting or speciation event. Determining that node requires attention to general speciation theory, which has proposed various competing criteria (Dupré 1993: 48f.; Okasha 2002: 201; Coyne & Orr 2004). In the case of Homo sapiens , it requires attention to the specifics of the human case, which are also controversial (see Crow 2003; Cela-Conde & Ayala 2017: 11ff.). The end point of the segment is marked either by some further speciation event or, as may seem likely in the case of Homo sapiens , by the destruction of the metapopulation. Only when the temporal boundaries of the segment have become determinate would it be possible to adduce sufficient conditions for the existence of such a historical entity. Hence, if “human nature” is understood to pick out the necessary and sufficient conditions that individuate the species taxon Homo sapiens , its content is not only controversial, but epistemically unavailable to us.

If we take such a view of the individuating conditions for the species Homo sapiens , what are the consequences for the question of which organisms belong to the species? It might appear that it leaves open the possibility that speciation has resulted in some intrinsic property or set of properties establishing the cohesion specific to the taxon and that such properties count as necessary and sufficient for belonging to it (cf. Devitt 2008: 17ff.). This appearance would be deceptive. To begin with, no intrinsic property can be necessary because of the sheer empirical improbability that all species specimens grouped together by the relevant lineage segment instantiate any such candidate property. For example, there are individuals who are missing legs, inner organs or the capacity for language, but who remain biologically human (Hull 1986: 5). Evolutionary theory clarifies why this is so: variability, secured by mechanisms such as mutation and recombination, is the key to evolution, so that, should some qualitative property happen to be universal among all extant species specimens immediately after the completion of speciation, that is no guarantee that it will continue to be so throughout the lifespan of the taxon (Hull 1984: 35; Ereshefsky 2008: 101). The common thought that there must be at least some genetic property common to all human organisms is also false (R. Wilson 1999a: 190; Sterelny & Griffiths 1999: 7; Okasha 2002: 196f.): phenotypical properties that are shared in a population are frequently co-instantiated as a result of the complex interaction of differing gene-regulatory networks. Conversely, the same network can under different circumstances lead to differing phenotypical consequences (Walsh 2006: 437ff.). Even if it should turn out that every human organism instantiated some property, this would be a contingent, rather than a necessary fact (Sober 1980: 354; Hull 1986: 3).

Moreover, the chances of any such universal property also being sufficient are vanishingly small, as the sharing of properties by specimens of other species can result from various mechanisms, in particular from the inheritance of common genes in related species and from parallel evolution. This doesn’t entail that there may be no intrinsic properties that are sufficient belonging to the species. There are fairly good candidates for such properties, if we compare humans with other terrestrial organisms. Language use and a self-understanding as moral agents come to mind. However, whether non-terrestrial entities might possess such properties is an open question. And decisively, they are obviously hopeless as necessary conditions (cf. Samuels 2012: 9).

This leaves only the possibility that the conditions for belonging to the species are, like the individuating conditions for the species taxon, relational. Lineage-based individuation of a taxon depends on its component organisms being spatially and temporally situated in such a way that the causal processes necessary for the inheritance of traits can take place. In the human case, the key processes are those of sexual reproduction. Therefore, being an organism that belongs to the species Homo sapiens is a matter of being connected reproductively to organisms situated unequivocally on the relevant lineage segment. In other words, the key necessary condition is having been sexually reproduced by specimens of the species (Kronfeldner 2018: 100). Hull suggests that the causal condition may be disjunctive, as it could also be fulfilled by a synthetic entity created by scientists that produces offspring with humans who have been generated in the standard manner (Hull 1978: 349). Provided that the species is not in the throes of speciation, such direct descent or integration into the reproductive community, i.e., participation in the “complex network […] of mating and reproduction” (Hull 1986: 4), will also be sufficient.

The lack of a “human essence” in the sense of intrinsic necessary and sufficient conditions for belonging to the species taxon Homo sapiens , has led a number of philosophers to deny that there is any such thing as human nature (Hull 1984: 19; 1986; Ghiselin 1997: 1; de Sousa 2000). As this negative claim concerns properties intrinsic both to relevant organisms and to the taxon, it is equally directed at the “nature” of the organisms as species specimens and at that of the species taxon itself. An alternative consists in retracting the condition that a classificatory essence must be intrinsic, a move which allows talk of a historical or relational essence and a corresponding relational conception of taxonomic human nature (Okasha 2002: 202).

Which of these ways of responding to the challenge from evolutionary theory appears best is likely to depend on how one takes it that the classificatory issues relate to the other matters at stake in the original human nature package. These concern the explanatory and normative questions raised by TP1–TP4. We turn to these in the following three sections of this article.

An exclusively genealogical conception of human nature is clearly not well placed to fulfil an explanatory role comparable to that envisaged in the traditional package. What might have an explanatory function are the properties of the entities from which the taxon or its specimens are descended. Human nature, genealogically understood, might serve as the conduit for explanations in terms of such properties, but will not itself explain anything. After all, integration in a network of sexual reproduction will be partly definitive of the specimens of all sexual species, whilst what is to be explained will vary enormously across taxa.

This lack of fit between classificatory and explanatory roles confronts us with a number of further theoretical possibilities. For example, one might see this incompatibility as strengthening the worries of eliminativists such as Ghiselin and Hull: even if the subtraction of intrinsicality were not on its own sufficient to justify abandoning talk of human nature, its conjunction with a lack of explanatory power, one might think, certainly is (Dupré 2003: 109f.; Lewens 2012: 473). Or one might argue that it is the classificatory ambitions associated with talk of human nature that should be abandoned. Once this is done, one might hope that certain sets of intrinsic properties can be distinguished that figure decisively in explanations and that can still justifiably be labelled “human nature” (Roughley 2011: 15; Godfrey-Smith 2014: 140).

Taking this second line in turn raises two questions: first, in what sense are the properties thus picked out specifically “human”, if they are neither universal among, nor unique to species specimens? Second, in what sense are the properties “natural”? Naturalness as independence from the effects of human intentional action is a key feature of the original package (TP1). Whether some such conception can be coherently applied to humans is a challenge for any non-classificatory account.

3. Characteristic Human Properties

The answer given by TP2 to the first question was in terms of the fully developed human form, where “form” does not refer solely to observable physical or behavioural characteristics, but also includes psychological features. This answer entails two claims: first, that there is one single such “form”, i.e., property or set of properties, that figures in explanations that range across individual human organisms. It also entails that there is a point in human development that counts as “full”, that is, as development’s goal or “telos”. These claims go hand in hand with the assumption that there is a distinction to be drawn between normal and abnormal adult specimens of the species. There is, common sense tells us, a sense in which normal adult humans have two legs, two eyes, one heart and two kidneys at specific locations in the body; they also have various dispositions, for instance, to feel pain and to feel emotions, and a set of capacities, such as for perception and for reasoning. And these, so it seems, may be missing, or under- or overdeveloped in abnormal specimens.

Sober has influentially described accounts that work with such teleological assumptions as adhering to an Aristotelian “Natural State Model” (Sober 1980: 353ff.). Such accounts work with a distinction that has no place in evolutionary biology, according to which variation of properties across populations is the key to evolution. Hence, no particular end states of organisms are privileged as “natural” or “normal” (Hull 1986: 7ff.). So any account that privileges particular morphological, behavioural or psychological human features has to provide good reasons that are both non-evolutionary and yet compatible with the evolutionary account of species. Because of the way that the notion of the normal is frequently employed to exclude and oppress, those reasons should be particularly good (Silvers 1998; Dupré 2003: 119ff.; Richter 2011: 43ff.; Kronfeldner 2018: 15ff.).

The kinds of reasons that may be advanced could either be internal to, or independent of the biological sciences. If the former, then various theoretical options may seem viable. The first grounds in the claim that, although species are not natural kinds and are thus unsuited to figuring in laws of nature (Hull 1987: 171), they do support descriptions with a significant degree of generality, some of which may be important (Hull 1984: 19). A theory of human nature developed on this basis should explain the kind of importance on the basis of which particular properties are emphasised. The second theoretical option is pluralism about the metaphysics of species: in spite of the fairly broad consensus that species are defined as units of evolution, the pluralist can deny the primacy of evolutionary dynamics, arguing that other epistemic aims allow the ecologist, the systematist or the ethologist to work with an equally legitimate concept of species that is not, or not exclusively genealogical (cf. Hull 1984: 36; Kitcher 1986: 320ff.; Hull 1987: 178–81; Dupré 1993: 43f.). The third option involves a relaxation of the concept of natural kinds, such that it no longer entails the instantiation of intrinsic, necessary, sufficient and spatiotemporally unrestricted properties, but is nevertheless able to support causal explanations. Such accounts aim to reunite taxonomic and explanatory criteria, thus allowing species taxa to count as natural kinds after all (Boyd 1999a; R. Wilson, Barker, & Brigandt 2007: 196ff.). Where, finally , the reasons advanced for privileging certain properties are independent of biology, these tend to concern features of humans’—“our”—self-understanding as participants in, rather than observers of, a particular form of life. These are likely to be connected to normative considerations. Here again, it seems that a special explanation will be required for why these privileged properties should be grouped under the rubric “human nature”.

The accounts to be described in the next subsection (3.2) of this entry are examples of the first strategy. Section 4 includes discussion of the relaxed natural kinds strategy. Section 5 focuses on accounts of human nature developed from a participant perspective and also notes the support that the pluralist metaphysical strategy might be taken to provide.

Begin, then, with the idea that to provide an account of “human nature” is to circumscribe a set of generalisations concerning humans. An approach of this sort sees the properties thus itemised as specifically “human” in as far as they are common among species specimens. So the privilege accorded to these properties is purely statistical and “normal” means statistically normal. Note that taking the set of statistically normal properties of humans as a non-teleological replacement for the fully developed human form retains from the original package the possibility of labelling as “human nature” either those properties themselves (TP3) or their developmental cause (TP2). Either approach avoids the classificatory worries dealt with in section 2 : it presupposes that those organisms whose properties are relevant are already distinguished as such specimens. What is to be explained is, then, the ways humans generally, though not universally, are. And among these ways are ways they may share with most specimens of some other species, in particular those that belong to the same order (primates) and the same class (mammals).

One should be clear what follows from this interpretation of “human”. The organisms among whom statistical frequency is sought range over those generated after speciation around 150,000 years ago to those that will exist immediately prior to the species’ extinction. On the one hand, because of the variability intrinsic to species, we are in the dark as to the properties that may or may not characterise those organisms that will turn out to be the last of the taxon. On the other hand, the time lag of around 100,000 years between the first anatomically modern humans and the general onset of behavioural modernity around the beginning of the Upper Palaeolithic means that there are likely to be many widespread psychological properties of contemporary humans that were not possessed by the majority of the species’ specimens during two thirds of the species’ history. This is true even if the practices seen as the signatures of behavioural modernity (see §1.1 ) developed sporadically, disappeared and reappeared at far removed points of time and space over tens of thousands of years before 50,000 ka (McBrearty & Brooks 2000; Sterelny 2011).

According to several authors (Machery 2008; 2018; Samuels 2012; Ramsey 2013), the expression “human nature” should be used to group properties that are the focus of much current behavioural, psychological and social science. However, as the cognitive and psychological sciences are generally interested in present-day humans, there is a mismatch between scientific focus and a grouping criterion that takes in all the properties generally or typically instantiated by specimens of the entire taxon. For this reason, the expression “human nature” is likely to refer to properties of an even more temporally restricted set of organisms belonging to the species. That restriction can be thought of in indexical terms, i.e., as a restriction to contemporary humans. However, some authors claim explicitly that their accounts entail that human nature can change (Ramsey 2013: 992; Machery 2018: 20). Human nature would then be the object of temporally indexed investigations, as is, for example, the weight of individual humans in everyday contexts. (Without temporal specification, there is no determinate answer to a question such as “How much did David Hume weigh?”) An example of Machery’s is dark skin colour. This characteristic, he claims, ceased to be a feature of human nature thus understood 7,000 years ago, if that was when skin pigmentation became polymorphic. The example indicates that the temporal range may be extremely narrow from an evolutionary point of view.

Such accounts are both compatible with evolutionary theory and coherent. However, in as far as they are mere summary or list conceptions, it is unclear what their epistemic value might be. They will tend to accord with everyday common sense, for which “human nature” may in a fairly low-key sense simply be the properties that (contemporary) humans generally tend to manifest (Roughley 2011: 16). They will also conform to one level of the expression’s use in Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), which, in an attempt to provide a human “mental geography” (1748 [1970: 13]), lists a whole series of features, such as prejudice (1739–40, I,iii,13), selfishness (III,ii,5), a tendency to temporal discounting (III,ii,7) and an addiction to general rules (III,ii,9).

Accounts of this kind have been seen as similar in content to field guides for other animals (Machery 2008: 323; Godfrey-Smith 2014: 139). As Hull points out, within a restricted ecological context and a short period of evolutionary time, the ascription of readily observable morphological or behavioural characteristics to species specimens is a straightforward and unproblematic enterprise (Hull 1987: 175). However, the analogy is fairly unhelpful, as the primary function of assertions in field guides is to provide a heuristics for amateur classification. In contrast, a list conception of the statistically normal properties of contemporary humans presupposes identification of the organisms in question as humans. Moreover, such accounts certainly do not entail easy epistemic access to the properties in question, which may only be experimentally discovered. Nevertheless, there remains something correct about the analogy, as such accounts are a collection of assertions linked only by the fact that they are about the same group of organisms (Sterelny 2018: 123).

More sophisticated nature documentaries may summarise causal features of the lives of animals belonging to specific species. An analogous conception of human nature has also been proposed, according to which human nature is a set of pervasive and robust causal nexuses amongst humans. The list that picks out this set would specify causal connections between antecedent properties, such as having been exposed to benzene or subject to abuse as a child, and consequent properties, such as developing cancer or being aggressive towards one’s own children (Ramsey 2013: 988ff.). Human nature thus understood would have an explanatory component, a component internal to each item on the list. Human nature itself would, however, not be explanatory, but rather the label for a list of highly diverse causal connections.

An alternative way to integrate an explanatory component in a statistical normality account involves picking out that set of statistically common properties that have a purely evolutionary explanation (Machery 2008; 2018). This reinterpretation of the concept of naturalness that featured in the original package (TP1) involves a contrast with social learning. Processes grouped together under this latter description are taken to be alternative explanations to those provided by evolution. However, learning plays a central role, not only in the development of individual humans, but also in the iterated interaction of entire populations with environments structured and restructured through such interaction (Stotz 2010: 488ff.; Sterelny 2012: 23ff.). Hence, the proposal raises serious epistemic questions as to how the distinction is precisely to be drawn and operationalised. (For discussion, see Prinz 2012; Lewens 2012: 464ff.; Ramsey 2013: 985; Machery 2018: 15ff.; Sterelny 2018: 116; Kronfeldner 2018: 147ff.).

4. Explanatory Human Properties

The replacement of the concept of a fully developed form with a statistical notion yields a deflationary account of human nature with, at most, restricted explanatory import. The correlative, explanatory notion in the original package, that of the fully developed form’s blueprint (TP2), has to some authors seemed worth reframing in terms made possible by advances in modern biology, particularly in genetics.

Clearly, there must be explanations of why humans generally walk on two legs, speak and plan many of their actions in advance. Genealogical, or what have been called “ultimate” (Mayr) or “historical” (Kitcher) explanations can advert to the accumulation of coherence among entrenched, stable properties along a lineage. These may well have resulted from selection pressures shared by the relevant organisms (cf. Wimsatt 2003; Lewens 2009). The fact that there are exceptions to any generalisations concerning contemporary humans does not entail that there is no need for explanations of such exception-allowing generalisations. Plausibly, these general, though not universal truths will have “structural explanations”, that is, explanations in terms of underlying structures or mechanisms (Kitcher 1986: 320; Devitt 2008: 353). These structures, so seems, might to a significant degree be inscribed in humans’ DNA.

The precise details of rapidly developing empirical science will improve our understanding of the extent to which there is a determinate relationship between contemporary humans’ genome and their physical, psychological and behavioural properties. There is, however, little plausibility that the blueprint metaphor might be applicable to the way DNA is transcribed, translated and interacts with its cellular environment. Such interaction is itself subject to influence by the organism’s external environment, including its social environment (Dupré 2001: 29ff.; 2003: 111ff.; Griffiths 2011: 326; Prinz 2012: 17ff.; Griffiths & Tabery 2013: 71ff.; Griffiths & Stotz 2013: 98ff., 143ff.). For example, the feature of contemporary human life for which there must according to Aristotle be some kind of blueprint, viz. rational agency, is, as Sterelny has argued, so strongly dependent on social scaffolding that any claim to the effect that human rationality is somehow genetically programmed ignores the causal contributions of manifestly indispensable environmental factors (Sterelny 2018: 120).

Nevertheless, humans do generally develop a specific set of physiological features, such as two lungs, one stomach, one pancreas and two eyes. Moreover, having such a bodily architecture is, according to the evidence from genetics, to a significant extent the result of developmental programmes that ground in gene regulatory networks (GRNs). These are stretches of non-coding DNA that regulate gene transcription. GRNs are modular, more or less strongly entrenched structures. The most highly conserved of these tend to be the phylogenetically most archaic (Carroll 2000; Walsh 2006: 436ff.; Willmore 2012: 227ff.). The GRNs responsible for basic physiological features may be taken, in a fairly innocuous sense, to belong to an evolved human nature.

Importantly, purely morphological features have generally not been the explananda of accounts that have gone under the rubric “human nature”. What has frequently motivated explanatory accounts thus labelled is the search for underlying structures responsible for generally shared psychological features. “Evolutionary Psychologists” have built a research programme around the claim that humans share a psychological architecture that parallels that of their physiology. This, they believe, consists of a structured set of psychological “organs” or modules (Tooby & Cosmides 1990: 29f.; 1992: 38, 113). This architecture is, they claim, in turn the product of developmental programmes inscribed in humans’ DNA (1992: 45). Such generally distributed developmental programmes they label “human nature” (1990: 23).

This conception raises the question of how analogous the characteristic physical and psychological “architectures” are. For one thing, the physical properties that tend to appear in such lists are far more coarse-grained than the candidates for shared psychological properties (D. Wilson 1994: 224ff.): the claim is not just that humans tend to have perceptual, desiderative, doxastic and emotional capacities, but that the mental states that realise these capacities tend to have contents of specific types. Perhaps an architecture of the former kind—of a formal psychology—is a plausible, if relatively unexciting candidate for the mental side of what an evolved human nature should explain. Either way, any such conception needs to adduce criteria for the individuation of such “mental organs” (D. Wilson 1994: 233). Relatedly, if the most strongly entrenched developmental programmes are the most archaic, it follows that, although these will be species-typical, they will not be species-specific. Programmes for the development of body parts have been identified for higher taxa, rather than for species.

A further issue that dogs any such attempts to explicate the “human” dimension of human nature in terms of developmental programmes inscribed in human DNA concerns Evolutionary Psychologists’ assertion that the programmes are the same in every specimen of the species. This assertion goes hand in hand with the claim that what is explained by such programmes is a deep psychological structure that is common to almost all humans and underlies the surface diversity of behavioural and psychological phenomena (Tooby & Cosmides 1990: 23f.). For Evolutionary Psychologists, the (near-)universality of both developmental programmes and deep psychological structure has an ultimate explanation in evolutionary processes that mark their products as natural in the sense of TP1. Both, they claim, are adaptations. These are features that were selected for because their possession in the past conferred a fitness advantage on their possessors. Evolutionary Psychologists conceive that advantage as conferred by the fulfilment of some specific function. They summarise selection for that function as “design”, which they take to have operated equally on all species specimens since the Pleistocene. This move reintroduces the teleological idea of a fully developed form beyond mere statistical normality (TP3).

This move has been extensively criticised. First, selection pressures operate at the level of groups and hence need not lead to the same structures in all a group’s members (D. Wilson 1994: 227ff.; Griffiths 2011: 325; Sterelny 2018: 120). Second, other evolutionary mechanisms than natural selection might be explanatorily decisive. Genetic drift or mutation and recombination might, for example, also confer “naturalness” in the sense of evolutionary genesis (Buller 2000: 436). Third, as we have every reason to assume that the evolution of human psychology is ongoing, evolutionary biology provides little support for the claim that particular programmes and associated traits evolved to fixity in the Pleistocene (Buller 2000: 477ff.; Downes 2010).

Perhaps, however, there might turn out to be gene control networks that do generally structure certain features of the psychological development of contemporary humans (Walsh 2006: 440ff.). The quest for such GNRs can, then, count as the search for an explanatory nature of contemporary humans, where the explanatory function thus sought is divorced from any classificatory role.

There has, however, been a move in general philosophy of science that, if acceptable, would transform the relationship between the taxonomic and explanatory features of species. This move was influentially initiated by Richard Boyd (1999a). It begins with the claim that the attempt to define natural kinds in terms of spatiotemporally unrestricted, intrinsic, necessary and sufficient conditions is a hangover from empiricism that should be abandoned by realist metaphysics. Instead, natural kinds should be understood as kinds that support induction and explanation, where generalisations at work in such processes need not be exceptionless. Thus understood, essences of natural kinds, i.e., their “natures”, need be neither intrinsic nor be possessed by all and only members of the kinds. Instead, essences consist of property clusters integrated by stabilising mechanisms (“homeostatic property clusters”, HPCs). These are networks of causal relations such that the presence of certain properties tends to generate or uphold others and the workings of underlying mechanisms contribute to the same effect. Boyd names storms, galaxies and capitalism as plausible examples (Boyd 1999b: 82ff.). However, he takes species to be the paradigmatic HPC kinds. According to this view, the genealogical character of a species’ nature does not undermine its causal role. Rather, it helps to explain the specific way in which the properties cohere that make up the taxon’s essence. Moreover, these can include extrinsic properties, for example, properties of constructed niches (Boyd 1991: 142, 1999a: 164ff.; Griffiths 1999: 219ff.; R. Wilson et al. 2007: 202ff.).

Whether such an account can indeed adequately explain taxonomic practice for species taxa is a question that can be left open here (see Ereshefsky & Matthen 2005: 16ff.). By its own lights the account does not identify conditions for belonging to a species such as Homo sapiens (Samuels 2012: 25f.). Whether it enables the identification of factors that play the explanatory roles that the term “human nature” might be supposed to pick out is perhaps the most interesting question. Two ways in which an account of human nature might be developed from such a starting point have been sketched.

According to Richard Samuels’ proposal, human nature should be understood as the empirically discoverable proximal mechanisms responsible for psychological development and for the manifestation of psychological capacities. These will include physiological mechanisms, such as the development of the neural tube, as well as environmentally scaffolded learning procedures; they will also include the various modular systems distinguished by cognitive science, such as visual processing and memory systems (Samuels 2012: 22ff.). Like mere list conceptions (cf. §3.2 ), such an account has a precedent in Hume, for whom human nature also includes causal “principles” that structure operations of the human mind (1739–40, Intro.), for example, the mechanisms of sympathy (III,iii,1; II,ii,6). Hume, however, thought of the relevant causal principles as intrinsic.

A second proposal, advanced by Paul Griffiths and Karola Stotz, explicitly suggests taking explanandum and explanans to be picked out by different uses of the expression "human nature". In both cases, the “nature” in question is that of the taxon, not of individual organisms. The former use simply refers to “what human beings are like”, where “human beings” means all species specimens. Importantly, this characterisation does not aim at shared characteristics, but is open for polymorphisms both across a population and across life stages of individual organisms. The causal conception of human nature, what explains this spectrum of similarity and difference in life histories, is equated by Griffiths and Stotz with the organism-environment system that supports human development. It thus includes all the genetic, epigenetic and environmental resources responsible for varying human life cycles (Griffiths 2011: 319; Stotz & Griffiths 2018, 66f.). It follows that explanatory human nature at one point in time can be radically different from human nature at some other point in time.

Griffiths and Stotz are clear that this account diverges significantly from traditional accounts, as it rejects assumptions that human development has a goal, that human nature is possessed by all and only specimens of the species and that it consists of intrinsic properties. They see these assumptions as features of the folk biology of human nature that is as scientifically relevant as are folk conceptions of heat for its scientific understanding (Stotz 2010: 488; Griffiths 2011: 319ff.; Stotz & Griffiths 2018: 60ff.). This raises the question as to whether such a developmental systems account should not simply advocate abandoning the term, as is suggested by Sterelny (2018) on the basis of closely related considerations. A reason for not doing so might lie in the fact that, as talk of “human nature” is often practised with normative intent or at least with normative consequences (Stotz & Griffiths 2018: 71f.), use of the term to pick out the real, complex explanatory factors at work might help to counter those normative uses that employ false, folk biological assumptions.

Explanatory accounts that emphasise developmental plasticity in the products of human DNA, in the neural architecture of the brain and in the human mind tend to reject the assumption that explanations of what humans are like should focus on intrinsic features. It should, however, be noted that such accounts can be interpreted as assigning the feature of heightened plasticity the key role in such explanations (cf. Montagu 1956: 79). Accounts that make plasticity causally central also raise the question as to whether there are not biological features that in turn explain it and should therefore be assigned a more central status in a theory of explanatory human nature.

A prime candidate for this role is what the zoologist Adolf Portmann labelled human “secondary altriciality”, a unique constellation of features of the human neonate relative to other primates: human neonates are, in their helplessness and possession of a relatively undeveloped brain, neurologically and behaviourally altricial, that is, in need of care. However they are also born with open and fully functioning sense organs, otherwise a mark of precocial species, in which neonates are able to fend for themselves (Portmann 1951: 44ff.). The facts that the human neonate brain is less than 30% of the size of the adult brain and that brain development after birth continues at the fetal rate for the first year (Walker & Ruff 1993, 227) led the anthropologist Ashley Montagu to talk of “exterogestation” (Montagu 1961: 156). With these features in mind, Portmann characterised the care structures required by prolonged infant helplessness as the “social uterus” (Portmann 1967: 330). Finally, the fact that the rapid development of the infant brain takes place during a time in which the infant’s sense organs are open and functioning places an adaptive premium on learning that is unparalleled among organisms (Gould 1977: 401; cf. Stotz & Griffiths 2018: 70).

Of course, these features are themselves contingent products of evolution that could be outlived by the species. Gould sees them as components of a general retardation of development that has characterised human evolution (Gould 1977: 365ff.), where “human” should be seen as referring to the clade—all the descendants of a common ancestor—rather than to the species. Anthropologists estimate that secondary altriciality characterised the lineage as from Homo erectus 1.5 million years ago (Rosenberg & Trevathan 1995: 167). We are, then, dealing with a set of deeply entrenched features, features that were in place long before behavioural modernity.

It is conceivable that the advent of secondary altriciality was a key transformation in generating the radical plasticity of human development beginning with early hominins. However, as Sterelny points out, there are serious difficulties with isolating any particular game changer. Secondary altriciality, or the plasticity that may in part be explained by it, would thus seem to fall victim to the same verdict as the game changers named by the traditional human nature slogans. However, maybe it is more plausible to think in terms of a matrix of traits: perhaps a game-changing constellation of properties present in the population after the split from pan can be shown to have generated forms of niche construction that fed back into and modified the original traits. These modifications may in turn have had further psychological and behavioural consequences in steps that plausibly brought selective advantages (Sterelny 2018: 115).

5. Human Nature, the Participant Perspective and Morality

In such a culture-mind coevolutionary account, there may be a place for the referents of some of the traditional philosophical slogans intended to pin down “the human essence“ or “human nature”—reason, linguistic capacity ( “ the speaking animal”, Herder 1772 [2008: 97]), a more general symbolic capacity ( animal symbolicum , Cassirer 1944: 44), freedom of the will (Pico della Mirandola 1486 [1965: 5]; Sartre 1946 [2007: 29, 47]), a specific, “political” form of sociality, or a unique type of moral motivation (Hutcheson 1730: §15). These are likely, at best, to be the (still evolving) products in contemporary humans of processes set in motion by a trait constellation that includes proto-versions of (some of) these capacities. Such a view may also be compatible with an account of “what contemporary humans are like” that abstracts from the evolutionary time scale of eons and focuses instead on the present (cf. Dupré 1993: 43), whilst neither merely cataloguing widely distributed traits ( §3.2 ) nor attempting explanations in terms of the human genome ( §4.1 ). The traditional slogans appear to be attempts to summarise some such accounts. It seems clear, though, that their aims are significantly different from those of the biologically, or otherwise scientifically orientated positions thus far surveyed.

Two features of such accounts are worth emphasising, both of which we already encountered in Aristotle’s contribution to the original package. The first involves a shift in perspective from that of the scientific observer to that of a participant in a contemporary human life form. Whereas the human—or non-human—biologist may ask what modern humans are like, just as they may ask what bonobos are like, the question that traditional philosophical accounts of human nature are plausibly attempting to answer is what it is like to live one’s life as a contemporary human. This question is likely to provoke the counter-question as to whether there is anything that it is like to live simply as a contemporary human, rather than as a human-in-a-specific-historical-and-cultural context (Habermas 1958: 32; Geertz 1973: 52f.; Dupré 2003: 110f.). For the traditional sloganeers, the answer is clearly affirmative. The second feature of such accounts is that they tend to take it that reference to the capacities named in the traditional slogans is in some sense normatively , in particular, ethically significant .

The first claim of such accounts, then, is that there is some property of contemporary humans that is in some way descriptively or causally central to participating in their form of life. The second is that such participation involves subjection to normative standards rooted in the possession of some such property. Importantly, there is a step from the first to the second form of significance, and justification of the step requires argument. Even from a participant perspective, there is no automatic move from explanatory to normative significance.

According to an “internal”, participant account of human nature, certain capacities of contemporary, perhaps modern humans unavoidably structure the way they (we) live their (our) lives. Talk of “structuring” refers to three kinds of contributions to the matrix of capacities and dispositions that both enable and constrain the ways humans live their lives. These are contributions, first, to the specific shape other features of humans lives have and, second, to the way other such features hang together (Midgley 2000: 56ff.; Roughley 2011: 16ff.). Relatedly, they also make possible a whole new set of practices. All three relations are explanatory, although their explanatory role appears not necessarily to correspond to the role corresponding features, or earlier versions of the features, might have played in the evolutionary genealogy of contemporary human psychology. Having linguistic capacities is a prime candidate for the role of such a structural property: human perception, emotion, action planning and thought are all plausibly transformed in linguistic creatures, as are the connections between perception and belief, and the myriad relationships between thought and behaviour, connections exploited and deepened in a rich set of practices unavailable to non-linguistic animals. Similar things could be claimed for other properties named by the traditional slogans.

In contrast to the ways in which such capacities have frequently been referred to in the slogan mode, particularly to the pathos that has tended to accompany it, it seems highly implausible that any one such property will stand alone as structurally significant. It is more likely that we should be picking out a constellation of properties, a constellation that may well include properties variants of which are possessed by other animals. Other properties, including capacities that may be specific to contemporary humans, such as humour, may be less plausible candidates for a structural role.

Note that the fact that such accounts aim to answer a question asked from the participant perspective does not rule out that the features in question may be illuminated in their role for human self-understanding by data from empirical science. On the contrary, it seems highly likely that disciplines such as developmental and comparative psychology, and neuroscience will contribute significantly to an understanding of the possibilities and constraints inherent in the relevant capacities and in the way they interact.

5.2. Human Nature and the Human ergon

The paradigmatic strategy for deriving ethical consequences from claims about structural features of the human life form is the Platonic and Aristotelian ergon or function argument. The first premise of Aristotle’s version ( Nicomachean Ethics 1097b–1098a) connects function and goodness: if the characteristic function of an entity of a type X is to φ, then a good entity of type X is one that φs well. Aristotle confers plausibility on the claim by using examples such as social roles and bodily organs. If the function of an eye as an exemplar of its kind is to enable seeing, then a good eye is one that enables its bearer to see well. The second premise of the argument is a claim we encountered in section 1.4 of this entry, a claim we can now see as predicating a structural property of human life, the exercise of reason. According to this claim, the function or end of individual humans as humans is, depending on interpretation (Nussbaum 1995: 113ff.), either the exercise of reason or life according to reason. If this is correct, it follows that a good human being is one whose life centrally involves the exercise of, or life in accordance with, reason.

In the light of the discussion so far, it ought to be clear that, as it stands, the second premise of this argument is incompatible with the evolutionary biology of species. It asserts that the exercise of reason is not only the key structural property of human life, but also the realization of the fully developed human form. No sense can be made of this latter notion in evolutionary terms. Nevertheless, a series of prominent contemporary ethicists—Alasdair MacIntyre (1999), Rosalind Hursthouse (1999), Philippa Foot (2001) and Martha Nussbaum (2006)—have all made variants of the ergon argument central to their ethical theories. As each of these authors advance some version of the second premise, it is instructive to examine the ways in which they aim to avoid the challenge from evolutionary biology.

Before doing so, it is first worth noting that any ethical theory or theory of value is engaged in an enterprise that has no clear place in an evolutionary analysis. If we want to know what goodness is or what “good” means, evolutionary theory is not the obvious place to look. This is particularly clear in view of the fact that evolutionary theory operates at the level of populations (Sober 1980: 370; Walsh 2006: 434), whereas ethical theory operates, at least primarily, at the level of individual agents. However, the specific conflict between evolutionary biology and neo-Aristotelian ethics results from the latter’s constructive use of the concept of species and, in particular, of a teleological conception of a fully developed form of individual members of the species “ qua members of [the] species” (MacIntyre 1999: 64, 71; cf. Thompson 2008: 29; Foot 2001: 27). The characterisation of achieving that form as fulfilling a “function”, which helps the analogy with bodily organs and social roles, is frequently replaced in contemporary discussions by talk of “flourishing” (Aristotle’s eudaimonia ). Such talk more naturally suggests comparisons with the lives of other organisms (although Aristotle himself excludes other animals from eudaimonia ; cf. Nicomachean Ethics 1009b). The concept of flourishing in turn picks out biological—etymologically: botanical—processes, but again not of a sort that play a role in evolutionary theory. It also seems primarily predicated of individual organisms. It may play a role in ecology; it is, however, most clearly at home in practical applications of biological knowledge, as in horticulture. In this respect, it is comparable to the concept of health.

Neo-Aristotelians claim that to describe an organism, whether a plant or a non-human or human animal, as flourishing is to measure it against a standard that is specific to the species to which it belongs. To do so is to evaluate it as a more or less good “specimen of its species (or sub-species)” (Hursthouse 1999: 198). The key move is then to claim that moral evaluation is, “quite seriously” (Foot 2001: 16), evaluation of the same sort: just as a non-defective animal or plant exemplifies flourishing within the relevant species’ life form, someone who is morally good is someone who exemplifies human flourishing, i.e., the fully developed form of the species. This metaethical claim has provoked the worry as to whether such attributions to other organisms are really anything more than classifications, or at most evaluations of “stretched and deflated” kinds that are missing the key feature of authority that we require for genuine normativity (Lenman 2005: 46ff.).

Independently of questions concerning their theory of value, ethical Neo-Aristotelians need to respond to the question of how reference to a fully developed form of the species can survive the challenge from evolutionary theory. Three kinds of response may appear promising.

The first adverts to the plurality of forms of biological science, claiming that there are life sciences, such as physiology, botany, zoology and ethology in the context of which such evaluations have a place (Hursthouse 1999: 202; 2012: 172; MacIntyre 1999: 65). And if ethology can legitimately attribute not only characteristic features, but also defects or flourishing to species members, in spite of species not being natural kinds, then there is little reason why ethics shouldn’t do so too. This strategy might ground in one of the moves sketched in section 3.1 of this entry. It might be argued, with Kitcher and Dupré, that such attributions are legitimate in other branches of biological science because there is a plurality of species concepts, indeed of kinds of species, where these are relative to epistemic interests. Or the claim might simply rest on a difference in what is taken to be the relevant time frame, where temporal relevance is indexed relative to the present. In ethics we are, it might be claimed, interested in humans as they are “at the moment and for a few millennia back and for maybe not much longer in the future” (Hursthouse 2012: 171).

This move amounts to the concession that talk of “the human species” is not to be understood literally. Whether this concession undermines the ethical theories that use the term is perhaps unclear. It leaves open the possibility that, as human nature may change significantly, there may be significant changes in what it means for humans to flourish and therefore in what is ethically required. This might be seen as a virtue, rather than a vice of the view.

A second response to the challenge from evolutionary biology aims to draw metaphysical consequences from epistemic or semantic claims. Michael Thompson has argued that what he calls alternatively “the human life form” and “the human species” is an a priori category. Thompson substantiates this claim by examining forms of discourse touched on in section 3.2 , forms of discourse that are generally taken to be of mere heuristic importance for amateur practices of identification, viz. field guides or animal documentaries. Statements such as “The domestic cat has four legs, two eyes, two ears and guts in its belly”, are, Thompson claims, instances of an important kind of predication that is neither tensed nor quantifiable. He calls these “natural historical descriptions” or “Aristotelian categoricals” (Thompson 2008: 64ff.). Such generic claims are not, he argues, made false where what is predicated is less than universal, or even statistically rare. Decisively, according to Thompson, our access to the notion of the human life form is non-empirical. It is, he claims, a presupposition of understanding ourselves from the first-person perspective as breathing, eating or feeling pain (Thompson 2004: 66ff.). Thus understood, the concept is independent of biology and therefore, if coherent, immune to problems raised by the Darwinian challenge.

Like Foot and Hursthouse, Thompson thinks that his Aristotelian categoricals allow inferences to specific judgments that members of species are defective (Thompson 2004: 54ff.; 2008: 80). He admits that such judgments in the case of the human life form are likely to be fraught with difficulties, but nevertheless believes that judgments of (non-)defective realization of a life form are the model for ethical evaluation (Thompson 2004: 30, 81f.). It may seem unclear how this might be the case in view of the fact that access to the human life form is supposed to be given as a presupposition of using the concept of “I”. Another worry is that the everyday understanding on which Thompson draws may be nothing other than a branch of folk biology. The folk tendency to ascribe teleological essences to species, as to “races” and genders, is no indication of the reality of such essences (Lewens 2012: 469f.; Stotz & Griffiths 2018: 60ff.; cf. Pellegrin 1982 [1986: 16ff., 120] and Charles 2000: 343ff., 368, on Aristotle’s own orientation to the usage of “the people”).

A final response to evolutionary biologists’ worries aims equally to distinguish the Neo-Aristotelian account of human nature from that of the sciences. However, it does so not by introducing a special metaphysics of “life forms”, but by explicitly constructing an ethical concept of human nature. Martha Nussbaum argues that the notion of human nature in play in what she calls “Aristotelian essentialism” is, as she puts it, “internal and evaluative”. It is a hermeneutic product of “human” self-understanding, constructed from within our best ethical outlook: “an ethical theory of human nature”, she claims,

should force us to answer for ourselves, on the basis of our very own ethical judgment, the question which beings are fully human ones. (Nussbaum 1995: 121f.; cf. Nussbaum 1992: 212ff.; 2006: 181ff.; McDowell 1980 [1998: 18ff.]; Hursthouse 1999: 229; 2012: 174f.)

There can be no question here of moving from a biological “is” to an ethical “ought”; rather, which features are taken to belong to human nature is itself seen as the result of ethical deliberation. Such a conception maintains the claim that the key ethical standard is that of human flourishing. However, it is clear that what counts as flourishing can only be specified on the basis of ethical deliberation, understood as striving for reflective equilibrium (Nussbaum 2006: 352ff.). In view of such a methodological proposal, there is a serious question as to what work is precisely done by the concept of human nature.

Neo-Aristotelians vary in the extent to which they flesh out a conception of species-specific flourishing. Nussbaum draws up a comprehensive, open-ended catalogue of what she calls “the central human capacities”. These are in part picked out because of their vulnerability to undermining or support by political measures. They include both basic bodily needs and more specifically human capacities, such as for humour, play, autonomy and practical reason (Nussbaum 1992: 216ff.; 2006: 76ff.). Such a catalogue allows the setting of three thresholds, below which a human organism would not count as living a human life at all (anencephalic children, for instance), as living a fully human life or as living a good human life (Nussbaum 2006: 181). Nussbaum explicitly argues that being of human parents is insufficient for crossing the first, evaluatively set threshold. Her conception is partly intended to provide guidelines as to how societies should conceive disability and as to when it is appropriate to take political measures in order to enable agents with nonstandard physical or mental conditions to cross the second and third thresholds.

Nussbaum has been careful to insist that enabling independence, rather than providing care, should be the prime aim. Nevertheless, the structure of an account that insists on a “species norm”, below which humans lacking certain capacities count as less than fully flourishing, has prompted accusations of illiberality. According to the complaint, it disrespects the right of members of, for example, deaf communities to set the standards for their own forms of life (Glackin 2016: 320ff.).

Other accounts of species-specific flourishing have been considerably more abstract. According to Hursthouse, plants flourish when their parts and operations are well suited to the ends of individual survival and continuance of the species. In social animals, flourishing also tends to involve characteristic pleasure and freedom from pain, and a contribution to appropriate functioning of relevant social groups (Hursthouse 1999: 197ff.). The good of human character traits conducive to pursuit of these four ends is transformed, Hursthouse claims, by the addition of “rationality”. As a result, humans flourish when they do what they correctly take themselves to have reason to do—under the constraint that they do not thereby cease to foster the four ends set for other social animals (Hursthouse 1999: 222ff.). Impersonal benevolence is, for example, because of this constraint, unlikely to be a virtue. In such an ethical outlook, what particular agents have reason to do is the primary standard; it just seems to be applied under particular constraints. A key question is thus whether the content of this primary standard is really determined by the notion of species-specific flourishing.

Where Hursthouse’s account builds up to, and attempts to provide a “natural” framework for, the traditional Aristotelian ergon of reason, MacIntyre builds his account around the claim that flourishing specific to the human “species” is essentially a matter of becoming an “independent practical reasoner” (MacIntyre 1999: 67ff.). It is because of the central importance of reasoning that, although human flourishing shares certain preconditions with the flourishing, say, of dolphins, it is also vulnerable in specific ways. MacIntyre argues that particular kinds of social practices enable the development of human reasoning capacities and that, because independent practical reasoning is, paradoxically, at core cooperatively developed and structured, the general aim of human flourishing is attained by participation in networks in local communities (MacIntyre 1999: 108). “Independent practical reasoners” are “dependent rational animals”. MacIntyre’s account thus makes room on an explanatory level for the evolutionary insight that humans can only become rational in a socio-cultural context which provides scaffolding for the development and exercise of rationality ( §4 ). Normatively, however, this point is subordinated to the claim that, from the point of view of participation in the contemporary human life form, flourishing corresponds to the traditional slogan.

MacIntyre, Hursthouse and Nussbaum (Nussbaum 2006: 159f.) all aim to locate the human capacity for reasoning within a framework that encompasses other animals. Each argues that, although the capacities to recognise reasons as reasons and for deliberation on their basis transform the needs and abilities humans share with other animals, the reasons in question remain in some way dependent on humans’ embodied and social form of life. This emphasis is intended to distinguish an Aristotelian approach from other approaches for which the capacity to evaluate reasons for action as reasons and to distance oneself from ones desires is also the “central difference” between humans and other animals (Korsgaard 2006: 104; 2018: 38ff.; cf. MacIntyre 1999: 71ff.). According to Korsgaard’s Kantian interpretation of Aristotle’s ergon argument, humans cannot act without taking a normative stand on whether their desires provide them with reasons to act. This she takes to be the key structural feature of their life, which brings with it “a whole new way of functioning well or badly” (Korsgaard 2018: 48; cf. 1996: 93). In such an account, “human nature” is monistically understood as this one structural feature which is so transformative that the concept of life applicable to organisms that instantiate it is no longer that applicable to organisms that don’t. Only “humans” live their lives, because only they possess the type of intentional control over their bodily movements that grounds in evaluation of their actions and self-evaluation as agents (Korsgaard 2006: 118; 2008: 141ff.; cf. Plessner 1928 [1975: 309f.]).

We have arrived at an interpretation of the traditional slogan that cuts it off from a metaphysics with any claims to be “naturalistic”. The claim now is that the structural effect of the capacity for reasoning transforms those features of humans that they share with other animals so thoroughly that those features pale into insignificance. What is “natural” about the capacity for reasoning for humans here is its unavoidability for contemporary members of the species, at least for those without serious mental disabilities. Such assertions also tend to shade into normative claims that discount the normative status of “animal” needs in view of the normative authority of human reasoning (cf. McDowell 1996 [1998: 172f.]).

The most radical version of this thought leads to the claim encountered towards the end of section 1.4 : that talk of “human nature” involves no essential reference at all to the species Homo sapiens or to the hominin lineage. According to this view, the kind to which contemporary humans belong is a kind to which entities could also belong who have no genealogical relationship to humans. That kind is the kind of entities that act and believe in accordance with the reasons they take themselves to have. Aliens, synthetically created agents and angels are further candidates for membership in the kind, which would, unlike biological taxa, be spatiotemporally unrestricted. The traditional term for the kind, as employed by Aquinas and Kant, is “person” (cf. Hull 1986: 9).

Roger Scruton has recently taken this line, arguing that persons can only be adequately understood in terms of a web of concepts inapplicable to other animals, concepts whose applicability grounds in an essential moral dimension of the personal life form. The concepts pick out components of a life form that is permeated by relationships of responsibility, as expressed in reactive attitudes such as indignation, guilt and gratitude. Such emotions he takes to involve a demand for accountability, and as such to be exclusive to the personal life form, not variants of animal emotions (Scruton 2017: 52). As a result, he claims, they situate their bearers in some sense “outside the natural order” (Scruton 2017: 26). According to such an account, we should embrace a methodological dualism with respect to humans: as animals, they are subject to the same kinds of biological explanations as all other organisms, but as persons, they are subject to explanations that are radically different in kind. These are explanations in terms of reasons and meanings, that is, exercises in “Verstehen”, whose applicability Scruton takes to be independent of causal explanation (Scruton 2017: 30ff., 46).

Such an account demonstrates with admirable clarity that there is no necessary connection between a theory of “human nature” and metaphysical naturalism. It also reinforces the fact, emphasised throughout this entry, that discussions of “human nature” require both serious conceptual spadework and explicit justification of the use of any one such concept rather than another.

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Aquinas, Thomas | Aristotle, General Topics: biology | Aristotle, General Topics: ethics | ethics: virtue | evolution | Kant, Immanuel | Locke, John: on real essence | naturalism: moral | natural kinds | psychology: evolutionary | species

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I would like to thank Michelle Hooge, Maria Kronfeldner, Nick Laskowski and Hichem Naar for their comments on earlier drafts.

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Library of Congress Catalog Data: ISSN 1095-5054

How we Think About Human Nature: Cognitive Errors and Concrete Remedies

• Published: 03 January 2021
• Volume 26 , pages 825–846, ( 2021 )

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• Alexander J. Werth   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-7777-478X 1 &
• Douglas Allchin 2  

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Us and them is perhaps the simplest explanation of human nature. —Wayne Bennett (2014).

Appeals to human nature are ubiquitous, yet historically many have proven ill-founded. Why? How might frequent errors be remedied towards building a more robust and reliable scientific study of human nature? Our aim is neither to advance specific scientific or philosophical claims about human nature, nor to proscribe or eliminate such claims. Rather, we articulate through examples the types of errors that frequently arise in this field, towards improving the rigor of the scientific and social studies. We seek to analyze such claims rhetorically, cognitively, and epistemically. Namely, how do we think about human nature? Claims about human nature, we show, are susceptible to widely exhibited deficits in cognitive tendencies such as framing, confirmation bias, satisficing, and teleological perspectives, as well as motivated reasoning. Such missteps foster methodological, empirical, and psychological mistakes and biases. Specifically, they promote the naturalizing error, whereby cultural ideology and values are projected onto an apparently objective description of nature. Concrete remedies are offered to aid scientists in conducting and reporting their research goals and findings more responsibly and effectively (relevant also to educators and other communicators who convey these findings publicly). Recommendations include acknowledging that human nature claims are often context-dependent, seeking multiple critical perspectives, and explicitly labeling uncertainties.

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Werth, A.J., Allchin, D. How we Think About Human Nature: Cognitive Errors and Concrete Remedies. Found Sci 26 , 825–846 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-020-09726-5

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Associations between Nature Exposure and Health: A Review of the Evidence

Marcia p. jimenez.

1 Department of Epidemiology, Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, MA 02215, USA

2 Department of Population Medicine, Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02215, USA; ude.dravrah.hpsh@semajp

Nicole V. DeVille

3 Channing Division of Network Medicine, Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02215, USA; ude.dravrah.hpsh@ttoillee (E.G.E.); ude.dravrah.gninnahc@hcjer (J.E.H.)

Elise G. Elliott

4 Department of Environmental Health, Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, MA 02215, USA; ude.dravrah.hpsh@ffihcsj (J.E.S.); ude.dravrah.g@tliwg (G.E.W.)

Jessica E. Schiff

Grete e. wilt, jaime e. hart, peter james.

There is extensive empirical literature on the association between exposure to nature and health. In this narrative review, we discuss the strength of evidence from recent (i.e., the last decade) experimental and observational studies on nature exposure and health, highlighting research on children and youth where possible. We found evidence for associations between nature exposure and improved cognitive function, brain activity, blood pressure, mental health, physical activity, and sleep. Results from experimental studies provide evidence of protective effects of exposure to natural environments on mental health outcomes and cognitive function. Cross-sectional observational studies provide evidence of positive associations between nature exposure and increased levels of physical activity and decreased risk of cardiovascular disease, and longitudinal observational studies are beginning to assess long-term effects of nature exposure on depression, anxiety, cognitive function, and chronic disease. Limitations of current knowledge include inconsistent measures of exposure to nature, the impacts of the type and quality of green space, and health effects of duration and frequency of exposure. Future directions include incorporation of more rigorous study designs, investigation of the underlying mechanisms of the association between green space and health, advancement of exposure assessment, and evaluation of sensitive periods in the early life-course.

1. Introduction

The “biophilia hypothesis” posits that humans have evolved with nature to have an affinity for nature [ 1 ]. Building on this concept, two major theories—Attention Restoration Theory and Stress Reduction Theory—have provided insight into the mechanisms through which spending time in nature might affect human health. Attention Restoration Theory (ART) posits that the mental fatigue associated with modern life is associated with a depleted capacity to direct attention [ 2 ]. According to this theory, spending time in natural environments enables people to overcome this mental fatigue and to restore the capacity to direct attention [ 3 ]. The Stress Reduction Theory (SRT) describes how spending time in nature might influence feelings or emotions by activating the parasympathetic nervous system to reduce stress and autonomic arousal because of people’s innate connection to the natural world [ 4 , 5 ]. Further, proponents of the biophilia hypothesis postulate that green spaces provide children with opportunities such as discovery, creativity, risk taking, mastery, and control, which positively influence different aspects of brain development [ 6 ]. Beyond the biophilia hypothesis, there are a number of other pathways through which nature may affect health, including but not limited to increasing opportunities for social engagement and space for physical activity, while mitigating harmful environmental exposures (e.g., air pollution, noise, heat) [ 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 ]. Though evidence is inconsistent, physical activity may serve as an important mechanistic pathway to beneficial health outcomes by providing increased opportunities for outdoor exercise (e.g., walking) and play [ 7 , 8 , 9 ]. Facilitation of social contact is a promising mechanism emerging from recent literature, where natural environments and green space provide an avenue for increased contact with others and a greater sense of community [ 9 , 10 ]. The mechanism’s underlying associations between nature exposure and health outcomes are many, not completely understood, and could act in isolation or synergistically [ 11 ].

While the study of exposure to nature and health outcomes has expanded substantially over recent years, there remain many understudied relationships, mechanisms, and populations. For instance, there is a much more expansive evidence base for associations between nature and health, particularly with experimental studies, in adults than in children. This narrative review synthesizes recent scientific literature on associations between nature and health, highlighting studies conducted among children and youth where possible, published throughout August 2020 and based on: (1) randomized experimental studies of short-term exposure to nature and acute responses; and (2) observational studies of exposure to nature.

A narrative review synthesizes the results of quantitative studies that employ diverse methodologies and/or theoretical frameworks without a focus on the statistical significance of the studies’ results [ 12 , 13 ]. We conducted a keyword search-based review using PubMed Advanced Search on 31 August 2020 for studies published in the last ten years with titles or abstracts containing “greenness”, “green space” or “NDVI” (i.e., normalized difference vegetation index) as the exposure, and “health, “children’s health” or “youth health” as the outcome (National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD, USA). Using World Health Organization definitions, we categorized a child as a person younger than 10 years and youth from 10 to 24 years inclusive [ 14 ]. We limited this narrative review to research on human subjects only and included English-language-based, international peer-reviewed articles (e.g., primary research, reviews), online reports, electronic books, and press releases. We included both experimental and observational studies and applied snowballing search methodology using the references cited in the articles identified in the literature search. Each identified item was assessed for relevance by a member of the study team. This review is not comprehensive but is intended to summarize recent literature on nature exposure and health.

In retrieving literature on associations of nature and health, we reviewed a range of research from multiple health-related disciplines, geographic regions, and study populations. Evidence from the experimental and observational studies presented below represents more recent literature (e.g., the last decade) on nature exposure and health, primarily from Western countries.

3.1. Experimental Studies

We found a substantial body of research on natural environment interventions to evaluate the effects of nature on health from an experimental approach. The interventions consisted of active engagement in the natural environment (e.g., walking, running, or other activities), passive engagement (e.g., resting outside or living with a view), or virtual exposure (e.g., watching videos or viewing images of nature) [ 15 , 16 ]. The majority of experimental studies assessed mental health and neurologic outcomes. Results from experimental studies suggested a protective effect of exposure to natural environments on mental health outcomes and cognitive function.

3.1.1. Stress

Several experimental studies have examined perceived stress and other subjective measures of stress, such as sleep quality. A recent systematic review of more than 40 experimental studies indicates that measures of heart rate, blood pressure, and perceived stress provide the most convincing evidence that exposure to nature or outdoor environments may reduce the negative effects of stress [ 17 ]. The results from perceived or reported stress after exposure to natural environments were more consistent than findings from studies using physiological stress measurements (e.g., cortisol levels) among adults. A recent meta-analysis found evidence suggesting that exposure to natural environments may reduce cortisol levels, one of the most frequently studied biological markers of stress. Song et al. [ 18 ] reviewed 52 articles from Japan that examined the physiological effects of nature therapy. There was overwhelming evidence that cortisol levels decreased when participants were exposed to a natural environment. In numerous studies, salivary cortisol levels decreased after mild to moderate exercise in a natural environment compared with an urban environment [ 18 ].

Although many studies have observed significant decreases in measured salivary cortisol levels after exposure to natural environments, others have not observed any significant differences in salivary cortisol levels before and after exposure to natural environments [ 17 , 19 ]. However, a key limitation of using cortisol as a biomarker of stress in experimental studies is the fluctuation of cortisol over a 24-h period. Diurnal cortisol levels need to be taken into account in order to make a fair comparison, and most of the literature on exposure to nature and stress have only studied cortisol levels before and after exposure [ 17 ].

Experimental studies focusing on children or youth are sparse [ 20 , 21 ]. One quasi-experimental study conducted in 10–12 year-olds in a school setting examined the influence of natural environments on stress response [ 22 ]. The researchers observed higher tonic vagal tone, a measure of heart rate variability, in natural environments but found no associations with event or phasic vagal tone.

3.1.2. Affective State

Exposure to natural environments has also been studied in relation to the self-reported affective state, or the underlying experience of feeling, emotion or mood. Although study measures vary, studies among adults have generally observed relationships between exposure to natural environments and affective state, with positive associations with positive emotions and negative associations with negative emotions [ 16 , 22 , 23 ]. A study randomly assigned sixty adults to a 50-min walk in either a natural or an urban environment in Palo Alto, California, and found that compared to urban experience, nature experience led to affective benefits (decreased anxiety, rumination, and negative affect, and preservation of positive affect) as well as cognitive benefits (increased working memory performance) [ 23 ]. In a study investigating forest bathing, or shinrin-yoku, researchers found that time spent in forests was associated with a reduction in reported feelings of hostility, depression, and anxiety among adults with acute and chronic stress [ 24 ]. Another study examining walking in different environments observed the largest and most consistent improvements in psychological states associated with forest walks [ 25 ]. Forest bathing may play an important role in health promotion and disease prevention. However, the lack of studies focused on children or youth limits the generalizability of these findings across a wide age range [ 26 ].

3.1.3. Anxiety and Depressive Mood

Exposure to natural environments has been linked with decreases in anxiety and rumination, which are associated with negative mental health outcomes, such as depression and anxiety [ 23 , 27 ]. Nature-based health interventions (NBI) are interventions that aim to engage people in nature-based experiences with the goal of improving health and wellness outcomes [ 28 ]. One study evaluated a wetland NBI in Gloucestershire, UK, that was designed to facilitate engagement with nature as a treatment for individuals diagnosed with anxiety and/or depression. The study found that the wetland site provided a sense of escape from participants’ everyday environments, facilitating relaxation and reductions in stress [ 27 ]. A recent systematic review and meta-analysis found a reduction in depressive mood following short-term exposure to natural environments [ 21 ]. However, the authors noted that the reviewed studies were generally of low quality due to a lack of blinding of study participants and a lack of information on randomization quality among randomized trials.

3.1.4. Cognitive Function

Experimental studies have examined the impact of brief nature experiences and cognition among adults, investigating cognitive function related to exposure to natural environments, and are consistent with the results from studies among school-aged children. A growing number of studies have found that exposure to natural environments compared with urban environments is associated with improved attention, executive function, and perceived restorativeness [ 16 , 29 , 30 , 31 , 32 , 33 , 34 , 35 , 36 , 37 ]. These studies have found statistically significant associations with positive cognitive outcomes, even after short periods of time spent in natural environments. Additionally, an emerging area of research is virtual reality (VR), using eye-tracking and wearable biomonitoring sensors to measure short-term physiological and cognitive responses to different biophilic indoor environments. These studies have found consistent physiological and cognitive benefits in indoor environments with diverse biophilic design features [ 38 , 39 ].

3.1.5. Brain Activity

Exposure to nature has been associated with alterations in brain activity in the prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain that plays an important role in emotional regulation [ 18 , 19 ]. One experimental study among female university students in Japan investigated physiological and psychological responses to looking at real plants compared with images of the same plants [ 40 ]. Although participants reported feelings of comfort and relaxation after seeing either real plants or images of the same plants, a physiological response was observed only after seeing real plants. Seeing real plants was associated with increased oxy-hemoglobin concentrations in the prefrontal cortex, suggesting that real plants may have physiological benefits for brain activity not replicated by images of plants.

3.1.6. Blood Pressure

Two meta-analyses [ 18 , 41 ] found evidence suggesting that exposure to a natural environment reduced blood pressure. Song et al. [ 18 ] reviewed the research in Japan from 52 studies on the physiological effects of nature therapy and found overwhelming evidence that blood pressure levels decreased when participants were exposed to a natural environment. Decreases in both systolic and diastolic blood pressure levels were observed across young healthy populations, as well as populations with hypertension. This suggests that forest walking may lead to a state of physiological relaxation [ 18 ]. Ideno et al. [ 41 ] conducted another systematic review and meta-analysis to synthesize the effects of forest bathing on blood pressure, including 20 trials involving 732 participants including high-school and college-aged youth. The authors found that both systolic and diastolic blood pressure taken in the forest environment were significantly lower than in non-forest environments [ 41 ].

3.1.7. Immune Function

In Japan, forest bathing has been positively associated with human immune function [ 42 ]. A study was conducted in which subjects experienced a 3-day/2-night bathing trip to forest areas, and blood and urine were sampled on days 2 and 3 of the trip. On days 7 and 30 after the trip, it was found that the mean values of natural killer (NK) cells (which play a major role in the immune system) and NK activity were higher on forest bathing days compared with control days [ 43 ]. This effect persisted for 30 days after the trip. A potential pathway for improved immune function is exposure to phytoncides (a substance emitted by plants and trees to protect themselves from harmful insects and germs), which could decrease stress hormones in the human body and increase NK cell activity. Additionally, the findings indicated that a day trip to a forest park also increased the levels of intracellular anti-cancer proteins [ 43 ].

3.1.8. Postoperative Recovery

While there is limited research on the effect of nature on postoperative recovery, a seminal study by Ulrich [ 4 ] investigated recovery after a cholecystectomy on patients with and without a room with a window view of a natural setting. Patients with a view of a natural setting had shorter hospital stays, received fewer negative evaluative comments in the nurse’s notes section of their charts, and took fewer potent analgesics (e.g., opiates) than those patients whose windows faced a brick building wall [ 4 ]. More recent research has successfully replicated the concept that plants and foliage in the hospital environment may have beneficial impacts on surgical recovery in randomized trials [ 44 , 45 ].

3.2. Observational Studies

Cross-sectional observational studies have shown evidence of positive associations between exposure to nature, higher levels of physical activity, and lower levels of cardiovascular disease. Increasingly, longitudinal observational studies have started to examine the long-term effects of exposure to nature on depression, anxiety, cognitive function, and chronic disease. Below, we summarize the key findings on mental health, physical activity, obesity, sleep, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cancer, mortality, birth outcomes, asthma and allergies, and immune function.

3.2.1. Mental Health

A recent systematic review found limited evidence suggesting a beneficial association with mental well-being in children and depressive symptoms in adolescents and young adults [ 21 ]. However, access to green space has been linked with improved mental well-being, overall health, cognitive development in children [ 46 ], and lower psychological distress in teens [ 47 ]. A study that examined the restorative benefits associated with frequency of use of different types of green space among US-based students found that students who engaged with green spaces in active ways ≥15 min four or more times per week reported a higher quality of life, better overall mood, and lower perceived stress [ 48 ]. Research in the U.S.-based Growing Up Today Study (GUTS) found that increased exposure to greenness measured around the home was associated with a lower risk of high depressive symptoms cross-sectionally (as measured with the McKnight Risk Factor Survey) and a lower incidence of depression longitudinally [ 49 ]. The investigators observed stronger associations in more densely populated areas and among younger adolescents [ 49 ]. Similarly, a study in four European cities (Barcelona, Spain; Doetinchem, The Netherlands; Kaunas, Lithuania; and Stoke-on-Trent, UK) that evaluated childhood nature exposure and mental health in adulthood showed that adults with low levels of childhood nature exposure had, when compared with adults with high levels of childhood nature exposure, significantly worse mental health, assessed through self-reports of nervousness or depression [ 50 ]. Another study of approximately one million Danes over 28 years of follow-up found that high levels of continuous green space presence during childhood were associated with lower risk of a wide spectrum of psychiatric disorders later in life [ 51 ]. A study based in the UK tracked individuals’ residential trajectories for five consecutive years and showed that individuals who moved to greener areas had better mental health than before moving [ 52 ]. Collectively, these studies suggest that implementation of environmental policies to increase urban green space may have sustainable public health benefits.

Novel research has examined green outdoor settings as potential treatment for mental and behavioral disorders, such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). One study demonstrated associations between green space exposure and improvement in behaviors and symptoms of ADHD and higher standardized test scores [ 46 ]. A recent systematic review found significant evidence for an inverse relationship between green space exposure and emotional and behavioral problems in children and adolescents [ 21 ]. Research has also shown that more and better quality residential green spaces are favorable for children’s well-being [ 53 ] and health-related quality of life [ 54 ]. Furthermore, the quality of green space appears to be more important as children age, as associations between green space quality and well-being are stronger in 12–13 year-olds compared with 4–5 year-olds [ 53 ]. In addition, natural features near schools, including forests, grasslands, and tree canopies, are associated with early childhood development, preschoolers’ improvement in socio-emotional competencies [ 55 ], and a decrease in autism prevalence [ 56 ].

Exposure to nature during adulthood also appears to be important for mental health. A study of 94,879 UK adults indicated a consistent protective effect of greenness on depression risk that was more pronounced among women, participants younger than 60 years, and participants residing in areas with low neighborhood socioeconomic status or high urbanicity [ 57 ]. Other innovative studies are starting to examine quantifiable time of exposure to evaluate the duration of time spent in nature that is associated with mental health benefits. For example, using a nationally representative sample of American adults, Beyer et al. [ 58 ] found that individuals who spent 5–6 or 6–8 h outdoors during weekends had lower odds of being at least mildly depressed, compared with individuals who spent less than 30 min outdoors on weekends. Another study from the UK suggested that lower levels of depression were associated with spending five hours or more weekly in a private garden [ 59 ]. Other studies are focused on uncovering which characteristics of green space are the determinants of mental health benefits. A UK study examined neighborhood bird abundance during the day and found inverse associations with prevalence of depression, anxiety, and stress [ 60 ].

The collective results from these studies suggest that nearby nature is associated with quantifiable mental health benefits, with the potential for lowering the physical and financial costs related to poor mental health. Most of these studies are cross-sectional, and reverse causation is possible. However, researchers are employing novel designs to examine the relationship between green space and mental health. For example, in a study of twins enrolled in the University of Washington Twin Registry, increased greenness was associated with decreased risk of self-reported depression, stress, or anxiety; however, only the results for depression were robust in within-twin pair analyses, suggesting the effect of green space on depression cannot be explained by genetics alone [ 61 ]. Finally, it is important to note that technological advancements have yielded improvements in assessments of exposure to nature and mental health. For instance, one study among adults 18–75 years of age used smartphones equipped with ecological momentary assessment applications to track location, physical activity, and mood for consecutive days, and found positive associations with feeling happy and restored or relaxed within 10 min of exposure to natural outdoor environments [ 62 ]. More novel studies such as these will bolster the evidence behind exposure to nature and mental health among children and/or youth.

3.2.2. Physical Activity

An extensive body of literature documents the impacts of access to green spaces or surrounding greenness on physical activity in children and adults. Proximity to green spaces may promote physical activity by providing a space for walking, running, cycling, and other activities. Although the bulk of the literature is cross-sectional, most studies (in both children and adults) have observed higher levels of physical activity in areas with more access to green space. For example, a study in Bristol, UK, evaluated associations between accessibility to green space and the odds of respondents achieving a recommended 30 min or more of moderate activity five times a week; respondents who lived closest to the type of green space classified as a formal park were more likely to achieve the physical activity recommendation [ 63 ]. Another study of adults in the UK found that people living in greenest compared with least-green areas were more likely to meet recommended daily physical activity guidelines [ 64 ]. However, another UK-based study did not find associations between road distance to nearest green space, number of green spaces, area of green space within a 2-km radius of residence, or green space quality and physical activity [ 65 ].

Almanza et al. [ 66 ] used GPS and accelerometry data among 208 children in California and found that greenness was associated with higher odds of moderate to vigorous physical activity, when comparing those in the 90th and 10th percentiles of greenness. Additionally, they found that children with >20 min daily green space exposure had nearly 5 times the daily rate of moderate to vigorous physical activity compared with those with nearly zero daily exposure [ 66 ]. Another study of Australian children illustrated that time spent outdoors at baseline positively predicted the amount of physical activity three years later [ 67 ]. In a review of youth health outcomes related to exercising in nature (i.e., “green exercise”), the results of fourteen studies (5 in the UK, 5 in the U.S., 2 in Australia, and 1 in Japan) indicated little evidence that green exercise is more beneficial than physical activity conducted in other locations, although any physical activity was beneficial across settings [ 68 ].

More recent studies have employed more sophisticated study designs to determine whether exposure to greenness increases physical activity. In studies that objectively assessed physical activity via accelerometers, individuals exposed to more greenness tended to be more physically active. For example, in a study of 15-year-olds in Germany, increases in greenness around the home address were associated with increased moderate-to-vigorous physical activity among youth in rural, but not urban, areas [ 69 ]. Another study of children in the UK evaluated momentary green space exposure based on GPS-derived location and contemporaneous physical activity measured by an accelerometer and found higher odds of physical activity in green space (versus outdoor non-green space) for boys but not girls [ 70 ].

3.2.3. Obesity

Green space may influence overweight or obesity through a physical activity pathway [ 71 ]. Some studies have shown that exposure to green space is associated with lower rates of obesity in children [ 67 ] and adults [ 72 ]; however, the results are conflicting. As with physical activity, many early studies were cross-sectional, and findings were more mixed for children than for adults. Some studies reported U-shaped associations with obesity [ 73 ], while other studies reported no association after adjustment for respondent characteristics [ 63 ] or neighborhood socioeconomic status [ 74 ]. Some studies demonstrate effect modification by gender [ 72 ]. Further, one cross-sectional UK-based study found that living in the greenest areas was associated with an increase in risk of being overweight and obese [ 75 ].

In one study of U.S. children, increasing greenness was associated with lower BMI z-scores and lower odds of increasing BMI z-scores between two follow-up times [ 76 ]. Another study of schoolchildren in Spain found that greenness and forest proximity were associated with lower prevalence of being overweight or obese [ 77 ]. One study found that street tree density was associated with lower obesity prevalence in New York City (U.S.) children; however, no association was found with park areas [ 78 ]. In an Australian study, the prevalence of being overweight was 27–41% lower in girls and boys who spent more time outdoors at the study baseline than those who spent less time outdoors [ 67 ]. Another study found that greenness was associated with decreased risk of being overweight but only among those in areas with a greater population density [ 79 ].

3.2.4. Sleep

Exposure to green space may influence sleep duration and quality. For instance, surrounding greenness may serve as a buffer for noise, which would disturb sleep. To date, only a handful of studies have examined these associations, and to our knowledge, even fewer have explored this association in children. A recent systematic review provided evidence of an association between green space exposure and improved sleep quality among adults [ 80 ]. A study of Australian adults who lived in areas with greater than 80% green space demonstrated lower risk of short sleep duration, even after adjustment for other predictors of sleep [ 81 ]. Among U.S. adults participating in the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System survey, natural amenities (e.g., green space, lakes, and oceans) were associated with lower reporting of insufficient sleep, and greenness was especially protective among men and individuals over 65 years of age [ 82 ]. In the Survey of Health in Wisconsin Study, increased tree canopy at the Census block group level was associated with lower odds of short sleep duration on weekdays and suggestive of an association with lower odds of short sleep duration on weekends, although there was no association between tree canopy and self-reported sleep quality [ 83 ]. A nationally representative study of Australian and German children and adolescents found no evidence of significant associations between residential green space and insufficient sleep or poor sleep quality [ 84 ].

3.2.5. Cardiovascular Disease

Exposure to green space may affect levels of physical activity, stress, and high blood pressure that drive cardiovascular disease risk. Recent reviews have found consistent evidence that exposure to residential green space is associated with decreased cardiovascular disease incidence [ 85 , 86 ]. Participants living in areas with lower greenness have higher levels of mortality following a stroke [ 87 ], higher cardiovascular disease mortality [ 88 , 89 ], and higher coronary heart disease [ 90 ]. A study from the UK found that associations between exposure to nature and cardiovascular outcomes differed by gender, where male cardiovascular disease and respiratory disease mortality rates decreased with increasing green space, and no associations were found for women [ 88 ]. Furthermore, the relationships between exposure to greenspace and cardiovascular outcomes may be modified by urbanicity. A recent Australian study showed significantly lower odds of high blood pressure among adults in an urban population when reported green space visits were an average of 30 min or more [ 91 ].

3.2.6. Diabetes

Although limited, evidence regarding the association between green space and type 2 diabetes highlights green space as a possible route for diabetes prevention. There are a few cross-sectional studies that have reported that green space is inversely related to type 2 diabetes among adults [ 92 , 93 ]. Few studies have examined the relationship between green space and diabetes in children. Cross-sectional studies of children found inverse associations between time spent in green spaces and fasting blood glucose levels [ 77 ] and insulin resistance [ 94 ]. A recent longitudinal study conducted on US children found no associations between residential exposure to green space and insulin resistance [ 95 ].

3.2.7. Cancer

Research on the link between green space and cancer is limited and may vary depending on the type of cancer. A recent case-control study examined whether residential green space exposure was related to prostate cancer incidence and found that higher residential greenness was associated with lower risk of prostate cancer [ 96 ], and a separate study of U.S. men demonstrated inverse associations between neighborhood greenness and lethal prostate cancer [ 97 ]. Another study examined the association between green space and several cancer types and found that green space was protective for mouth, throat, and non-melanoma skin cancers but was not associated with colorectal cancer [ 98 ]. A U.S.-based nationwide study of nurses found that residential greenness was inversely associated with breast cancer mortality [ 99 ]. Conversely, another systematic review that evaluated evidence on the association between residential green spaces and lung cancer mortality found no benefits of residential greenness [ 85 ].

3.2.8. Mortality

Many early mortality studies relied on cross-sectional data and could not estimate nature exposure over time [ 100 ], whereas others could not account for important potential confounding by race/ethnicity, individual-level smoking, and area-level socioeconomic factors, such as median home value [ 101 , 102 ]. A UK-wide ecological study found that all-cause mortality was higher in greener cities [ 89 ]. An analysis of greenness and mortality in male and female stroke survivors living in Boston (U.S.) found that greater exposure to greenness was associated with higher survival rates [ 87 ]. Another U.S.-based nationwide study of nurses found a consistent protective relationship between residential greenness and non-accidental mortality [ 103 ]. The greenness–mortality relationship was explained primarily by a mental health pathway, and the relationship was strongest among those who had high levels of physical activity [ 103 ]. A study of 4.2 million adults in the Swiss National Cohort assessed the relationship between residential greenness and mortality, while mutually considering socioeconomic status, air pollution, and transportation noise exposure, and found that higher exposure to green space was associated with lower rates of death from natural causes, respiratory disease, and cardiovascular disease [ 104 ]. Protective effects were stronger in younger individuals and in women and, for most outcomes, in urban (versus rural) and in the highest (versus lowest) socioeconomic quartile. Effect estimates did not change after adjustment for air pollution and transportation noise, suggesting that the protective effect of exposure to nature persists in the absence of pollution sources. Finally, a systematic review and meta-analysis of cohort studies on green space and mortality assessed findings from nine studies, comprising 8.3 million individuals from seven countries across the globe [ 105 ]. Seven of the nine studies demonstrated an inverse relationship between green space exposure and mortality, and the authors recommended wide-scale interventions to increase and manage green spaces in order to improve public health outcomes.

3.2.9. Birth Outcomes

The relationship between exposure to nature and birth outcomes has been studied extensively in analyses across multiple countries. Findings of positive associations between greenness and birth weight and decreased risk of low birth weight are consistent, with stronger associations observed among those of a lower socioeconomic status [ 106 ]. Banay et al. [ 107 ] reviewed studies that examined the association between greenness and maternal or infant health. While the majority of studies were cross-sectional, many studies found evidence for positive associations between greenness and birth weight. Fewer studies demonstrated consistent evidence for an association between greenness and gestational age, preeclampsia, or gestational diabetes. These studies also found that effects were stronger among those of a lower socioeconomic status. A more recent review highlighted the evolving literature showing that higher levels of residential greenness were associated with lower risk of preterm birth, low birth weight, and small gestational-age babies [ 108 ]. Akaraci et al. [ 109 ] conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis of 37 studies on residential green and blue spaces and pregnancy outcomes. Increases in residential greenness were associated with higher birthweight and lower odds of being small for gestational age; however, no significant associations between residential blue spaces and birth outcomes were found.

3.2.10. Asthma/Allergies

Several studies have examined the relationship between greenspace and atopic outcomes, including asthma and allergies. Mechanistically, trees and plants are a source of allergens and respiratory irritants [ 110 ]. However, the biodiversity created by green space could be protective against inflammatory conditions [ 111 , 112 ]. The literature reflects these contrasting hypotheses with mixed findings. Some studies have shown no association between the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) or tree canopy cover and asthma [ 113 ], while other studies have shown that living close to forests and parks was positively associated with allergic rhinoconjunctivitis and asthma [ 77 ]. Another study of greenspace and allergies in Germany demonstrated positive associations in urban areas and negative associations in rural areas [ 114 ]. The same investigators examined data from seven birth cohorts across Sweden, Australia, the Netherlands, Canada, and Germany and found that the relationship between residential NDVI and allergic disease was positive in some countries and negative in others [ 115 ]. A study in Spain found proximity to residential greenness to be protective of bronchitis in the Mediterranean region of Spain and protective of wheezing for children in the Euro-Siberian region of Spain [ 116 ]. One study conducted in China examined the relationship between exposure to greenness and parks and asthma and allergies among middle-school-aged children [ 117 ]. The researchers observed no associations between residential greenness exposure and self-reported doctor-diagnosed asthma, pneumonia, rhinitis, and eczema; however, living farther away from a park was associated with decreased odds of currently or ever having asthma. In sum, the relationship between exposure to nature and asthma and allergies is inconsistent, with associations varying in magnitude and direction by geography. One review of fourteen studies suggested an association between early life exposure to urban greenness and allergic respiratory diseases (e.g., asthma, bronchitis, allergic symptoms) in childhood; however, there were inconsistencies among study results, likely due to variability in study design, exposure assessment, outcome ascertainment, and geographic region [ 118 ].

3.3. Natural Experiments/Randomized Controlled Trials of Chronic Outcomes

Beyond smaller experimental studies of short-term outcomes and observational epidemiologic studies of chronic outcomes, there are a few natural experiments and randomized controlled trials that add substantial evidence to the relationship between exposure to nature and health. These quasi-experimental and randomized trials have lower potential for confounding bias to explain observed associations between nature and health. One important study capitalized on a natural experiment when an invasive tree pest, the emerald ash borer, killed over 100 million ash trees in the Midwestern United States [ 119 ]. The investigators found that living in a county infested with the emerald ash borer was associated with a 41% increased risk of cardiovascular disease, and these results were only consistent when looking in metropolitan areas where they could adjust for socioeconomic status. Another innovative study examined the greening of vacant lots in Philadelphia [ 120 ]. This citywide study used a three-arm randomized trial approach to randomize 110 vacant lots to either no intervention, cleaning but no greening, or cleaning and greening. The study found that those living around lots that were greened had substantial decreases in reports of depression, poor mental health, and feelings of worthlessness compared with lots that had no intervention. Those living around lots that were cleaned but not greened showed no difference compared with no intervention. Another ongoing longitudinal study in Sydney, Australia, is evaluating the effects of large-scale investment in green space (e.g., public access points, advertising billboards, walking and cycle tracks, BBQ stations, and children’s playgrounds) on physical activity, mental health, and cardiometabolic outcomes [ 121 ]. This natural experiment utilizes proximity to different areas of the Western Sydney Parklands to define treatment and control groups.

Looking to the future, there are a few randomized trials in progress that will provide fundamental evidence to understand whether adding green pace to cities benefits health. The Green Heart Project in Louisville, Kentucky, will assess risk of diabetes and heart disease, stress levels, and the strength of social ties in 700 participants [ 122 ]. The team will take baseline measurements of air pollution levels and will plant as many as 8000 trees, plants, and shrubs throughout Louisville neighborhoods to create an urban ecosystem that promotes physical activity while simultaneously decreasing noise, stress, and air pollution. During five years of follow-up, participants will receive annual check-ups to evaluate how the increasing greenery has affected their physical and mental health and social ties. A second randomized trial is the ‘Productive Green Infrastructure for Post-industrial Urban Regeneration’ or ProGIreg, a multi-city study examining the potential effects of green infrastructure [ 123 ]. This project is based in Dortmund (Germany), Turin (Italy), Zagreb (Croatia) and Ningbo (China) where Living Labs are hosted and nature-based solutions are developed, tested, and implemented. Although health is not the main focus of this study, researchers are hoping to incorporate health metrics into the study design to examine pre- and post-intervention outcome data. Collectively, these randomized trials, natural experiments, and pre-post study designs will establish crucial data on whether interventions to incorporate nature into cities can measurably improve health.

3.4. Effect Modification/Susceptible Populations

Inequitable distribution of green spaces could exacerbate health inequalities if people who are already at greater health risks (e.g., people with lower socioeconomic status) have limited access. Many studies have indicated that disadvantaged populations have decreased access to nature and greenspace [ 124 , 125 , 126 , 127 , 128 , 129 , 130 , 131 , 132 ]. At the same time, evidence suggests that exposure to nature disproportionately benefits disadvantaged populations, a phenomenon known as the equigenic effect of green space, which upends the expected association between lower socioeconomic status and greater risk of poor health outcomes [ 133 ]. Based on the theory of equigenic environments, one study showed that populations exposed to the greenest environments also had the lowest levels of health inequality related to income deprivation, suggesting that green space might be an important factor in reducing socioeconomic health disparities [ 89 ]. A review of 90 studies on green space and health outcomes demonstrated that individuals of lower socioeconomic status showed more beneficial effects than those of higher socioeconomic status; the authors found no significant differences in the protective effects of green space on health outcomes among different racial/ethnic groups [ 134 ]. The evidence is inconsistent, and more work is needed to elucidate potential mechanisms.

Conversely, improvements in access to green space may lead to “green gentrification,” an increase in property values that displaces low-income residents from their neighborhoods [ 129 , 135 , 136 , 137 ]. This process needs to be studied and understood so that its adverse effects can be prevented. Other cultural and contextual factors may affect nature preferences and experience of nature. For instance, there is evidence that the legacy of forced labor, lynching, and other violence may evoke deeply disturbing associations with trees, fields, and forests among some African Americans [ 138 , 139 ]. Similarly, some people may prefer open fields for sports, while others prefer picnic facilities for socializing.

4. Discussion

The purpose of this narrative review was to summarize recent experimental and observational literature on associations between nature exposure and health in adults and children/youth. While some associations between nature and health outcomes are well-studied, our review highlights the lack of studies, particularly experimental, among child/youth and other susceptible populations. We found evidence for associations between exposure to nature and improved cognitive function, brain activity, blood pressure, mental health, physical activity, and sleep. Results from experimental studies indicated protective effects of nature exposure on mental health and cognitive function. Cross-sectional observational studies provide evidence of positive associations between nature exposure, higher levels of physical activity and lower levels of cardiovascular disease. Observational studies, natural experiments, and randomized controlled trials are starting to assess the longitudinal effects of exposure to nature on depression, anxiety, cognitive function, chronic disease, and other health outcomes. Our review synthesizes recent literature, primarily from Western countries; thus, a limitation of this review is that we may not have captured all relevant literature from outside our publication range or across all geographic regions.

4.1. Data Gaps and Limitations

There are several limitations in the literature on exposure to nature and health. First, definitions of nature are inconsistent across studies. Further, the impacts of the quality of green space, duration of exposure to nature, frequency of exposure, or type of nature exposure on health outcomes are not well understood. Second, methods for measuring exposure to nature (e.g., percentage of residential greenness versus distance to the closest park) or defining the relevant geographic area of exposure (e.g., 500 m away from our home versus 1 km or 10 km) are inconsistent [ 140 , 141 ]. We must also develop methods to elucidate thresholds for dose and duration of nature exposure to achieve a given health effect. Although some studies have determined potential estimates of relevant doses [ 142 ], this area of research is nascent. In addition, standard approaches towards nature exposure assessment do not capture the variations in how people experience nature differentially (e.g., smell, touch, etc.) and have low reproducibility across studies (e.g., inconsistent land-use measures). Third, critical time windows of exposure during the life course that might have the greatest impact on health are also understudied (e.g., early life exposure, childhood exposure). Fourth, mechanistic pathways are understudied. Further, the dynamic relationship between green space, air pollution, noise, temperature, and neighborhood walkability also warrant further exploration, as these factors could be both mediators or moderators of the nature–health relationship [ 143 , 144 ]. We also know little about the potential harms of exposure to nature, most commonly observed in studies of asthma and allergies.

4.2. Future Directions

There are ample promising future directions for nature and health research. First, future research should employ rigorous study designs (e.g., longitudinal studies, randomized controlled trials) and investigate the underlying mechanisms of observed associations between exposure to nature and health outcomes. Although cross-sectional studies dominate the literature, there is increasing evidence emerging from prospective studies, which are essential to investigating causal relationships [ 108 ]. Novel designs, such as quasi-experimental studies and randomized trials, will provide further detail on how nature influences health [ 119 ]. Furthermore, studies should thoroughly evaluate potential biases, such as confounding by socioeconomic status, that may threaten the validity of studies on nature and health. Researchers should rigorously examine factors that may modify the effects of exposure to nature (e.g., socioeconomic status, gender, or race) to determine the subpopulations that might benefit most from exposure to nature. A life-course approach to examining associations between green space and health is also essential. We need to better understand vulnerable time windows in the early life-course where access or exposure to nature may have stronger impacts on health than in other time periods. Similarly, additional research assessing dose-response relationships (e.g., duration of time in nature or quantity of vegetation) is crucial to determine the minimum amount of exposure to green space needed to yield health benefits or if the relevant dosage varies across the life-course or across different countries/settings [ 142 ].

Second, future studies should make use of novel datasets and computational approaches that may provide rapid advances in exposure assessment. Emergence of advanced satellite and aerial photos combined with machine learning to develop tree canopy measures and other more specific metrics of nature provide information on specific species on the ground. Google Street View and other ubiquitous geocoded imagery, when combined with machine learning, also provide scalable approaches to estimate specific natural features from the on the ground perspective as human beings experience them [ 145 ]. Combined with geocoded residential addresses or GPS data and health or behavioral data, these approaches may unveil novel insights on how nature exposure affects health. Leveraging smartphones with GPS and accelerometry enable fine-scale information on exposure and physical activity. Ecological momentary assessment (EMA) or micro-surveys administered through smartphones can be used to ask about processes for how and why people interact with nature [ 62 ]. EMA can also be applied to estimate mental health outcomes in real time, and these responses can be geo-tagged and linked to spatial measures of natural environments. In addition, consumer wearable devices (e.g., FitBit) provide objective information on physical activity patterns, heart rate, sleep, and other biometrics down to the second level [ 146 ]. These data will prove crucial to better understand the behavioral mechanisms through which nature exposure impacts health. We should also capitalize on geo-located social media data (Flickr, Twitter, Facebook) and other data sources to understand exposure to nature [ 147 ]. Innovative metrics of mental health, such as skin conductivity, cortisol (stress), heart rate variability, brain activity through EEG, and functional MRI, can also provide information on stress processes when individuals encounter natural environments [ 148 ]. Such measures of nature exposure and time spent in nature should be incorporated into large federal data collection efforts, such as the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS), National Health Interview Survey (NHIS), and National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) in the United States or the Health Survey for England (HSE) in the United Kingdom. These recommendations cannot be accomplished without also considering the impacts climate change is currently having and will have on exposures to nature, and how climate change may alter the relationship individuals have with nature.

Third, future studies on nature and mental health should focus more on positive health—happiness, purpose, flourishing—instead of just the absence of negative mental health outcomes. Further, more research is required on natural water features, or blue space [ 149 ], as well as other natural environments.

Fourth, the overwhelming majority of research on nature and health is on urban study populations in North America, Europe, and Australia. Researchers should also focus on different geographic areas, low-income and middle-income settings, and vulnerable or historically marginalized populations where nature benefits might be greatest. Researchers should also work together with communities as they conduct their research to ensure their work addresses the needs of community members.

Finally, we must also recognize the potential unintended consequences of adding green infrastructure in cities. Adding green amenities to cities may entice high-income populations, and the resulting increased property values shape a new conundrum, embodied in the exclusion and displacement associated with so-called green gentrification [ 135 ]. Results from this type of research should also be considered for policies, urban planning, and designing cities.

5. Conclusions

The purpose of this review was to examine recent literature on exposure to nature and health, highlighting studies on children and youth where possible. We assessed the strength of evidence from experimental and observational studies and found evidence for associations between exposure to nature and improved cognitive function, brain activity, blood pressure, mental health, physical activity, and sleep. Evidence from experimental studies suggested protective effects of exposure to natural environments on mental health outcomes and cognitive function. Cross-sectional observational studies provide evidence of positive associations between exposure to nature, higher levels of physical activity and lower levels of cardiovascular disease. Longitudinal observational studies are starting to assess the long-term effects of exposure to nature on depression, anxiety, cognitive function, and chronic disease. Limitations and gaps in studies of nature exposure and health include inconsistent measures of exposure to nature, knowledge of the impacts of the type and quality of green space, and the health effects of the duration and frequency of exposure among different populations (e.g., adults, children, historically marginalized). Future research should incorporate more rigorous study designs, investigate the underlying mechanisms of the association between green space and health, advance exposure assessment, and evaluate sensitive periods throughout the life-course.

Author Contributions

Conceptualization, M.P.J., N.V.D., J.E.H. and P.J.; methodology, M.P.J., N.V.D., J.E.H. and P.J.; writing—original draft preparation, M.P.J., N.V.D., E.G.E., J.E.S., G.E.W., J.E.H. and P.J.; writing—review and editing, M.P.J., N.V.D., E.G.E., J.E.S., G.E.W., J.E.H. and P.J.; supervision, J.E.H. and P.J.; project administration, N.V.D.; funding acquisition, P.J. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

This research was funded by The National Geographic Society, and NIH grants R00 CA201542, R01 HL150119, T32 {"type":"entrez-nucleotide","attrs":{"text":"ES007069","term_id":"164015192","term_text":"ES007069"}} ES007069 , K99 AG066949, R01 ES028712 and P30 ES000002.

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Not applicable.

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Conflicts of interest.

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

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What is Human Nature According to David Hume?

How did Hume attempt to apply the scientific method to human nature, and how has this attempt been received by his successors and by contemporary philosophers?

What kind of thing are we, most fundamentally? Many people would be tempted to answer that question by claiming that what they are, most fundamentally, is human beings. The question then raises itself: what is a human being, fundamentally? This is the question that motivates David Hume’s philosophy.

In particular, he hoped to apply a method analogous to that pursued in the natural sciences to the study of human beings. Yet, at the same time, his philosophy demonstrates that the study of human beings, like humans themselves, must be conceived of in an utterly singular way.

This article explores Hume’s theory of human nature, with reference to one of its most important modern interpretations – that which was offered by Gilles Deleuze in his first book, Empiricism and Subjectivity . It begins by explaining Hume’s, largely unfair, reputation in the history of philosophy. It then moves on to focus on how Hume wished to adapt the experimental method of science for his study of human nature. It concludes with an analysis of the role of passion and reason in human nature.

Hume’s Philosophical Reputation

Hume’s philosophical reputation , at least in the English-speaking world, is a somewhat negative one. This has to do, in part, with how his work was originally situated in the history of philosophy.

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Teleologically-minded 19th-century historians of philosophy (that is, those who see philosophy as having a necessary direction and destination) tended to place Hume as carrying the empiricist tradition to its natural conclusion and thereby laying the way for Kant and post-Kantian philosophers like Hegel.

However, this misunderstands both the positive content of Hume’s philosophy and its originality. The central motivation of Hume’s philosophy is to provide a theory of human nature . As Barry Stroud (another modern interpreter of Hume’s) puts it, his work constitutes an “expression of the unbounded optimism of the Englightenment…[the] outline of which… represents for many people the very paradigm of what it is to have an explanation of something”.

A Scientific Investigation of Human Nature 

Hume’s first work of philosophy, in which many of his most important ideas are articulated, was A Treatise on Human Nature . The subtitle of this work reads: “An Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects.” For Hume, ‘moral subjects’ aren’t just limited to questions of ethics, but any questions about human beings (as distinct from natural objects or processes). Hume is interested (indeed, singularly fixated) on asking what makes human beings special without prejudice or a priori assumption.

Scientific investigation is clearly set against the approach to human nature Hume finds in ancient philosophy and literature, which casts it in the most positive terms. It should be no surprise that one contemporary critique of Hume, which comes from Frances Hutcheson, was to the effect that Hume’s account of human beings lacked warmth, given that he was trying to do for human beings the thing that natural sciences had, on his account, already done for the rest of nature: “anatomize” it, and explain all of the various phenomena within it. The relevant features of a scientific theory that Hume was especially concerned with included the requirement that it be all-encompassing (it should leave no phenomenon out), and that it should rely on only a few, basic underlying principles. It is these principles Hume is after, and not a full account.

Hume on Essence 

When he came back to make some amendments to the Treatise , Hume said:

“I pretend not to have here exhausted this subject. It is sufficient for my purpose, if I have made it appear, that, in the production and conduct of the passions, there is a certain regular mechanism, which is susceptible of as accurate a disquisition, as the laws of motion, optics, hydrostatics, or any part of natural philosophy”.

Moreover, his ambition was to follow the method of science – what he calls the “experimental method.” The method should be based exclusively on “careful and exact experiments, and the observation of those particular effects, which result from its different circumstances and situations.” Hume is self-conscious about the limitations of applying an “experimental method” to human beings, calling for a “cautious observation of human life” on the grounds that one can’t easily manipulate the objects of experimentation.

Of course, as the history of the human sciences goes to show, manipulation of various kinds may actually be possible. In spite of this perceived limitation, Hume seems quite set against “invention” in the realm of human sciences, against “essences.” One thing which Gilles Deleuze attempted to show in his analysis of Hume was that essence, or at least something functionally similar, is reinserted into Hume’s philosophy subtly at different points. One such point is in Hume’s analysis of the passions (on which more will be said shortly) as universal.

The Possibility of Philosophy

Now, Hume’s focus on empiricism might seem to force the question of what he thinks he is doing. Surely, he should really be doing something more “empirical,” like psychology or sociology. Philosophy is necessarily a priori , involving the litigation of meanings, concepts, logical relations etc.

Two rejoinding questions present themselves. Firstly, is philosophy necessarily a priori ? And secondly, is there a firm distinction to be drawn between the empirical and the a priori ? Of course, these are open questions, but they should be sufficient to at least problematize this particular critique of Hume. The Humean focus on creating a science of human nature runs deep. He was especially struck by the power of Isaac Newton’s thought, and elements of Hume’s theory of ideas demonstrates this. For Hume, simple perceptions leave us with simple ideas, which in turn can be used to construct complex ideas. Why do we call certain ideas to mind?

Why are some ideas related to one another? Hume’s answer is that there are “principles of association,” which sound an awful lot like gravity:

“​​Here is a kind of attraction , which in the mental world will be found to have as extraordinary effects as in the natural, and to shew itself in as many and various forms…so far as regards the mind these are the only links that bind the parts of the universe together or connect us with any person or object exterior to ourselves. For as it is by means of thought only that anything operates upon our passions, and as these are the only ties of our thoughts, they are really to us the cement of the universe, and all the operations of the mind must, in a great measure, depend on them.”

Is this an analogy or something more literal? Perhaps it’s something even more fundamental than that, a claim about the way in which things in general relate to things in general, the idea that the empirical worldview relies on the existence of relations or forces which cannot themselves be observed to make sense of the coherence of things.

Hume and Hutcheson

To return to an earlier point about Hume’s originality, it is worth noting that Hume himself really doesn’t seem to see himself as pushing any so-called “empiricist tradition” to any so-called “logical conclusion”: “My principles are also so remote from all the vulgar sentiments on the subject, that were they to take place, they would produce almost a total alteration in philosophy: and you know, revolutions of this kind are not easily brought about.”

What arguably makes Hume a brilliant, revolutionary thinker is how he adds to this picture of ideas, which are of a qualitative piece with impressions, in order to create a convincing picture of human thought overall. To do this, he takes a great deal of inspiration from Francis Hutcheson’s theory of aesthetics and ethics. To simplify greatly, Hutcheson believes that we are naturally disposed to make ethical or aesthetic judgments (such as they are) based not on anything rational as such, but based on feelings. We do not make inferences from features of beauty or goodness, but rather we infer from our feelings.

Expanding Hutcheson’s Theory

Hume’s theory involves a radical extension of Hutcheson’s conception of feeling into a far wider sphere of human existence – indeed, almost every cognitive and intellectual element of our lives turns out to be, at its root, an expression of feeling rather than reason.

For Deleuze, this idea is also at the heart of Hume’s theory of ideas – ideas are, in a certain sense, if not themselves passions then definitely passional (that is, they are in some sense directed by the passions, or interpreted by them). In any case, Hume holds that “belief is more properly an act of the sensitive, than of the cogitative part of our natures” (laicization of belief).

Rationality, on several definitions, seems to imply something intentional, whereas for Hume we arrive at our beliefs about the world due to a combination of our perceptions and the principles of human nature. We find ourselves thinking something just as we find ourselves noticing that something is red. The question then is how and why we come to believe the things we believe.

A Critique of Human Freedom

Hume’s treatment of reason extends to a critique of human freedom: “Reason is …the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them”. This is blatantly the reversal of how reason is normally conceived of, wherein reason is associated with control, autonomy, the instigation of processes in an intentional way.

Hume’s isn’t just opposing a conventional conception of human beings as fundamentally rational animals. He is also taking a shot at his philosophical forebears: Descartes , for instance, who claims in his Meditations that there are “two general modes [of thinking], the one of which consists in perception, or in the operation of the understanding, and the other in volition, or the operation of the will”, and elsewhere in the Meditations claims that “the will is absolutely essential for our giving our assent to what we have in some manner perceived”. This view takes human beings out of the causal order of the universe, and offers us the possibility of freedom. Hume denies it.

Human Nature and Reason

There appear to be two things happening side by side: the analysis of human nature and deflation of the foundational claim of reason. Hume tends to begin by analyzing the supposed ‘foundation in reason’ for a certain belief, showing (or claiming to show) that there is none, and then moving on to a more positive analysis of the passions. Generally, this is not an argument founded on Hume having a better explanation, grounded in passion, to explain a certain phenomenon. It is an attack which comes in two separate movements, first the negative, then the positive.

This idea of “dual focus” in Hume is common even among the various different modern interpretations of his work. For Deleuze , the two things are passions , desires, and what is imminent (ideas also) on one side, against what is determined by the principles of association on the other. These principles gain their own transcendence – that is, our capacity to go beyond what is given directly in experience is affirmed not by reason, but by the various principles of association.

Hume’s work remains thought-provoking and challenging for modern philosophers, and interpretative disagreements are entirely reasonable. What is undeniable is that Hume’s positive, original thought deserves the greater attention it is gradually receiving.

5 Facts About David Hume’s Empiricist Take on Human Nature

By Luke Dunne BA Philosophy & Theology Luke is a graduate of the University of Oxford's departments of Philosophy and Theology, his main interests include the history of philosophy, the metaphysics of mind, and social theory.

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New Hypothesis for Human Evolution and Human Nature

Domestic animals, like this water buffalo in Viet Nam, live intimately with humans and provide renewable resources to humans that communicate well with them. Photo by Greg Luna.

It's no secret to any dog-lover or cat-lover that humans have a special connection with animals. But in a new journal article and forthcoming book, paleoanthropologist Pat Shipman of Penn State University argues that this human-animal connection goes well beyond simple affection. Shipman proposes that the interdependency of ancestral humans with other animal species — "the animal connection" — played a crucial and beneficial role in human evolution over the last 2.6 million years.

"Establishing an intimate connection to other animals is unique and universal to our species," said Shipman, a professor of biological anthropology. Her paper describing the new hypothesis for human evolution based on the tendency to nurture members of other species will be published in the August 2010 issue of the journal Current Anthropology .

In addition to describing her theory in the scientific paper, Shipman has authored a book for the general public, now in press with W. W. Norton, titled The Animal Connection . "No other mammal routinely adopts other species in the wild — no gazelles take in baby cheetahs, no mountain lions raise baby deer," Shipman said. "Every mouthful you feed to another species is one that your own children do not eat. On the face of it, caring for another species is maladaptive, so why do we humans do this?"

These carvings are from ivory and have been dated to between 30,000 - 36,000 years old, making them the oldest artworks in Europe. Photo by H. Jensen. Copyright: University of Tübingen.

Shipman suggests that the animal connection was prompted by the invention of stone tools 2.6-million years ago. "Having sharp tools transformed wimpy human ancestors into effective predators who left many cut marks on the fossilized bones of their prey," Shipman said. Becoming a predator also put our ancestors into direct competition with other carnivores for carcasses and prey. As Shipman explains, the human ancestors who learned to observe and understand the behavior of potential prey obtained more meat. "Those who also focused on the behavior of potential competitors reaped a double evolutionary advantage for natural selection," she said.

Over time, Shipman explains, the volume of information about animals increased, the evolutionary benefits of communicating this knowledge to others increased, and language evolved as an external means of handling and communicating information through symbols. "Though we cannot discover the earliest use of language itself, we can learn something from the earliest prehistoric art with unambiguous content. Nearly all of these artworks depict animals. Other potentially vital topics — edible plants, water, tools or weapons, or relationships among humans — are rarely if ever shown," Shipman said. She sees this disproportion as evidence that the evolutionary pressure to develop an external means of storing and transmitting information — symbolic language — came primarily from the animal connection

The oldest stone tools are from Gona, Ethiopia, where they were used to cut up animal carcasses 2.6 million years ago. Photo by Sileshi Semaw.

Shipman concludes that detailed information about animals became so advantageous that our ancestors began to nurture wild animals — a practice that led to the domestication of the dog about 32,000 years ago. She argues that, if insuring a steady supply of meat was the point of domesticating animals, as traditionally has been assumed, then dogs would be a very poor choice as an early domesticated species. "Why would you take a ferocious animal like a wolf, bring it into your family and home, and think this was advantageous?" Shipman asks. "Wolves eat so much meat themselves that raising them for food would be a losing proposition."

Shipman suggests, instead, that the primary impetus for domestication was to transform animals we had been observing intently for millennia into living tools during their peak years, then only later using their meat as food. "As living tools, different domestic animals offer immense renewable resources for tasks such as tracking game, destroying rodents, protecting kin and goods, providing wool for warmth, moving humans and goods over long distances, and providing milk to human infants" she said.

Domestication, she explained, is a process that takes generations and puts selective pressure on abilities to observe, empathize, and communicate across species barriers. Once accomplished, the domestication of animals offers numerous advantages to those with these attributes. "The animal connection is an ancient and fundamentally human characteristic that has brought our lineage huge benefits over time," Shipman said. "Our connection with animals has been intimately involved with the evolution of two key human attributes — tool making and language — and with constructing the powerful ecological niche now held by modern humans."

Pat Shipman: 919-542-5539, [email protected] Barbara Kennedy (PIO): 814-863-4682, [email protected] Kevin Stacey (Journals Division of the University of Chicago Press): [email protected] , 773-834-0386

Reason and Meaning

Philosophical reflections on life, death, and the meaning of life, summary of kant’s theory of human nature.

Immanuel Kant (1724 – 1804) is generally considered one of the three or four greatest philosophers in the Western tradition. He lived his entire life in Konigsberg, Prussia which is today the city of Kaliningrad in Russia. Kant’s philosophy is extraordinarily complex but perhaps he was most interested in reconciling Christianity with the science of the Enlightenment.

Kant was quite an accomplished scientist who “developed the nebular hypothesis, the first account of the origin of the solar system by accretion of the planets from clouds of dust.” His education in the humanities was equally impressive “embracing Greek and Latin philosophy and literature, European philosophy, theology, and political theory.” In his university education, he was particularly influenced Leibniz, a rationalist who believed that pure reason could prove metaphysical claims, especially those about the existence of god and that we live in the best of all possible worlds. Thus both empiricism and rationalism influenced him, and he spent a lifetime trying to reconcile them.

Kant was the deepest thinker of the European Enlightenment who believed “in the free, democratic use of reason to examine everything, however traditional, authoritative, or sacred … He argued that the only limits on human reason are those that we discover when we scrutinize the pretensions and limitations of reason itself …” His emphasis on the inquiry into the nature and limits of human knowledge meant that epistemology became for him the heart of philosophy. He turned his critical analysis to science, metaphysics, ethics, judgments of beauty and to religion.

Metaphysics, Epistemology, and the Limits of Human Knowledge – A fundamental theme of Kant’s philosophy “was to explain how scientific knowledge is possible.” He argued that “science depends on certain fundamental propositions, for example, that every event has a cause and that something (substance) is conserved through mere change.” These principles cannot be proved empirically but they are not tautologies either. [In Kant’s language they are synthetic a priori propositions—propositions whose predicate concept is not contained in its subject concept but related, and propositions whose justification does not rely upon experience.]

An example of a synthetic proposition is “all bachelors are unhappy.” An example of an a priori proposition is “all bachelors are unmarried.] Many philosophers of the time including Leibniz and Hume, as well as many philosophers today deny the possibility of such propositions.] Kant believed that these synthetic a priori propositions “can be shown to be necessary conditions of any self-conscious, conceptualized perceptual experience of an objective world. [In other words we can’t have experiences of the world without assuming these propositions are true.]

In the first part of his magisterial  Critique of Pure Reason , Kant sets out his theory of how we perceive everything in space and time, and the twelve categories or forms of thought and associated concepts like substance and causality. This leads to the justification for Kant of empirical (a posteriori) knowledge derived from sense experience, and analytical (a priori) knowledge derived from pure reasoning. And, as we saw in the previous paragraph, he also argued that there exist synthetic a priori propositions. Kant famously argued that much of mathematics is in this 3rd box, although many philosophers would argue that mathematics is analytic. Most importantly Kant accepts the existence of an independently existing material world. [Kant is arguing, among other things, that mathematical and scientific knowledge are justified.]

Still Kant argued that how we perceive this external world depends on how the inputs of that world are processed by our cognitive faculties and sensory apparatus. This implies that our cognitive intuitions may “distort our representation of what exists.” And this means we know the world only as it appears to us, not as it really is. Furthermore things as they really are may not even be in space and time! [Thus Kant’s Copernican revolution. We are at the center of our reality, structuring it with our minds; our minds are not passive receptors of the external world.]

In the second part of the  Critique of Pure Reason , Kant argues that “reason tries to go beyond  … its legitimate use, when we claim illusory metaphysical knowledge … ( human souls, the universe as a whole, uncaused events, and God.) Such claims go beyond the bounds of human knowledge … we can neither prove nor disprove them; we cannot even acquire probable evidence for or against them.” Thus a decisive break with natural theology. [For Kant theology is not an intellectually justified discipline.] Of course many theologians have responded with fideism (religious belief is justified by faith) but, as we will see, Kant is not in this tradition.

Theory of Human Nature – As we have seen Kant was basically interested in reconciling morality and religion with science. How does human nature fit into this project? For Kant perceptual knowledge depends upon the interaction of “sensory states caused by physical objects and events outside the mind, and the mind’s activity in organizing these data under concepts …” Thus humans interact with the world with their senses and their understanding (reasoning and language.) Reason also plays a special role for human beings—they use it to integrate all their knowledge, in “the scientific search for a unified theory of all natural phenomena.”

In addition to abstract theorizing, reasoning also plays a practical role in Kant’s philosophy. We are agents who do things, who act in the world. But there are not merely causes for what we do, as there are for our non-human animal brethren, we also give reasons for what we do. Sometimes the reason we do thing involves our desires which Kant labels “hypothetical imperatives.” [If you want to be a lawyer, then you ought to go to law school.] But at other times, Kant argues, the reasons for our actions command us independent of our desires as in our moral obligations. We ought to tell the truth or help others even if lying or ignoring them would be in our self-interest. These are examples of what Kant calls “categorical imperatives.” [You ought not lie, even if lying would satisfy some desire you have.] Reason recognizes these categorical imperatives which are the basis of ethics [suicide and lying are bad; helping others and developing your talents are good.]

So what does all this mean for his conception of human nature? Are we dualistic or merely material? Kant leaves the question open, it is irresolvable. [Whether the soul is immortal or not; whether we are free or determined, whether the world in infinite or not, all of these Kant calls “antinomies of reason.” That is we can use reason to support either view.] As for our biological bodies, we are just as determined as other things in the physical world, but because we are rational beings we can act for reasons. We can thus be free. [If we are entirely material beings, this solution probably doesn’t work.]

Of course while we can see that my reasons give me a reason to act, it is hard to see how rational propositions give me a reason to act. [The latter is what the categorical imperative claims.] Kant does not solve the problem of freedom—nobody else has either—but he does believe that we act “under the idea of freedom.” That is from a practical we necessarily presuppose that we are free. [And the ethical point of view presupposes freedom as well.]

Diagnosis – Selfishness And Sociality – Kant contrasts non-human animals, who have desires but no sense of duty, and humans who do experience tension between their (self-interested) desires and the demands of the practical reason to do their duty. But how can the interests of others, motivate us to act? Why should we be moral?

Kant argues that reason demands that we be moral. It is our duty to act according to morality rather than our self-interested inclinations and passions. Rational persons should conform their (free) wills to the moral law, which is known to reason through general maxims like the categorical imperative. Being moral is a matter of having the right intention—to follow the moral law—and has nothing to do with the consequences of our actions. We follow the moral law—for example by telling the truth—and disregard whatever consequences may follow. But many people subordinate moral duty to their inclinations, to the desire for their own happiness. Such persons violate the moral law.

As for the source of this immorality, Kant believes on the one hand that we freely choose to disregard our duty, but on the other hand the propensity to evil is somehow innate. The extent to which our evil tendencies are exacerbated by society is open to debate. [What we can say is that something is amiss in human life. We have a duty to others, but we are naturally self-interested.]

Prescription: Pure Religion and Cultural Progress – How then do we overcome selfishness and act morally? Kant dismisses self-interested reasons to be moral—you will be punished if you don’t act appropriately—because such reasons are inconsistent with virtue. For Kant, the only thing that is completely good is a good will , the desire or intention to do good for the sake of goodness alone. [While Kant believes the moral law ultimately comes from God, he doesn’t emphasize this. Rather he appeals to human reason’s ability to know the moral law. Furthermore, Kant argued vehemently in the first critique that the traditional arguments for God’s existence were worthless. Yet he will not rely on fideism either. So where does he go?]

What Kant takes with one hand he gives back with another. While pure reason cannot support the existence of his god, the practical reason can justify beliefs in God, the immortality of the soul, and free will. When we act we presuppose that we are free and saying one ought to do something implies that they can. What then of God and immortality? Kant argues that the highest good, the end of all our striving, is a combination of moral virtue and happiness.

Yet morality is not always rewarded in this life and the evildoers often flourish while the good do not. Thus we need god to rectify the situation. God’s perfect justice will reward and punish. [This is basically the moral argument for God’s existence. 1) There is a moral law, thus 2) there must be a moral lawgiver.] It is important that we have hope that moral virtue will be rewarded, although we are moral not because of these possible rewards, but because being moral is our duty. While Kant did not take a lot of religious imagery literally, but he did hope that justice somehow prevailed. He also thought that practical reason justifiably invokes

Kant also “envisaged continued progress in human culture through education, economic development, and political reform, gradually emancipating people from poverty, war, ignorance, and subjection to traditional authorities … he was a supporter of egalitarian and democratic ideals … [and] he sketched a world order of peaceful cooperation between nations with democratic constitutions.” And Kant expressed hope that human potential could be gradually fulfilled. He was a consummate Enlightenment thinker.

ADDENDUM: BASIC IDEAS IN KANT’S PHILOSOPHY (not from the book we are discussing )

WHAT CAN WE KNOW? (addressed in The Critique of Pure Reason )

• Mathematics? Yes, it is legitimate knowledge
• Natural science? Yes, it too is legitimate knowledge
• Metaphysics? No, we can’t know “things-in-themselves,” we can’t know the nature of ultimate reality, reason isn’t justified in making metaphysical claims.

Still, we want a complete picture of reality, despite the fact that theoretical reason can’t give it to us. This is in part because there exist “ antimonies ” of reason, the most important of which are the existence of: God; freedom; and immortality. Reason cannot resolve such questions. So what do we do when it comes to action? The realm where ethics applies?

WHAT SHOULD WE DO? (addressed in The Critique of Practical Reason )

First we must presuppose the existence of God and freedom for there to be ethics. Since we have reason and free will we can choose between actions, unlike non-human animals who are guided by instinct. For Kant moral actions are actions where reason leads, rather than follows, instincts. Put more simply we ought to conform our free will to the moral law; that is our duty. The moral law ultimately comes from God but Kant doesn’t stress. Instead, he emphasizes that reason can overcome our impulses, the non-rational, instinctive part of our nature, by exercising reason.

Thus Kant says that the only thing that is completely good is a good will, one that tries to conform itself to the moral law which is its duty. This presupposes that we are free to do this. But what do we do when we freely conform our will to the moral law when doing our duty? Kant, as an Enlightenment rationalist, assumes that there must be some rational representation of the moral law that we can all understand. And when he thinks about say a physical law, one of the key characteristics of true laws of nature are that they are universal. Thus, the moral law must be characterized by its universality. Just as an equation of the form a(b+c) = ab + ac is universally applicable and needs only to be filled in by numbers, the moral law must have an abstract formulation to be filled in by actions.

This leads to the 1 st formulation of the categorical imperative (CI) , which is the moral law as understood by reason. This law is binding on all rational being and is such that violation of the moral law also violates reason. He gives four examples of actions that demonstrate how the CI works: lying, suicide, helping others and developing your talents. These are all absolute duties, however, the first two are perfect duties while the second two are imperfect duties. This means that satisfying one’s duty in the first two cases can be specified exactly, whereas in the other two there are various ways of doing one’s duty. But the key idea is that one’s duty is the rational action, the one that reason demands. Rational actions are moral actions; irrational actions are immoral ones.

Of course, we can act contrary to reason because we are free, just like we can say that 2 + 2 = 6, or round squares exist, or that there are married bachelors. But we violate reason when we say these things just as the bank robber violates reason when he robs banks. Why? The reason is the same as it is for suicide or lying. One cannot consistently universalize the maxim of one’s actions when one engages in such actions. For example, a bank robber wills a world where:

• banks exist as the necessary prerequisite of the bank robbery intended and
• banks don’t exist as the obvious consequence of bank robberies.

This is Kant’s essential idea. It violates both reason and ethics to say that I can have a drink of your beer but you can’t have a drink of mine.

To summarize, ethical conduct is that in which the will conforms to the moral law which it understands as the CI and this is its duty. Does this lead to happiness? Not necessarily. Kant says if you want to be happy follow your instincts; if you want to be moral follow the constraints of reason. In this way, you should see that Kant doesn’t care about the consequences of actions. Do your duty and whatever happens, happens. So the key is your intention which should be to follow the moral law. Note that this intention is internal to the moral agent, not external like consequences are. You should give someone the correct change—in Kant’s example—because it’s the right thing to do, not because its good for business.

Kant’s criticisms of utilitarianism warrant a separate discussion. Utilitarian moral theories evaluate the moral worth of action on the basis of happiness that is produced by an action. Whatever produces the most happiness in the most people is the moral course of action. Kant has an insightful objection to moral evaluations of this sort. The essence of the objection is that utilitarian theories actually devalue the individuals it is supposed to benefit. If we allow utilitarian calculations to motivate our actions, we are allowing the valuation of one person’s welfare and interests in terms of what good they can be used for. It would be possible, for instance, to justify sacrificing one individual for the benefits of others if the utilitarian calculations promise more benefit. Doing so would be the worst example of treating someone utterly as a means and not as an end in themselves.

Another way to consider his objection is to note that utilitarian theories are driven by contingent inclinations in humans for pleasure and happiness, not by the universal moral law dictated by reason. To act in pursuit of happiness is arbitrary and subjective, and is no more moral than acting on the basis of greed, or selfishness. All three emanate from subjective, non-rational grounds. The danger of utilitarianism lies in its embracing of baser instincts while rejecting the indispensable role of reason and freedom in our actions.

WHAT CAN I HOPE FOR? – I’ll leave this question for another day. But what I hope is that life is meaningful, that it all somehow works out for the best, that a better reality comes to be. Here is my own poem to describe the situation:

And so the world goes on, good gods perpetually sleeping, good people perpetually weeping, and waiting, for a new world to dawn.

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4 thoughts on “ summary of kant’s theory of human nature ”.

Kant is considered to be one the the three or four greatest philosophers in Western tradition. His philosophy was extremely complex but that could be due to his interest in reconciling Christianity with the science of the Enlightenment. He developed the nebular hypothesis which is the first account of the origin of the solar system by accretion of the planets from clouds of dust. Empiricism and rationalism influenced him which resulted in him trying to reconcile them.

Kant argued that the only limits on human reason are those that we discover when we scrutinize the presentations and limitations of reason itself.

A fundamental theme of Kant’s philosophy was to explain how scientific knowledge is possible. We can’t have experiences of the world without assuming propositions are true. Kant had this theory of how we perceive everything is in space and time. Empirical knowledge is derived from sense experience. Whereas, analytical knowledge is derived from pure reasoning. Kant argued that mathematics and scientific knowledge belong in the third box due to the reason that they can be justified.

We know the world as it appears to us, not as it really is. I personally think that this is strong. My niece was born with cataracts. She didn’t have surgery to correct her vision until she was 7 years old. That means that for the first seven years of her life, she was experiencing the world through her perception. After the eye surgery, she began to experience the world in a different perception. She didn’t know the world any other way until her eye surgery. We know the world as it appears to us. Humans interact with the world with their senses and their understanding. Humans use reason to integrate all their knowledge.

Kant says that we act under the idea of freedom. We are rational beings, so we act for reasons unlike other things in the physical world.

your objection to Kant doesn’t make sense, in fact it contradicts itself.

‘Most importantly Kant accepts the existence of an independently existing material world.’

Rather loosely stated — Kant isn’t so very impatient with the notion of items of empirical knowledge as ‘representations’, or with the notion of empirical objects themselves as ‘representations’, given that they are not so very separate and not so very not-connected. After all, elsewhere here you are explaining how ‘our minds are not passive receptors of the external world’.

‘although many philosophers would argue that mathematics is analytic’

Many philosophers that you have read? Somebody who perhaps, does usually play a central role in textbooks or introductory courses on the philosophy of mathematics? Because then I might be able to guess who we are talking about here, except no. In sum, I think the matter is interesting enough to be worth tarrying over a bit. I suggest this on Kant’s behalf, here. Have you considered how right he is?

‘An example of a synthetic proposition is “all bachelors are unhappy.” An example of an a priori proposition is “all bachelors are unmarried.] Many philosophers of the time including Leibniz and Hume, as well as many philosophers today deny the possibility of such propositions.]’

Leibniz and Hume perhaps failed to observe the distinction, though also I don’t think they encountered it in so many words, if we are talking about ‘analytic’/’synthetic’. One may read that there are precursors of the contemporary notion of the analytic in Leibniz, and in Hume, in their talk of something-or-other. I am similarly wondering whether the thread is finer, when I encounter ’empiricism and rationalism influenced him, and he spent a lifetime trying to reconcile them’. Maybe they influenced him and so forth, but did he encounter these words, so that he would know what you are talking about in so many words? I know that there is, we might agree, this broad definition that accords with the derivation of the term ’empiricism’ from whatever, but Kant isn’t so very present in such a discussion, necessarily. Actually, if you give me one definition, I can give you a second and a third, with which I am familiar, but no interesting ones. I find all of Kant interesting.

thanks for the interesting thoughts and clarifications. Let me think on them. Thanks again.

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What Are We? Three Views on Human Nature

James N. Anderson Associate Professor of Theology and Philosophy Reformed Theological Seminary, Charlotte

The following is adapted from the first of two lectures—the Fifth Annual B. B. Warfield Lectures—delivered in October 2016 at the invitation of Erskine Seminary and First Presbyterian Church, Columbia, SC.

One of my enduring childhood memories of Sunday evenings in the Anderson household is the sound of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 floating across the living room. This was not, as you might assume, because my parents were attempting to cultivate in their progeny a love of classical music, but because they were avid viewers of Antiques Roadshow . The show first aired in the United States in 1997, yet—like so many other great ideas—America stole it from Britain, where it has been broadcast regularly since 1979.

The basic idea behind Antiques Roadshow is that members of the public bring to a traveling roadshow what they believe to be antique items—cabinets, chairs, coins, vases, and so on—and have the items examined and appraised by experts who identify the items, give background information on their provenance, and place a value on them. In sum, the specialists scrutinize each item and give an estimate of how much it might fetch at auction.

Antiques Roadshow can be quite educational, but its popularity is undoubtedly due to its entertainment value, and that value peaks whenever there’s a large discrepancy between the owner’s expectation and the specialist’s evaluation. The woman who discovered a dusty old book in her attic is informed that it’s one of a handful of first-edition copies published in the 17 th century and now worth several hundred thousand dollars. Meanwhile, the fellow who brought what he believed to be a rare Ming Dynasty vase, which he was planning on selling in order to fund a very comfortable retirement, is excruciatingly deflated when the expert points out three tiny but significant words etched under its rim: Made in Taiwan . And all of this is captured on camera for our viewing pleasure!

There is a central question that drives viewer interest in Antiques Roadshow , a question posed of every item discussed:

• What is its value? (Put baldly: What is it worth?)

In order to answer that central question, however, two prior questions must be asked and answered:

• What kind of thing is it? (The question of its nature .)
• Where did it come from? (The question of its origins .)

One cannot determine the value or worth of an item without knowing something about its nature and its origins. And once those three questions have been answered, a fourth is raised:

• How should I treat it? (What should I do with it?)

If it’s a first-edition copy of a rare 17 th -century book, you should treat it very carefully! You should respect it. You should protect it. If on the other hand it’s a cheaply manufactured piece of pottery with nothing whatsoever to distinguish it, well, perhaps you could put it in the garage as a receptacle for all those random nuts and bolts you daren’t throw away.

I. Anthropology and Worldviews

The topic of this lecture is anthropology : the study of mankind. But what, you might ask, does Antiques Roadshow have to do with anthropology? Just this: the four questions mentioned above can also be applied to us —to human beings.

• What value or worth do we have?
• What are we by nature?

Where did we come from?

How should we be treated?

Moreover, these four questions are logically connected in much the same way that they’re connected for antique items brought to the roadshow. We cannot know how to treat other human beings without knowing the value of human beings—the worth of a human life. We cannot understand the value of human beings without knowing something about our nature and our origins .

Consider for a moment some of the great cultural and moral debates of our day. Abortion. Euthanasia. Racial equality and civil rights. Sexual morality and sexual liberty. Religious freedom. Environmentalism and animal rights. Embryonic research. Genetic enhancement. Gender identity. All of these issues—and many others—turn on the issue of anthropology; that is to say, on the nature and origins of human beings.

Furthermore, there are multiple anthropologies competing within our culture today, which leads to polarized positions on these ethical debates. But anthropologies don’t come into existence ex nihilo . They aren’t self-sustaining and free-floating. Every anthropology is situated within, arises from, and finds its justification within a broader worldview—a wider perspective on ultimate reality, ultimate truth, ultimate meaning, and ultimate value.

In the remainder of this essay, then, I propose to consider three prominent worldviews and the competing views of human nature that they embody and entail. Why three? Here I wish to take a cue from philosopher Alvin Plantinga by suggesting that in the West today there are “three main competitors vying for spiritual supremacy: three fundamental perspectives or ways of thinking about what the world is like, what we ourselves are like, what is most important about the world, what our place in it is, and what we must do to live the good life.” [1] Plantinga labels these three perspectives “Christian theism,” “perennial naturalism,” and “creative anti-realism.” I propose to simplify matters by referring to them (in adjusted order) as Naturalism, Postmodernism, and Christian Theism. The main burden of the following discussion will be to argue that in the end only one of these worldviews—Christian Theism—can supply any firm basis for human dignity and human rights. But before launching into that discussion, I should say a brief word about worldviews in general.

Roughly stated, a worldview is an overall philosophical outlook on the world: an all-encompassing perspective on everything that exists and matters to us. A worldview reflects both descriptive and normative content: it concerns not only how things are , but also how things ought to be . We can talk about a worldview as the perspective of an individual person: his or her fundamental guiding beliefs, assumptions, ideas, and values. We can also talk about a worldview as a generalized type, as I will be doing here.

The content of a worldview can be carved up in different ways, but to keep matters relatively simple we will consider the three aforementioned worldviews under four headings:

• Its view of God
• Its view of ultimate reality
• Its view of truth and knowledge
• Its view of goodness and value

The first two of the four would fall under the traditional label of metaphysics , the third under epistemology , and the fourth under ethics or axiology . A worldview—or “world-and-life view” as some prefer to say—will include views on all four areas. Moreover, those positions will largely determine the anthropology embedded in that worldview.

II. Naturalism

Naturalism may be defined very simply as the thesis that only the natural universe exists . Naturally enough, this raises the question of what counts as ‘natural’—an issue that turns out to be vigorously debated even among professing Naturalists. A fairly standard definition would be as follows: something is natural if and only if it can be studied and explained, at least in principle, by the so-called natural or empirical sciences (i.e., physics, chemistry, and biology).

A common view among Naturalists is that all of the sciences can be reduced to physics: biology can be explained in terms of chemistry, which in turn can be explained in terms of physical entities and properties. On this view, Naturalism turns out to be some version of physicalism. As one Naturalist philosopher, Alex Rosenberg, succinctly put it: “The physical facts fix all the facts.” [2]

Within the Naturalist camp we may also distinguish between hard and soft Naturalists. Soft Naturalists allow for the reality of minds and mental entities (such as thoughts and ideas) provided that they are metaphysically grounded in physical entities (e.g., the mind is something non-physical that is somehow generated by a physical brain). Hard Naturalists, in contrast, will deny altogether the reality of minds and mental entities. On that view, strictly speaking, there are no such things as minds. (One has to wonder what’s going through their minds.)

Naturalism is closely associated with scientism , the notion that scientific knowledge is paradigmatic for human knowledge, and (in its more radical forms) that scientific knowledge is the only true knowledge.

Perhaps the most memorable summary of the Naturalist worldview can be credited to Carl Sagan: “The cosmos is all that was, or is, or ever will be.” While the number of card-carrying Naturalists may be relatively small, the basic worldview of Naturalism exerts a disproportionately strong influence on academic and culture today.

Let us consider Naturalism as a worldview, under the four headings previously stated.

Naturalism’s view of God

Simple—there is no God! God is a supernatural being and therefore God does not exist. Naturalism, by definition, rejects the idea of any transcendent supernatural cause, from which it follows that the universe is either eternal or came into existence spontaneously without any prior cause (both positions are defended by Naturalists today).

Naturalism’s view of ultimate reality

The ultimate reality is physical, material reality . Everything that exists ultimately has its basis in physical entities: matter and energy. As Rosenberg puts it, “The basic things everything is made up of are fermions and bosons. That’s it.” [3]

It follows that the universe is ultimately impersonal in nature; there is no moral agent or rational intellect behind the universe. Nature is ultimately non-moral , non-rational , and non-personal . It’s all just physical stuff. Consequently, there is no ultimate meaning or purpose in the universe. In the final analysis, nothing exists for a reason and nothing happens for a reason. It’s full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Naturalism’s view of truth and knowledge

Naturalists will typically affirm that there is such a thing as objective truth. Only science, however, can really deliver that truth. Objective truth means hard scientific facts —or what can be reduced to such facts. If your belief cannot be scientifically established, it isn’t knowledge. If your belief presupposes any non-natural entities, it isn’t true. It can’t be true. On this view, truth and knowledge range over natural entities alone, and they’re circumscribed by the methods of science. [4]

Naturalism’s view of goodness and value

Whatever goodness is, it has nothing whatsoever to do with God. Goodness isn’t defined by the nature, character, or will of God. If there is such a thing as goodness, it must be defined in wholly naturalistic terms. This puts Naturalists in something of a predicament, because it is widely recognized that science cannot deliver value judgments. Science tells you how things are , not how things ought to be . (The same applies generally to ordinary sense experience.)

Nevertheless, Naturalists have offered various theories of goodness and value, particular moral goodness and moral value. Here I will mention only two theories of moral goodness popular among Naturalists:

• Subjectivism : moral goodness is defined in terms of human preferences . On this view, something is good if I prefer or desire it. Thus, if I prefer company to solitude, then company is good . (There are, of course, collectivist versions of this theory, according to which something is good if we —whoever ‘we’ happens to be—prefer or desire it.)
• Utilitarianism : moral goodness is defined in terms of human pleasures . As the classical principle of utility has it, morality directs us to promote “the greatest happiness for the greatest number.”

With this bare-bones outline of the Naturalist worldview in place, let us turn our attention to anthropology. Recall the four questions delineated in the introduction:

• What kind of beings are we? (The question of human nature .)
• Where did we come from? (The question of human origins .)

Once we grasp the essentials of the Naturalist worldview, answers to these four questions follow relatively straightforwardly.

What kind of beings are we?

We are physical, material beings. There is no soul distinct from the body. When my body ceases to exist, I cease to exist. [5] We are, in essence, biological organisms: especially advanced, complex mammals.

Naturalism has its own creation myth, and it’s an evolutionary narrative. The story begins with cosmological evolution—the natural formation of a stable physical cosmos containing stars and planetary systems. The next chapter features chemical evolution—the chance formation of the first organic materials, and, eventually, the first living cells with reproductive powers. The door is thus opened to biological evolution: the progression from single-celled organisms to complex multi-celled life forms by primarily Darwinian processes. Finally, following the emergence of consciousness and intelligence, the story shifts to cultural evolution: the development of language, social practices, art, technology, and so forth.

For the Naturalist, all evolutionary processes are entirely natural and therefore undirected . As George Gaylord Simpson famously put it, “Man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind.” [6]

What is our value? What are we worth?

Objectively speaking, we have no value, simply because there is no objective value on the Naturalist view. A human organism has no more intrinsic worth than any other arrangement of atoms. On the Naturalist view, no particular arrangement of atoms is objectively better or worse than any other arrangement. The universe just is what it is!

Consequently, the only way one can ascribe value to a human being is subjectively . You are valuable for me if you are valuable to me . Your worth is what you are worth to me . Value and worth will be entirely in the eye of the beholder.

For a strict, consistent Naturalist, this is a question without an answer. It’s a pseudo-question, because it’s not a question that has any objective scientific answer. From a thoroughgoing Naturalist perspective, the question “How should we treat a human being?” no more has a right or wrong answer than the question “How should we treat a pile of leaves?”

Nevertheless, Naturalists will inevitably run it through their various moral theories. Subjectivists would answer thus: we should treat people as we prefer or desire to treat them. (The immediate problem with this answer should be obvious to anyone with a high-school level knowledge of twentieth-century history.) Utilitarians, meanwhile, would answer thus: we should treat people so as to promote the greatest happiness for the greatest number. On this view, we should note, any human may be treated as a means to an end, namely, the happiness of other humans. An individual human has merely instrumental value toward a collective end. On neither of these views—Subjectivism or Utilitarianism—are there any absolute duties or constraints on human actions.

III. Postmodernism

I should begin this section with an apologia for my use of the label ‘Postmodernism’. No doubt the terms ‘postmodern’ and ‘postmodernism’ have been used to describe a multitude of different movements and viewpoints. On some definitions, every single person in the West today is postmodern! [7] Here I propose to use the term simply as a covering label for various philosophies that share some common themes. These themes arguably originated with Immanuel Kant, can be traced through Friedrich Nietzsche and the twentieth-century Existentialists (such as Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre) and find their most radical expression in the Deconstructionist movement and other anti-realist spin-offs. They are also found, however, in much cruder forms across the cultural landscape today.

The essence of Postmodernism, as I envisage it here, may be expressed in this proposition: there are no absolute norms and there is no objective reality . There are no absolute standards over us, to which we are all subject—and that includes moral standards. Moreover, there is no objective reality in the following sense: there is no reality that exists independently of us, that is to say, independently of our thoughts and our language. At any rate, there is no relevant and accessible reality that exists independently of us.

On the Postmodernist view, what is ‘real’ and what is ‘true’ are ultimately defined by us. This stance is sometimes called constructivism : ‘reality’ and ‘truth’ are constructed by us, in the way that we impose or project our thoughts, our ideas, our values, and our goals onto our experiences and thereby (in effect) create the world.

In terms of academic influence, Naturalism is most dominant in the sciences, whereas Postmodernism tends to hold sway in the humanities. Having previously considered Naturalism as a worldview, let us now do the same for Postmodernism.

Postmodernism’s view of God

There is no God in the classical sense. There is no transcendent personal Creator who exists objectively and absolutely. The only God or gods that could exist must be at root human projections rather than independent realities. Postmodernism may appear quite religiously liberal and pluralistic, but make no mistake, it has an absolutist and exclusivist core: it simply cannot tolerate an absolute God.

Postmodernism’s view of ultimate reality

There is no ultimate reality in any absolute or objective sense. There is no ultimate reality that simply is what it is, independently of us. There are only relative realities: relative to individuals or to cultures. In one sense, then, there is no ultimate reality for the Postmodernist. But in another sense, there are multiple ultimate realities: what’s ultimate is simply what’s ultimate for you , in terms of your construction of the world.

Postmodernism’s view of truth and knowledge

Truth is not something to be discovered so much as something to be created . (Note the contrast here with Naturalism, which typically holds to the objectivity of truth.) For the Postmodernist, truth is a social construction. It arises out of the choices and preferences of human societies. In short, something is true because we have decided that it is true, either individually or collectively. We have projected a particular interpretation onto our experiences.

As for knowledge, there is no such thing as knowledge in the classical sense (roughly, a well-grounded or well-justified belief that reflects an objective reality). Postmodernists typically view ‘knowledge’ along one of the following lines:

• a myth—a throwback to a modernist pipe-dream;
• a concealed attempt to exert power over some individual or group;
• a matter of internal coherence within one’s own interpretation of the world.

Postmodernism’s view of goodness and value

There are no absolute norms; there are no objective criteria of goodness. Nothing is objectively good or bad (i.e., independently of us). Rather, if something is good, that is because we have decided that it is good. If something is valuable, that’s because it is valuable to us . Nothing has an intrinsic and objective value, simply in virtue of what it is.

With this (again bare-bones) outline of the Postmodernist worldview, let us now focus on the consequences for anthropology. The central tenet of a Postmodernist anthropology comes to this: human nature cannot be something that is defined independently of us —by the creative purposes of God, say, or by objective scientific facts. This entails that there is no objective, determinate answer to questions such as “What is a human being?” and “What does it mean to be human?” We ourselves are free to define what it means to be human, whether individually or collectively. Consequently, what we call “human nature”—if we can meaningfully speak of “human nature” at all—will be relative, fluid, and ultimately up for grabs.

In answer to our four questions, then:

Simple: we are whatever we define ourselves to be. As I’ve noted, that act of definition can operate individually or collectively, but a truly consistent Postmodernism (so I would argue) must say that it operates individually, at the level of the conscious subject.

Frankly, it doesn’t matter, except to say this: we do not find our origins in the creative act of an absolute personal God. Perhaps we evolved; perhaps we were seeded by aliens; perhaps something else altogether. It makes no difference in the end, because Postmodernism seeks to decouple human nature from any objective historical events. [8]

Our value is whatever value we ascribe to ourselves. On the Postmodernist view, humans have no intrinsic, objective, universal value. We have no value that is independent of our own preferences and judgments. If we value ourselves highly, then we are highly valuable; if we don’t value ourselves highly, then we aren’t highly valuable. Moreover, these valuations are subject to variation from person to person, from culture to culture.

This is a particularly tricky question for a Postmodernist, for there are no absolute norms that could supply an objective answer. The typical answer given, however, is that we should treat others with pluralistic tolerance and without judgment. Inclusivity is in! Exclusivity is out!

So much for the Postmodernist worldview and anthropology. Before turning to the third worldview—Christian Theism—I wish to make a few cursory observations about how Naturalism and Postmodernism differ with respect to their view of human nature, as well as what they have in common.

At first glance, Naturalism and Postmodernism appear to be polar opposites. Naturalism presents a depressingly low view of human beings: we are basically highly-evolved animals, which in turn are just complex arrangements of physical particles. (As Marvin Minsky, the MIT professor and pioneer of artificial intelligence put it, humans are essentially “meat machines.”) Postmodernism, on the other hand, ascribes to us virtually God-like power and authority. We are the creators of the world—indeed, the creators of ourselves! We are the ultimate authors of reality. The world is what it is, and has the meaning and value that it does, because of us —because of our thoughts, our words, our activities.

At a deeper level, however, these two worldviews must be regarded as close siblings; indeed, as non-identical twins conceived in the same womb. For these two worldviews are united in denying the existence of a transcendent personal Creator, and thus united in affirming human autonomy while rejecting any absolute reference point for truth, reason, meaning, purpose, and value. And for this very reason, neither of these secular worldviews can give an adequate account of the objective value of human beings and human life.

Naturalists can be (and have been) quite open about this. Postmodernists (as is their wont) tend to be more equivocal about it. Nevertheless, both worldviews are engaged in a kind of metaphysical alchemy: an attempt to derive meaning and value from ultimate meaninglessness and valuelessness. [9]

The dilemma for worldviews that reject a personal absolute God is precisely this: either they must make man nothing or they must make man everything. Man is either promoted to the level of deity or demoted to the level of dirt.

It seems appropriate at this point to remind ourselves of the words of Psalm 8:

O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory above the heavens… When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him? Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings [Heb. elohim ] and crowned him with glory and honor. You have given him dominion over the works of your hands… O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!

Consider how the inspired Psalmist’s anthropological reflections begin and end with the glory of God—a thoroughly theocentric vision—while encompassing a view of man that is neither demoralizingly low nor blasphemously high.

IV. Christian Theism

For the purposes of this section I will define Christian Theism as the worldview presented in and presupposed by the Bible. Each of the points of the Christian worldview I lay out below is either explicitly stated, implied, or taken for granted by the biblical authors. The reason I identify the Christian worldview with the biblical worldview is straightforward: Christianity is defined by Christ, and Jesus himself affirmed that the Scriptures were the very word of God. [10] The Christian worldview is Christ’s worldview, and the worldview of Jesus was—and is—the biblical worldview.

Such preliminaries established, let us consider some of the defining tenets of Christian Theism under the four now-familiar headings.

Christian Theism’s view of God

Needless to say, the existence of God is the most foundational presupposition of the biblical worldview. There is but one God, and that one God has definite attributes. As the Westminster Larger Catechism summarizes the matter:

God is a Spirit, in and of himself infinite in being, glory, blessedness, and perfection; all-sufficient, eternal, unchangeable, incomprehensible, everywhere present, almighty, knowing all things, most wise, most holy, most just, most merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth.

Some distinctives of the Christian view of God need to be noted here, in contrast to other monotheistic religions. God is both personal and absolute . God is both transcendent and immanent . God is both One and Many (the doctrine of the Trinity). [11] Furthermore, from this understanding of the nature of God, it follows that God is the sovereign creator of everything that is not God.

Christian Theism’s view of ultimate reality

God, and God alone, is the ultimate reality. God alone is self-existent, self-sufficient, and absolute. God is the source and author of every other reality, the definer of every other reality. Everything other than God exists only because of God. Everything other than God—every created thing—is what it is only because of God’s sovereign decree. Nothing exists independently of God in the slightest respect. All this to say, Christian Theism posits a sharp Creator-creation distinction.

Christian Theism’s view of truth and knowledge

What is the Christian view of truth? We might be tempted to say (with considerable justification) that truth is simply correspondence with reality . I suggest however that we ought to say something deeper and more consistently theocentric. Truth doesn’t exist in the abstract, independently of God. Rather, truth is grounded in the mind of God. Truth, we might say, is ultimately identical with God’s thoughts. [12] For that very reason, truth exhibits both internal coherence (because of God’s essential unity) and external correspondence (because God defines reality). [13]

As for a Christian view of knowledge, surely the first point to affirm is that God is the ultimate knower . We can have knowledge because—and only because—God has made us derivative knowers and has provided us with divine revelation and cognitive faculties fitted to appropriate that divine revelation. In other words, Christian Theism affirms a revelational epistemology .

Christian Theism’s view of goodness and value

God is good, of course, but God is not merely good. God is ‘the Good’—that is to say, God is goodness as such . On the Christian Theist view, God himself is the absolute norm—the ultimate standard of truth, goodness, and beauty. Therefore, whatever has value, has value because (and only because) of its relationship to God. Something is valuable, objectively speaking, simply because God values it and delights in it. [14] Moral goodness is grounded in God’s character and God’s will. Right and wrong are defined by God’s law, which in turn is a revelation of his righteousness, holiness, and loving-kindness.

These, in briefest outline, are some of the defining points of the Christian Theist worldview. Let us now turn from theology (in the narrow sense) to anthropology. What is the Christian Theist view of human nature? Once again we will answer by way of four distinct questions.

From a biblical perspective, the first thing to say is that we are creatures . Second, and more specifically, we are creatures made in the image of God :

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. (Genesis 1:26-27)

The significance of this biblical affirmation cannot be underestimated, and it has the most profound implications for how we view ourselves and treat one another.

Third, we should note that we are gendered creatures. “In the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” The human race is structured around a basic gender binary: man and woman. Moreover, we dare not overlook the Hebrew parallelism in this verse: man and woman are equally created in the image of God.

Fourth, we are social creatures—designed by God for community:

Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.” (Genesis 2:18)

Thus we see the creation of the woman as a fitting companion for the man, and thereafter the institution of marriage and the family. (While I wouldn’t want to overstate or overextend the point, as some theologians may have done, there’s an important sense in which human community is a created reflection of the inner divine community of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.)

Fifth, we are not merely physical creatures. We consist of both body and soul. The soul is an irreducible spiritual aspect of our being which can survive the death of the body and therefore does not merely ‘supervene’ upon the physical. [15]

Sixth, we are fallen creatures. Here I cannot improve upon the summary statements of the Westminster Shorter Catechism:

Q. 17. Into what estate did the fall bring mankind? A. The fall brought mankind into an estate of sin and misery. Q. 18. Wherein consists the sinfulness of that estate whereinto man fell? A. The sinfulness of that estate whereinto man fell consists in the guilt of Adam’s first sin, the want of original righteousness, and the corruption of his whole nature, which is commonly called original sin; together with all actual transgressions which proceed from it. Q. 19. What is the misery of that estate whereinto man fell? A. All mankind by their fall lost communion with God, are under his wrath and curse, and so made liable to all miseries in this life, to death itself, and to the pains of hell forever.

In summary: we are creatures, made in God’s image, gendered, social, both physical and spiritual, and corrupted by sin in every part.

Christian Theism offers a very distinctive and significant story of origins. Human were created by God ; more precisely, human were specially created by God. God did not create us indirectly via natural evolutionary processes. As the creation account in Genesis plainly affirms (and as scientific knowledge increasingly confirms) there is a clear ontological boundary between mankind and other animals, rather than an evolutionary continuum.

According to the biblical view, all humans are descended from one man (and one woman):

The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything. And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place… (Acts 17:24-26)

The ethical implications of this biblical monogenesis can hardly be understated—to highlight but one example, consider the pressing issues of racial equality and reconciliation. (It also has equally important theological implications for the Christian doctrines of the fall, sin, and salvation.)

What value do we have?

We have enormous value, not merely as creatures but as creatures made in the image of God. We see this illustrated in Scripture in at least two ways. First, in the institution of capital punishment:

And for your lifeblood I will require a reckoning: from every beast I will require it and from man. From his fellow man I will require a reckoning for the life of man. “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image.” (Gen. 9:5-6)

This point is underscored in the Mosaic Law by the different penalties assigned for human death and animal death. If an ox gores a man to death, the ox is put to death, but if a man kills his neighbor’s ox, the man isn’t put to death; rather, he has to make restitution to his neighbor. [16]

Secondly, we see the great value ascribed to mankind in the incarnation and the atonement. The value God places on human life is nowhere demonstrated more dramatically than in the fact that our Creator was willing to assume a human nature and make an atoning sacrifice to save human beings from an eternal hell and bring them into eternal fellowship with him. (To put the point rather pointedly: God did not take on a canine nature and make an atonement for dogs!)

It follows from the above that we ought to treat our fellow human beings with the greatest respect, dignity, and care. We should make every effort to protect and preserve human life, and to promote (as the current lingo has it) ‘human flourishing’.

Certainly we must treat our fellow humans as having immeasurably more value than animals (never mind plants). Yet at the same time, we must treat each other as fellow creatures, not as gods. We are created in the divine image, but we are not divine. We may be a little lower than the heavenly beings, but we are still lower.

Some readers might be asking at this point, “What is distinctively Christian about any of this? Shouldn’t we just call this ‘Theism’ or ‘the Theist worldview’? Don’t all monotheistic religions—at least the so-called Abrahamic ones—share the same basic anthropology?”

Those are understandable questions, but I want to challenge their premise by briefly noting some important differences between Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. [17]

Consider first the Islamic worldview. Unlike Christianity, Islam offers no doctrine of the imago Dei . The Qur’an nowhere echoes the affirmations of Genesis 1:26-27. In contrast, the Qur’an and subsequent Islamic tradition stress the absolute transcendence of God: Allah cannot be compared to anything in the creation. [18]

To be clear, my point is not that Islam reflects a low view of human beings. Consider, for example, the somewhat odd account in the Qur’an in which God, after creating Adam, commands the angels to bow down to him. When the angel Iblis (Satan) refuses to do so, God asks him why, and the reply comes forth, “Because I’m better than him: you created me out of fire and him out of dirt!” [19] Such protests notwithstanding, the idea that the angels should bow down to a human, rather than the reverse, hardly suggests a low view of mankind.

Nevertheless, the fact remains that Islam lacks a doctrine of the imago Dei and therefore humans simply cannot bear the kind of significance they enjoy in a biblical worldview. If there is any categorical distinction among creatures in the Qur’an, it isn’t between humans and animals but between believers and unbelievers . [20]

Unlike Islam, Judaism acknowledges the doctrine of the imago Dei , sharing with Christianity a commitment to the creation account in the Torah. What Judaism lacks, compared with Christianity, is a doctrine of redemption through divine incarnation and atonement. According to Christianity—and Christianity alone—the infinite God has united himself with a fully human nature, both body and soul!

Indeed, what we find in the New Testament is that the original theme of the image of God in man is transposed into a new key. The redeemed are not merely renewed to the image of God but conformed specifically to the image of Christ, the God-man. Christ is the archetypal human—the final Adam—the true Adam. And thus, through our union with Christ by faith, we are conformed to the divine image and brought into the divine life in a way that Adam never experienced.

St. Athanasius famously declared of Christ, “He became man that we might become God.” [21] Needless to say, there are orthodox and unorthodox ways to understand that statement! (Similar statements can be found among the early church fathers.) If we understand Athanasius’s aphorism along orthodox biblical lines, I believe we can understand why Christianity ascribes a dignity and value to human nature that Judaism simply cannot.

V. Conclusion

Our fundamental anthropology—our view of human nature and human origins—will inevitably have huge implications for how we view other people, how we value them, how we relate to them, and how we treat them, both individually and as a society. Moreover, our anthropology will in turn flow out of our broader worldview. The worldviews of Naturalism and Postmodernism hold considerable sway in our culture today, but they can offer no meaningful basis for human dignity, human rights, human equality, and human solidarity. They are sterile soils—nothing good can grow in them.

But to underscore once again the indispensability of a sound anthropology, consider this selection of recent news headlines:

“Woman Has Abortion Because She Couldn’t Fit Into Her Wedding Dress” “First Child Dies by Euthanasia in Belgium” “Transgender Man Gives Birth after Conceiving With Transgender Wife” “First Baby Born Using ‘Three-Parent’ Technology”

Clearly there are deep divisions and highly-polarized debates in our culture today on the most basic matters of morality and public policy. I am convinced that there can be no resolution of these issues while people hold such radically divergent views of human nature, situated in such diametrically opposed worldviews.

What then can Christians do? Reams could be written in answer to that question; I will restrict myself to one concluding observation. Worldviews cannot be imposed from the outside. They have to be planted and grounded in the heart. In reality, these divisions and debates will never be resolved without real gospel transformation. So our first priority as Christians must be what it has always been: to proclaim the gospel and pray for revival.

• Alvin Plantinga, “On Christian Scholarship,” in The Challenge and Promise of a Catholic University , ed. Theodore M. Hesburgh (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), 267–95. ↑
• Alex Rosenberg, The Atheist’s Guide to Reality (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2011), 26, 162. ↑
• Ibid., 21. ↑
• Some Naturalists find a strict scientism too narrow, but they will still affirm empiricism: one can only know what is perceived through the senses. This allows for non-scientific knowledge; on this more permissive view, science is understood to be an extension of ordinary empirical knowledge. ↑
• Richard Dawkins was once invited to express his view of what happens after we die. His answer: “We decompose.” ↑
• George Gaylord Simpson, The Meaning of Evolution , rev. ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1967), 345. One might quibble that cultural evolution is not undirected and purposeless, since it is driven by human minds, but cultural evolution presupposes the arrival of human beings on the scene. Recall that our focus here is on human origins according to Naturalism. ↑
• As someone once quipped, trying to define ‘postmodernism’ is like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall. ↑
• I think this is a fair generalization, although there are exceptions. Richard Rorty, for example, attempted to justify his anti-realist epistemology on the basis of a naturalistic Darwinian account of human origins. Rorty’s worldview thus represents an intriguing case of a Naturalism-Postmodernism hybrid. ↑
• One thinks here of Van Til’s vivid analogy of a man made of water trying to raise himself out of an infinite expanse of water by building a ladder of water. Cornelius Van Til, The Defense of the Faith , 3rd ed. (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1967), 102. ↑
• John W. Wenham, “Christ’s View of Scripture,” in Inerrancy , ed. Norman L. Geisler (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1979), 3–36; Craig L. Blomberg, “Reflections on Jesus’ View of the Old Testament,” in The Enduring Authority of the Christian Scriptures , ed. D. A. Carson (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2016), 669–701. ↑
• For a detailed exposition of these distinctives and others, see John M. Frame, The Doctrine of God (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2002). ↑
• For a philosophical defense of this view, see James N. Anderson and Greg Welty, “The Lord of Noncontradiction: An Argument for God from Logic,” Philosophia Christi 13, no. 2 (2011): 321–38; Greg Welty, “Theistic Conceptual Realism,” in Beyond the Control of God? Six Views on the Problem of God and Abstract Objects , ed. Paul M. Gould (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), 81–111. ↑
• Cf. Cornelius Van Til, A Survey of Christian Epistemology (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1969), 1–3. ↑
• And God delights in himself more than anything else! ↑
• John W. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting: Biblical Anthropology and the Monism-Dualism Debate (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1989). ↑
• Exodus 21:28-36. ↑
• I refer here to Orthodox Judaism, by which I mean that traditional branch of historical Judaism which continues to affirm biblical monotheism and the authority of the Old Testament scriptures. ↑
• Qur’an 30:27; 42:11; 112:4. ↑
• Qur’an 7:11-13. One is tempted to think that Satan might have had a point here. ↑
• See, e.g., Qur’an 98:6-7, where believers are referred to as “the best of creatures,” and unbelievers as “the worst of creatures.” ↑
• On the Incarnation, 54. ↑

Volume 2 Issue 1

May, 2017 | 114 pages

Other Articles in This Issue

• In This Issue
• Biblical Exegesis in Fourth-Century Trinitarian Debates: Context, Contours, & Ressourcement
• Trinitarian Relations in the Fourth Century

Other Reviews in This Issue

• Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels
• God’s Word Alone: The Authority of Scripture: What the Reformers Taught . . . and Why It Still Matters
• Union with Christ

Copyright © 2017 Reformed Theological Seminary

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• S. K. Runcorn

The extragalactic Universe: an alternative view

We discuss evidence to show that the generally accepted view of the Big Bang model for the origin of the Universe is unsatisfactory. We suggest an alternative model that satisfies the constraints better.

• G. Burbidge
• N. C. Wickramasinghe

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