humanity mankind essay

The Power of Humanity: On Being Human Now and in the Future

Humanity means three different things: a species; a behaviour, and a global identity. The historical relationship between these different dimensions of humanity has been elegantly discussed by the late Bruce Mazlish in his 2009 book The Idea of Humanity in a Global Era and it is important to distinguish between these three aspects of being human as we prepare to meet as a global humanitarian movement once again.

Humanity as species

The first meaning of humanity describes a particular kind of animal that biologists encouragingly call homo sapiens – or wise human – and which seems distinct from all other animals because of its powers of language, reasoning, imagination and technology. This biological and evolutionary use of the term has the same meaning as “humankind” and marks us out as a particular life form that is different to other kinds of animal and vegetative life.

The power of the human species is considerable over the non-human world. This is mainly because our intelligence has consistently invented and deployed tools and technology which means we have come to dominate the earth, and our imagination has shaped religious and political meanings around which we form competing interests and social movements.

Our tools mean we are not a simple species but always function as a hybrid species – part human and part technology – in a constantly changing mix of human and non-human components. This hybrid humanity must infuriate non-human life like lions and microbes who could easily “take us down” in a fair fight of simple life forms, but who have consistently encountered us in hybrid forms in which we merge our humanity with spears, guns, horses, cars, vaccines and antibiotics.

We operate routinely in these human-machine interactions (HMI) of various kinds. I am doing it now typing on my Macbook Air with an electric fan to keep me cool on a hot summer’s day. Our mechanization gives us exponential power and unfair advantage over non-human life forms both large and microscopic, which tend to remain simple in one form except for bacteria and viruses, our most threatening predators, which can change form relatively fast.

Our essential hybridity with other animal, plant and machine life is now in the emergent stages of a giant leap towards new forms of power which we cannot envision . New applications of biotech, robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) mean that our hybrid humanity is about to expand exponentially in a way that is already changing what it means to be human. Today’s technologists are focused hard on simplifying human-machine interfaces – different types of “dashboards” which use our five human senses and recognize human gestures so that our humanity interacts seamlessly with AI of various kinds. These interfaces will increasingly be embedded in our bodies and minds as new levels of interactivity with technology which will inevitably change the experience of being human and the power of humanity.

Technology will not just change us where we are but also change where we can be. Humanity will be enhanced in time and space but also relocated across time and space. For example, because I am on Twitter or Skype, I can already be visibly present elsewhere, speaking and responding in thousands of different places across time and space. This is radically different from my great grandmother who could only ever really be visible and engaged in one place at one time, or in two places at two times when someone far away was reading a letter from her.

This time-space compression and its resulting context collapse which began with radio and television is an ever-increasing feature of being human. Some of our grandchildren will probably be talking and listening simultaneously in a hundred different places at once in embodied replicas as holograms or humanoid drones. They will probably be fluent in all languages, move through space much faster than us and live forever on earth and in space because of biological and AI enhancements. Our machines will develop new levels of autonomy which, although created by humans, are inevitably adapted by machine learning into new forms of non-human and non-animal life.

This all means that the power of humanity as a species is about to increase dramatically because of a revolution in human-machine interaction which will see new forms of hybridity beyond our current imagining. Our human power will become even greater but what about our wisdom and the way we use this new power of humanity? In short, what about the ethics of our behaviour in our new hybrid humanity?

Humanity as ethical behaviour

We now come to the second meaning of humanity which is used to describe a certain moral value that we can see operating across humankind as kindness and compassion for one another. We can therefore understand this second meaning as the kindness of humans. [1] This humanity is our first Fundamental Principle and primary purpose in the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement and has been summarized as follows since 1965:

“To prevent and alleviate human suffering wherever it may be found (and) to protect life and health and ensure respect for the human being.”

This principle of humanity is the fundamental value at play in every Red Cross and Red Crescent worker wherever they are in the world today. If you stop one of them in whatever they are doing – taking blood donations in a major city, organizing relief in war or disaster, or negotiating with diplomats in the UN Security Council – and ask them why they are doing it, each one them should simply answer: “I am trying to protect life and health and ensure respect for human beings.”

This is humanity in action and it is the power of this humanity – humane behaviour towards other humans – that we seek to celebrate, improve and increase in our Movement’s 33rd International Conference in December.

Humanity in this sense is human behaviour that cares for other humans because of a profound and universally held conviction that life is better than death, and that to live well means being treated humanely in relationships of mutual respect. This commitment is a driving principle in the rules of behaviour in the Geneva Conventions, whose 70th anniversary falls this year, and in the Disaster Laws recommended by the Movement to ensure better disaster prevention, preparedness and response around the world.

The Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement is at once symbol, advocate and embodiment of this ethic of humanity and so is constantly working emotionally, judicially and practically to increase humanity as a dominant form of human behaviour in extreme situations. This is not easy, of course, because the human species is ethically ambivalent and not simply driven by an ethic of humanity. We are also deeply competitive, cruel and violent as a species and often believe that some things we have constructed are much more important than particular human lives. The reason that the call for humanity is so loud is because our record of inhumanity is so long, and the power of inhumanity is often greater than the power of humanity.

And what of humanity’s behaviour towards non-human life? In our era of climate crisis, environmental degradation and multiple species extinction, the moral principle of humanity is looking increasingly self-referential and incomplete as a primary ethic for the human species. Quite simply, it is not enough for humans only to be kind to humans.

The principle of humanity as currently expressed is a classic example of speciesism in ethics. It cares only about one species – our own. We may claim that the principle of humanity is a niche ethic for calamitous human situations which rightly trumps wider ethical considerations in extremis, but this is neither true nor realistic. It is not true because the principle of humanity already takes account of the natural environment in the laws of war and the norms of disaster response and so recognizes the importance of non-human life in its own right and as means to human life. Nor is it realistic at a time when our biggest existential challenge as a species arises from our relationship with the non-human world around us.

The principle of humanity must, therefore, keep pace with the ethical evolution of humanity (the species) and needs to expand its purpose and behaviour towards non-human life. This currently includes all animal and vegetative life. But, in future, it is increasingly also likely to include non-human machines like robots and AI which may develop their own levels of consciousness, feelings and rights as they increasingly merge with humanity – the species and its ethics – in hybrid forms.

Here time is pressing. We may have little time to work out what it means to apply humane behaviour within non-human machines and towards non-human machines. This means agreeing how non-human machines and new models of human-machine interactions can behave with humanity, especially as new weapons systems. It will also mean thinking about how we should show humanity to increasingly machine-like humans and human-like machines.

We may have even less time to think hard about what it means to show humanity to non-human environments and animals in the Movement’s humanitarian norms and work. At the moment, our humanitarian action can be profoundly inhumane to non-human life, neither protecting nor respecting it.

With all this uncertainty about what exactly it may mean to be human in future and the persistent record of our inhumanity to each other and towards non-human life, what sense does it make to try to aspire to a single global identity as billions of human beings?

Humanity as global identity

Over the last 200 years, a third sense of humanity has increasingly referred to a single global identity across all human societies. This is not a simple biological identity but the idea that as a conflicted species we can and must build a single global political identity in which every human has a stake. This global identity is a meta identity which transcends smaller identities shaped by culture, nation, class, political opinion and religion.

The purpose of this single political humanity is to build a human “we” in which can share a common species consciousness as one group sharing a single planetary “home” and so work together on common problems and common opportunities that face the whole of humanity.

This political sense of being a single global group is experiencing push-back today as a broad-based politics of ethnic and economic nationalism expresses scepticism about globalism of all kinds. This political turn sees many people asking national politicians to think “more about us here” and “less about them over there”. But our Movement continues to argue that it is important to imagine and build a global sense of humanity because our common human problems are intense and interdependent, and can only be solved internationally not just nationally.

There are five truly existential problems that we all share as members of the human species, and always have done. Threats from each one can be significantly reduced if we work together to solve them in the spirit of Dumas’ Three Musketeers: “all for one and one for all”. This is what we try to do at the International Conference. Our perennial five problems are:

1. The problem of our violence as a species as it plays out terribly in war and violent crime. 2. Our struggle for fairness and our desire to reduce inequalities between us. 3. Our predators and their threat to our health which now take mainly microscopic form as infectious microbes, or chronic and autoimmune diseases in which we attack ourselves. 4. Our relationship with the non-human environment and its impact on human survival. 5. The promethean risk of our creativity and how our technological inventions help and harm as they change the world around us and redefine humanity itself in new hybrid forms.

These five deep species problems will all be raised in various forms at our Conference in December. They will require a powerful response by all humanity, with an ethic of humanity, to ensure the survival of humanity.

[1] Oxfam plays on the relationship between humankind and kind humans in their ongoing global campaign “Be Humankind” which was launched in 2008.

• ICRC, Artificial intelligence and machine learning in armed conflict: A human-centred approach , 6 June, 2019
• ICRC Report: The potential human cost of cyber operations , 29 May 2019

Other blog posts by this author

• Masculinity and War–let’s talk about it , 15 March 2018
• Impartiality and Intersectionality , 16 January 2018
• Habitat III: The smartest city is a safe city , 24 October 2016
• Remember the millions of people living in urban violence , 4 July 2016

Artificial intelligence in military decision-making: supporting humans, not replacing them

13 mins read  Humanitarian Action / Humanitarian Principles / Identity / The most read blog posts in 2019 Wen Zhou & Anna Rosalie Greipl

War and what we make of the law

10 mins read  Humanitarian Action / Humanitarian Principles / Identity / The most read blog posts in 2019 Cordula Droege

Great piece Hugo. I must say, the term “non-human machine” is a head-scratcher. It looks like a redundancy, but suspect you have a very good reason for using it.

On a more serious note, I think we need to be careful not to lump all push-back on the ideal of humanity as an expression of selfish nationalism or a rejection of our global family. The way we think and define humanity in humanitarian circles seems embedded in a (Western?) tradition of individual rights and freedoms. I don’t think that is necessarily a problem. But we should think about how this might translate into, for example, an approach to impartiality that obscures the needs of and undermines the social capital of a community via its systemic reduction of crisis response to the individual or household.

Oddly enough, I just blogged about this earlier today. Your upcoming conference seems a good place to reflect not just on the power and ideals encapsulated by our principle of humanity, but how we might comprehend and mitigate potential negative consequences of its (all too human?) operationalization.

I admire your aspirations for a global identity for humanity.

I bring good news that we already have such an identity. We are all the creation of One God, Allah, the Most Merciful. He Created us for a purpose, and we undoubtedly will return to Him and be held to account for how we used the life He gave us.

Allah the Exalted says: “O people, worship your Lord who created you and those before you, so that you may become God-fearing.” (Qur’an 2:2)

I humbly invite you to apply your rare intellect and your inspiring concern for humanity to a study of the Qur’an, in which you might find answers. Islam teaches that humanity will only succeed when we surrender to the will of God.

Thank you, Marc. You’re right “non-human machine” sounds weird. I suppose I was reaching for “human-like (but not human) machine”. It’s all quite complicated still to me….

And, yes, I share your caution on an overly-individualistic application of humanitarian action. We must always balance an individual caseload with a collective response. I look forward to reading your blog on this. Please tell us where it is. I gave a paper on the increasing “individualisation”of the civilian at Edinburgh University earlier this year and have lost it, rather annoyingly! If I find it, I will write it up……

Thank you, Sharriff, for your beautiful call (dawa) for me to embrace Islam. I have heard it and know well that our modern secular commitment to a single global identity as human beings is founded in a more original faith and its religious insight.

And I will keep reading the Quran as I study all faiths, and we will see what happens.

The tragedy is that humans are likely to accord ‘human’ rights to machines which are made in their own image while continuing to abuse the other animals who have as much (and, indeed, arguably more) right to planetary resources than the human animal. Every day, other animals have their lands and other resources stolen by humans. Every second of every day and night other animals are imprisoned without cause…tortured mentally and physically, and then murdered by an animal which is far too full of its own importance. We should respect these other animals, treating them as we wish to be treated ourselves…It’s time to get off our ‘human supremacist’ pedestals and to show (a very great deal) of humility towards the other animals whose home this planet also is. One final observation, the more I understand about other animals and the more I see of the human animal, the more I feel that the only thing that distinguishes us from other animals, is our capacity to destroy the planet.

Thanks for the article and the focus on the different dimensions of being human.

I really like this part: “(…) it is important to imagine and build a global sense of humanity because our common human problems are intense and interdependent, and can only be solved internationally not just nationally.”

I see in those lines a call for true solidarity, and to be aware of the reality that we as humanity have a common origin and a common destiny, that we are all in the same journey together and we cannot simply escape from each other closing borders or even closing our eyes and minds to difficult realities other humans are experiencing.

I see also a call for multilateralism and multistakeholder approach for the solution of the different challenges we face as human family.

Recently, I read the book The Good Immigrant. There is one article from Salena Godden, British poet, recalling our global citizenship and expressing: “United as a people we are a million majestic colours, together we are a glorious stained glass window. We are building a cathedral of otherness, brick by brick and book by book. “

Our species has developed a lot in the past years. New treatments, advanced equipment are there to solve those issues which were impossible to take care of. The development can be seen through medical, automotive and other industries. Thank you very much. I would like to know more about this! Smile makeover Malden

A really well-written and meaningful article! I found a small motivation in myself to write about change as I read your blog… Life is about growth, but many people remain the same without even sparing a thought even for a moment. Many people think that they have come up to a level by which nobody can demand anything from them. They are repulsive and unchangeable even if it is for their own good. If people aren’t adamant to change, they can see more of themselves which can help in the overall development of society, humanity and also the earth. Here are my thoughts about the change that needs to be brought about in humanity as a whole. https://thebetterhumanity.com/why-do-we-need-change/ Hope you like them! Thanks

Interesting insights- thanks very much for sharing them, and for reading!

Great piece Hugo. I must say, the term “non-human machine” is a head-scratcher. It looks like a redundancy, but suspect you have a very good reason for using it. Thanks for your nice post . I hope I will see this type of post again in your Website

its very nice fantastic

Human population densities are approaching that of animals in factory farms; thus humanity may end up in ‘factory cities’, whatever that might mean.

The power of humanity? Humanity is a disgusting species, more akin to a virus or plague than any mammalian species. Selfish, greedy, destructive, dishonest, disloyal and with only rare exceptions to the contrary. The planet will be far better off once we’re gone. I live completely off grid now, and there are signs across my property here in Europe spelling it out, in no uncertain terms, what will happen to anyone, anyone, who steps foot on my land. The more time I spend working the land, with my dogs, the less I like, and have time for, humanity. I’m ashamed to be a part of it.

Excellent piece but I have to leave a comment, I live in northeast of England and was raised and live in a working class community, my view of being human and humanity is almost alien to how you perceive it, I had to double check my self, television, schooling, religion and parents world views is what really shapes us into being, i was born in 1980, and if I speak honestly I see myself being of a loving nature from nature all equal in value. 1 law, do not cause harm to others willingly. We are everything and nothing, I wasn’t taught this but it’s built into our dna, it has to be, I see surfering and pain voilence mainly from television and media, what isn’t taught which should be primary is how to use our full brain potential, and energetic body system, I know it as kundalini and pineal activation, and from here we can operate from a super position, ie quantum. Even with all this confusion and old Newtonian way of thinking, inherently i see the majority existing with all the creators creations extremely well, for we know deep down we are one.. all information is in this space and time. It should be taught because a lot of people know how. everything is conscious, all is mind, mind if the all. There is solid foundations in place to build upon metaphysically. The metaverse already exists. So I don’t know what zuckerberg and co are creating, we need transparency and a universal language to communicate, so as to not be tricked, conned, confused by double speak and countless meanings of words, hood winked into thinking were something else. Have trust and faith in ourself we are made with a Divine spark within us, thank you to anyone who takes the time to read this, love and harmony to all

Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts Michael! Sending love and harmony back your way. Best, Lizzie

Leave a comment

Click here to cancel reply.

Email address * This is for content moderation. Your email address will not be made public.

Your comment

A former US listening station on Teufelsberg hill, Berlin. Photo by Lorenzo Maccotta/Panos Pictures

What awaits us?

Humanity’s future remains as unthinkable as the still-uncolonised galaxy or the enduring mystery of our own births and deaths.

by Jennifer Banks   + BIO

In 2003, Edward Said wrote in the wake of the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 and in the context of the United States’ war on terror that ‘humanism is the only, and, I would go so far as saying, the final, resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history.’ The moment, he felt, was ‘apocalyptic’, and the end was indeed near for him; he died of leukaemia later that year.

So why was it humanism that he held to so tightly as war and sickness cinched time’s horizon around him? Humanism, an intellectual and cultural movement that emerged in Renaissance Europe emphasising classical learning and affirming human potential, had been subject to decades of critique by the time Said was writing this. Among its many detractors were postcolonialists who argued that humanism’s elevation of a particular kind of human – Eurocentric, rational, empiricist, self-realising, secular and universal – had provided thin cover for the exploitation of large swaths of the world’s population.

But Said, one of the founders of postcolonial studies, hadn’t given up on the term, despite its imperialist entanglements. He imagined a humanism abused but not exhausted, an - ism more elastic and plural, more subject to critique and revision, and more acquainted with the limits of reason than many humanisms have historically been. Humanism, he argued, was more like an ‘exigent, resistant, intransigent art’ – an art that was not, for him, particularly triumphant. His humanism was defined by a ‘tragic flaw that is constitutive to it and cannot be removed’. It refused all final solutions to the irreconcilable, dialectical oppositions that are at the heart of human life – a refusal that ironically kept the world liveable and the future open.

At stake in his defence was not only the survival of the humanistic fields of study he had devoted his academic career to, but the survival, freedom and thriving of actual people, including those populations that humanisms had historically excluded. Various antihumanisms had gradually been eroding humanism’s stature within the academy, but it was humanism, he believed, with its positive ideas about liberty, learning and human agency – and not antihumanist deconstructions – that inspired people to resist unjust wars, military occupations, despotism and tyranny.

Humanism, however, fell further out of vogue in the two decades that followed. Humanities enrolments dropped dramatically at universities, and funding for departments like comparative literature, women’s studies, religion, and foreign languages got slashed. Increasingly, however, it wasn’t just the inadequacies of any - ism that were the problem. It was the subject at the heart of humanism that came under widespread attack: the human itself. Given that history could be read as a catalogue of human greed, blindness, exclusions and violence, the future seemed to belong to someone – or something – else. The humane in humanism seemed to be missing. Alternative ideologies like antihumanism, transhumanism, posthumanism and antinatalism seeped from the fringes into the mainstream, buoyed by their conviction that they might offer the planet or even the cosmos something more ethical , more humane even, than humans have ever been able to. Humanity’s time, perhaps, was simply up.

In his book The Revolt Against Humanity: Imagining a Future Without Us (2023), the American critic Adam Kirsch identifies the contested line between humanists and non-humanists as one of the defining faultlines of our political and cultural moment. The debates between them can feel merely semantic, the stuff of graduate seminars, but the revolt against humanity is likely to have major implications for our future, Kirsch argues, even if its prophecies about our imminent extinction don’t come true. ‘[D]isappointed prophecies,’ he writes, ‘have been responsible for some of the most important movements in history, from Christianity to Communism.’ Anyone committed to the prospect of a liveable future should pay close attention to what’s going on here.

This requires more than a passing glance; it demands the kind of careful, comparative critique that Said believed humanism inculcated in both its academic practitioners but also, importantly, in any concerned citizen of the world. To understand how a humanism like Said’s might be the only and final ‘resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history’, it is helpful to do some comparison readings.

I might have never put too much stock in a term like humanism if I had not read around in the transhumanist literature. I came to this work while researching a book on birth that explored the relationship between birth, death and the question of a human future. Does humanity have a future? Do we deserve one? What will that future look like? The answers to those questions will be determined by many forces – technological, economic, political, environmental and more – but also by how we experience and think about our own births and deaths. Despite large areas of convergence, humanists and transhumanists can end up with wildly different visions of our future, based on dramatically different understandings of birth and death, as one can see by comparing how a novelist (Toni Morrison) and a philosopher (Nick Bostrom) have explored these themes. Morrison offers us a prophetic celebration of Earthly, ongoing, biological generation and a future that allows for human freedom, while Bostrom points us toward a highly controlled surveillance world order, organised around a paranoid fear of human action, and oriented toward the pristine emptiness of outer space. Which future, we should ask ourselves, would we willingly choose?

Let’s look first at Morrison’s vision. Although she refused to identify as any ‘ist’, Morrison powerfully modelled the kind of tragic and yet affirmative humanism Said espoused. Her work, like his, bore witness to humanism’s failures, testifying to some of humanity’s vilest instincts. But she still affirmed human existence and believed in our innate capacity to participate in the ongoing and even miraculous unfolding of reality, generation after generation. This conviction was powerfully expressed in her Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities delivered in Washington, DC in March 1996.

Her lecture ‘The Future of Time: Literature and Diminished Expectations’ starts with a dire assessment: ‘Time, it seems, has no future.’ Time, an entirely human concept, ‘no longer seems to be an endless stream through which the human species moves with confidence in its own increasing consequence and value.’ Instead, humans had become increasingly adept voyagers of deep time; we could think back thousands of years, far beyond the Coliseum and Pharaohs, acutely aware of the gifts and burdens our histories have bestowed upon us. It had simultaneously and paradoxically become impossible, she observed, to think forward more than a couple of generations. Our imaginations stumble beyond the year 2030 ‘when we may be regarded as monsters to the generations that follow us.’

How had this happened?

Eden is not humanity’s future, after all, but its deep, organic, mythic past

The possibility of a nuclear apocalypse, she reminds her readers, had existed for long enough and with such intensity that there ‘seemed no point in imagining the future of a species there was little reason to believe would survive.’ Secularism, she believed, was also to blame for these shrunken horizons. It was in the modern, secularised West where progress and change had been ‘signatory features’ that the outlook was dimmest. Religious ideas about life after death had become associated with naive superstition and intolerance in such societies. The modern human imagination had been trained instead ‘on the biological span of a single human being’. Rather than this awakening us to the richness of our embodied lives, it had initiated those strange attempts at escape into the recesses and ‘outer space’ of deep time.

Against these foreclosures of the future, Morrison issued a daring wager: history was ‘about to take its first unfettered breath’. She challenged her listeners to allow the years 4000 or 5000 or even 20000 to hover in their consciousness. And she catalogued a variety of novelists – Umberto Eco, Leslie Marmon Silko, Toni Cade Bambara and Salman Rushdie, among others – whose work was ‘race inflected, gendered, colonialised, displaced, hunted’ and who had courageously imagined a future for humanity. Their bright hopes paradoxically grew out of centuries of ancestral dehumanisation – a dehumanisation that had well attuned them to the reality of human limitations. The relationship between human possibility and human limits was, for her, the crux of literature. Through literature, these novelists had communicated their ‘unblinking witness to the light and shade of the world we live in’.

Although her lecture begins with time ‘narrowing to a vanishing point beyond which humanity neither exists nor wants to’, the lecture ends with Eden, the garden in which humans began the hazardous project of human embodiment in the Hebrew Bible. It’s a curious evocation for her to have ended on. Eden is not humanity’s future, after all, but its deep, organic, mythic past. Eden is furthermore not where Eve gave birth to her sons, creating a first human link in the generational lineages that follow. Childbirth happens in exile, after humanity’s epic fall, and it’s entangled with the curse set on Eve for her wilful disobedience. At the same time, God encourages his exilic creatures to ‘be fruitful and multiply’, to stretch their ancestral lines hopefully into the future. Birth is both a blessing and a curse in Genesis; it is a perennial opportunity to plant and bear new fruit, but it can happen only outside paradise, constrained by the consequences of human error.

Still, Morrison concludes, quoting the novelist William Gass, ‘There are “acres of Edens inside ourselves.” Time does have a future. Longer than its past and infinitely more hospitable – to the human race.’

I n setting Morrison’s critique and prophecy in relief, against the background of simultaneous counter-movements in the culture, we can begin to see the acuity and power of her arguments. Morrison ended with the image of a generative garden, but over the next three decades Earth’s actual gardens would be ravaged at a pace unprecedented in human history. Over this same period, even as the threat of imminent nuclear war receded from the forefront of public consciousness, new technologies were rapidly developing that would, emerging transhumanists argued, pose exponentially larger threats to humanity than those posed by nuclear weapons or environmental degradation. All these threats were anthropogenic, the result of human actions. Sentient life had reached a threshold; it would either evolve into more intelligent, self-optimised, wise and moral forms, or it would probably destroy itself within centuries, if not sooner. For all their doomsday predictions, many of these same transhumanists believed that these emerging technologies, if guided by careful, coordinated oversight, could create a future in which human suffering and poverty could be eradicated. Humankind was merely in its infancy; trillions of people might still be born.

Around the time Morrison delivered her lecture, a Swedish graduate student based in London got interested in an ‘Extropy’ online discussion group focused on closely related themes. The group had come together in the late 1980s around a shared interest in transhumanism, eventually founding what they called the Extropy Institute. Like Morrison, the Extropians critiqued the contemporary focus on the biological limits of a single human life, and the thinking that foreclosed the possibility of eternal life. Unlike her, they challenged ‘entrenched dogmas concerning the inevitability of death’ and projected ‘an unlimited lifespan’ made possible by the removal or transcendence of ‘traditional, genetic, biological, and neurological limits to the pursuit of life, liberty, and boundless achievement.’

Where Morrison pessimistically saw a future contracting, they optimistically saw one expanding. Where she hopefully wagered on a human future, a future that not only contained humans but that was hospitable to them, the Extropians were betting on a different story of survival and ongoing generation, one that might evolve past the biological human entirely. Boundless expansion and self-transformation would happen not in the cities we live in, they believed, nor in the human bodies we’d been born into, but ‘here, in cyberspace, or off-Earth’.

To have any human future at all, argued Bostrom, we’ll need to wrest control of evolution

That Swedish student who joined Extropy was Nick Bostrom , now a bestselling philosopher, director of the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford, and a thinker who has influenced such intellectual luminaries as Peter Singer and Stephen Hawking, and such business leaders as Elon Musk and Bill Gates. He made headlines in early 2023 for racist comments he’d posted via the Extropian listserv in 1997, a time and place in which he says contributors were having ‘freewheeling conversations about wild ideas’. In a series of academic papers and public presentations over the following decades, Bostrom articulated a less freewheeling transhumanism than that expressed by the early Extropians – a transhumanism characterised as much by fear as by feverish anticipation. Yet, for all its carefully worded and amply sourced delivery, this body of work has consistently exhibited an aversion to many forms of biological human life that can lead in quite dangerous directions.

Bostrom has been called a eugenicist, a broad label he repudiates while admitting that ‘I would be in favour of some uses and against others.’ His work, however, has long and unabashedly emphasised the upsides of careful and selective human breeding, a selectivity he believes could be favourable to our species collectively and in the long term. In the paper ‘The Future of Human Evolution’ (2004), he argued that, in order to have any human future at all, we’ll need to wrest control of evolution. Technological advancements, he warned, could set in motion ‘freewheeling evolutionary developments’ that might make possible the unlimited enhancements of human life, but they could also ‘lead to the gradual elimination of all forms of being that we care about’.

The potential dystopian catastrophe on the horizon is not so much that we will merge with machines or even be replaced by machines, but that these will be the wrong kinds of machines, machines without any of the consciousness, altruism, meaning or purpose we associate with being human. They would endanger what he calls ‘eudaemonic living’ and such ‘useless’ behaviours, ‘flamboyant displays’ and ‘hobbyist interests’ as joking, writing poetry, hosting parties, taking vacations, wearing fashionable clothes, and playing sports. None of these activities offer much competitive, evolutionary advantage; they are fitness inefficiencies. While eudaemonic agents are busy writing poetry and taking their vacations, the more single-mindedly competitive non-eudaemonic agents, either human or transhuman, will likely be expropriating the matter, space and sunlight they need to survive.

Evolution’s default trajectory probably runs toward this dystopian future, Bostrom gambles, but we should resist that trajectory; the eudaemonic agents, even if they don’t stand any evolutionary chance, are valuable. We want those human agents or values in our future. Existence would be less without them. This is the humanism that runs through the transhumanism Bostrom develops, but it is consequentially different than the humanism Morrison articulated, and the distinctions deserve close scrutiny.

T o begin with, Morrison and Bostrom have very different understandings of what death is and how it might be experienced. Morrison, again, had criticised secularism for shrinking down human life to an exclusively biological scale. At the same time, she confronted and even accepted death as a biological limit. Life goes on after death, she believed, but the dead affirm human life more than they transcend it or reject it, as the ghosts who haunt the living in her novels make clear.

These weren’t just abstract propositions for her. In 2015, she told a reporter about a near-death experience she’d had decades earlier. ‘I left my body and I was only eyes and mind,’ she reported. ‘I could think and I could see. I didn’t try to speak because I was so fascinated with this experience.’ That death felt like a liberating weightlessness, and as much as she didn’t want to revert to weight, she tried to return to her body because she ‘had kids’ whom she needed to get back to. Death and the afterlife were where her responsibilities to the living easily trumped the liberatory weightlessness of a bodiless intelligence.

In contrast, the transhumanist project is one in which biological death ultimately no longer exists as a limit. Survival and longevity, both individual and collective, are the goals, as is evidenced in many transhumanists’ belief in a future of uploaded minds but also by their interest in cryonics. Through cryonics, our individual bodies and their intelligences can be preserved. But the preservation of human life is also a shared, collective project. If we do survive as a species, Bostrom predicts that it will be as a proactively protected minority among a vast proliferation of intelligent agents. Our continuing existence will be subsidised by a tax on the non-eudaemonic agents; we’ll be afforded an ‘affirmative action’ that is put in place by a deliberate ‘social sculpting’ of conditions.

Morrison’s and Bostrom’s parallel accounts of birth also reveal clashing understandings of what a human life is. Biological birth is constitutive of the human experience for Morrison. It is central to her work. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), begins in the doomed pregnancy of an 11-year-old girl who has been raped by her father, and her last novel, God Help the Child (2015), ends in the hopeful pregnancy of a young woman with a painful family past. In the middle of her oeuvre sits Beloved (1987), a book with one of the most incandescent birth scenes in literature, a scene followed by a terrible sequence of events. Birth in her work is creaturely, embodied, gendered, graphic, bloody, sexual and pleasurable. Her characters grasp the miracle and beauty of their own births, but they also struggle with birth’s fraught contexts and bodily costs.

A technocratic class could be strongly if selectively pro-natal

It’s on the topic of childbirth that the distinctions between Morrison’s understanding and Bostrom’s are most stark. Like Morrison, Bostrom grasps that a human future depends not only on the survival of existing people but also on the birth of new sentient beings. Our human future, he has argued, is limited both by people’s disinterest in having children, but also by the slowness of biological reproduction, which involves close to a year of gestation in another person’s body followed by roughly 15 years until sexual maturation. If people truly wanted to maximise their reproductive capacities, he argues, they’d be donating as much of their sperm and eggs to banks as humanly possible. Or they’d stop using any forms of birth control.

If cultural evolution, however, could progress more quickly than biological evolution, Bostrom posits that a ‘dominant meme set favouring plentiful offspring and opposing all forms of birth control’ might emerge. Technology is often associated with programmes intent on reducing the number of births – through, say, birth control, sterilisations or abortions – but here we can see how a technocratic class could be strongly if selectively pro-natal. Technology, Bostrom argued, could reduce birth’s biological costs and limits, and open the possibility of our boundless proliferation. Reproduction could become asexual and instantaneous. Most mating rituals – such ‘flamboyant displays’ as sports, poetry, joking and dancing – would no longer serve any evolutionary function and would likely be replaced by something like auditing firms that assess our reproductive fitness. In such a future, birth would not necessarily involve the emergence of newborn, undeveloped people. We could acquire the capacity to reproduce ourselves immaculately, making adult duplicates that would be constrained by no maturational latency. This, it seems, would be a pro-natalist world without sex, pregnancy or children – a reality in which we’d be like both God and Adam in Genesis, creator and created unified at last, free of any pregnant, cursed and paradise-wrecking Eve.

Bostrom’s solution to safeguarding the human ‘thing’ amid these reproductive revolutions involves wresting control of evolution and preventing the emergence of mutations that would heavily favour non-eudaemonic life. For digital uploads, this could be done through a series of ‘verifications’. For biological uploads, it could be done by scanning for mutations with advance gene technologies and by reproductive cloning. If this amounts to a sweeping eugenics project focused on saving humanity from itself, Bostrom seems reconciled to its moral downsides.

To oversee such an ambitious and complex project, he argues, humanity would need a ‘singleton’, a ‘global regime that could enforce basic laws for its members’. This singleton would be coordinative and stable, and its rule uncontested. It could take different forms – democratic or dictatorial, moral or machine – but it would absolutely depend on transparency, on being able to see into the lives of all sentient beings, to observe their actions but also such intimate details as their genetic codes.

In the paper ‘The Vulnerable World Hypothesis’ (2019), he provides further clues as to what such a ‘High-tech Panopticon’ might look like. Everyone would be fitted with a ‘freedom tag’, he explains, an appliance ‘worn around the neck and bedecked with multidirectional cameras and microphones’. This would be a crucial piece of ‘preventive policing’ in a system of ‘turnkey totalitarianism’, which would of course come with its own considerable risks. But those risks just might be worth it, he challenges his readers to see, if they can save us from the threat of massive civilisational destruction wrought by one of our fellow humans gone rogue.

If this is our future, do we really want to live to see it? In Morrison’s words: ‘No wonder the next 20 or 40 years is all anyone wants to contemplate.’

T he word ‘colonise’ comes up a lot in the transhumanists’ writings; they dream of colonising outer space – a place that appears empty and ripe for possession. But the global surveillance regime Bostrom imagines also entails an invasion of every corner of our inner lives as well. Here we can see how far we have travelled from Said’s postcolonial humanism, or Morrison’s humanism of the displaced, both of which always prioritised the rights of individual human actors, balancing them with responsibility, care, weight and limits, but never losing sight of freedom’s constitutive role in any sane society.

Transhumanism may well be the wave of the future; we are surely several steps along its path already. In such a future, Bostrom’s ‘eudaemonic agents’ might read Morrison’s lecture as yet another disappointed prophecy, but one that remains strangely resonant. Her humanism of the displaced would accrue eerie relevance after the entire human species is colonised and left to linger on as a curious species of useless hobbyists, subsisting on the altruistic but reluctant patrimony of superintelligent, non-biological beings.

But the future remains before us, as unthinkable as the farthest reaches of our still-uncolonised galaxy, or the startling mystery of our own births and deaths. I like to believe there’s still time to salvage whatever sane humanisms we can from the wreckage of modern history, to practise Said’s ‘exigent, resistant, intransigent’ arts, and to vindicate Morrison’s prophecy. The future, I hope, will remain hospitable to our species and to our children. The year 2030, the one that Morrison said our imaginations stumbled beyond, beyond which ‘we may be regarded as monsters to the generations that follow us’, is now just six short years away.

Political philosophy

C L R James and America

The brilliant Trinidadian thinker is remembered as an admirer of the US but he also warned of its dark political future

Harvey Neptune

Progress and modernity

The great wealth wave

The tide has turned – evidence shows ordinary citizens in the Western world are now richer and more equal than ever before

Daniel Waldenström

Neuroscience

The melting brain

It’s not just the planet and not just our health – the impact of a warming climate extends deep into our cortical fissures

Clayton Page Aldern

Falling for suburbia

Modernists and historians alike loathed the millions of new houses built in interwar Britain. But their owners loved them

Michael Gilson

Thinkers and theories

Rawls the redeemer

For John Rawls, liberalism was more than a political project: it is the best way to fashion a life that is worthy of happiness

Alexandre Lefebvre

Computing and artificial intelligence

Mere imitation

Generative AI has lately set off public euphoria: the machines have learned to think! But just how intelligent is AI?

September 1, 2016

11 min read

20 Big Questions about the Future of Humanity

We asked leading scientists to predict the future. Here’s what they had to say

Kyle Hilton

1. Does humanity have a future beyond Earth? “I think it’s a dangerous delusion to envisage mass emigration from Earth. There’s nowhere else in the solar system that’s as comfortable as even the top of Everest or the South Pole. We must address the world’s problems here. Nevertheless, I’d guess that by the next century, there will be groups of privately funded adventurers living on Mars and thereafter perhaps elsewhere in the solar system. We should surely wish these pioneer settlers good luck in using all the cyborg techniques and biotech to adapt to alien environments. Within a few centuries they will have become a new species: the posthuman era will have begun. Travel beyond the solar system is an enterprise for posthumans—organic or inorganic.” —Martin Rees, British cosmologist and astrophysicist

2. When and where do you think we will find extraterrestrial life? “If there is abundant microbial life on Mars, I suspect that we will find it within 20 years—if it is enough like our form of life. If an alien life-form differs much from what we have here on Earth, it is going to be difficult to detect. It’s also possible that any surviving Martian microbes are rare and located in places that are difficult for a robotic lander to reach. Jupiter’s moon Europa and Saturn’s moon Titan are more compelling places. Europa is a water world where more complex forms of life may have evolved. And Titan is probably the most interesting place in the solar system to look for life. It is rich in organic molecules but very cold and has no liquid water; if life exists on Titan, it will be very different from life on Earth.” —Carol E. Cleland, philosophy professor and co-investigator in the Center for Astrobiology at the University of Colorado Boulder

3. Will we ever understand the nature of consciousness? “Some philosophers, mystics and other confabulatores nocturne   pontificate about the impossibility of ever understanding the true nature of consciousness, of subjectivity. Yet there is little rationale for buying into such defeatist talk and every reason to look forward to the day, not that far off, when science will come to a naturalized, quantitative and predictive understanding of consciousness and its place in the universe.” — Christof Koch, president and CSO at the Allen Institute for Brain Science; member of the Scientific American Board of Advisers

On supporting science journalism

If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing . By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.

4. Will the entire world one day have adequate health care? “The global community has made tremendous progress toward health equity over the past 25 years, but these advances have not reached the world’s most remote communities. Deep in the rain forest, where people are cut off from transportation and cellular networks, mortality is the highest, access to health care is the most limited and quality of care is the worst. The World Health Organization estimates that one billion people go their entire lives without seeing a health worker because of distance. Health workers recruited directly from the communities they serve can bridge the gap. They can even fight epidemics such as Ebola and maintain access to primary care when health facilities are forced to shut their doors. My organization, Last Mile Health, now deploys more than 300 health workers in 300 communities across nine districts in partnership with the government of Liberia. But we can’t do this work alone. If the global community is serious about ensuring access to health care for all, it must invest in health workers who can reach the most remote communities.” —Raj Panjabi, co-founder and chief executive at Last Mile Health and instructor at Harvard Medical School

5. Will brain science change criminal law? “In all likelihood, the brain is a causal machine, in the sense that it goes from state to state as a function of antecedent conditions. The implications of this for criminal law are absolutely nil. For one thing, all mammals and birds have circuitry for self-control, which is modified through reinforcement learning (being rewarded for making good choices), especially in a social context. Criminal law is also about public safety and welfare. Even if we could identify circuitry unique to serial child rapists, for example, they could not just be allowed to go free, because they would be apt to repeat. Were we to conclude, regarding, say, Boston priest John Geoghan, who molested some 130 children, ‘It’s not his fault he has that brain, so let him go home,’ the result would undoubtedly be vigilante justice. And when rough justice takes the place of a criminal justice system rooted in years of making fair-minded law, things get very ugly very quickly.” —Patricia Churchland, professor of philosophy and neuroscience at the University of California, San Diego

6. What is the chance Homo sapiens will survive for the next 500 years? “I would say that the odds are good for our survival. Even the big threats—nuclear warfare or an ecological catastrophe, perhaps following from climate change—aren’t existential in the sense that they would wipe us out entirely. And the current bugaboo, in which our electronic progeny exceed us and decide they can live without us, can be avoided by unplugging them.” —Carlton Caves, Distinguished Professor in physics and astronomy at the University of New Mexico

7. Are we any closer to preventing nuclear holocaust? “Since 9/11 the U.S. has had a major policy focus on reducing the danger of nuclear terrorism by increasing the security of highly enriched uranium and plutonium and removing them from as many locations as possible. A nuclear terrorist event could kill 100,000 people. Three decades after the end of the cold war, however, the larger danger of a nuclear holocaust involving thousands of nuclear explosions and tens to hundreds of millions of immediate deaths still persists in the U.S.–Russia nuclear confrontation.

Remembering Pearl Harbor, the U.S. has postured its nuclear forces for the possibility of a bolt-out-of-the-blue first strike in which the Soviet Union would try to destroy all the U.S. forces that were targetable. We don’t expect such an attack today, but each side still keeps intercontinental and submarine-launched ballistic missiles carrying about 1,000 warheads in a launch-on-warning posture. Because the flight time of a ballistic missile is only 15 to 30 minutes, decisions that could result in hundreds of millions of deaths would have to be made within minutes. This creates a significant possibility of an accidental nuclear war or even hackers causing launches.

The U.S. does not need this posture to maintain deterrence, because it has about 800 warheads on untargetable submarines at sea at any time. If there is a nuclear war, however, U.S. Strategic Command and Russia’s Strategic Missile Forces want to be able to use their vulnerable land-based missiles before they can be destroyed. So the cold war may be over, but the Doomsday Machine that came out of the confrontation with the Soviets is still with us—and on a hair trigger.” —Frank von Hippel, emeritus professor at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University and co-founder of Princeton’s Program on Science and Global Security

8. Will sex become obsolescent? “No, but having sex to conceive babies is likely to become at least much less common. In 20 to 40 years we’ll be able to derive eggs and sperm from stem cells, probably the parents’ skin cells. This will allow easy preimplantation genetic diagnosis on a large number of embryos—or easy genome modification for those who want edited embryos instead of just selected ones.” —Henry Greely, director of the Center for Law and the Biosciences at Stanford University

9. Could we one day replace all of the tissues in the human body through engineering? “In 1995 Joseph Vacanti and I wrote for this magazine about advances in artificial pancreas technology, plastic-based tissues such as artificial skin and electronics that might permit blind people to see [see ‘ Artificial Organs ,’ by Robert Langer and Joseph P. Vacanti; Scientific American, September 1995]. All of these are coming to pass, either as real products or in clinical trials. Over the next few centuries it is quite possible that nearly every tissue in the body may be able to be replaced by such approaches. Creating or regenerating tissues such as those found in the brain, which is extremely complex and poorly understood, will take an enormous amount of research. The hope is, however, that research in this area will happen quickly enough to help with brain diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.” —Robert Langer, David H. Koch Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

10. Can we avoid a “sixth extinction”? “It can be slowed, then halted, if we take quick action. The greatest cause of species extinction is loss of habitat. That is why I’ve stressed an assembled global reserve occupying half the land and half the sea, as necessary, and in my book Half-Earth, I show how it can be done. With this initiative (and the development of a far better species-level ecosystem science than the one we have now), it will also be necessary to discover and characterize the 10 million or so species estimated to remain; we’ve only found and named two million to date. Overall, an extension of environmental science to include the living world should be, and I believe will be, a major initiative of science during the remainder of this century.” — Edward O. Wilson, University Research Professor emeritus at Harvard University

11. Can we feed the planet without destroying it? “Yes. Here’s what we need to do: reduce crop waste, consumer waste and meat consumption; integrate appropriate seed technologies and management practices; engage consumers about the challenges farmers face in both the developed and the developing world; increase public funding for agricultural research and development; and focus on advancing the socioeconomic and environmental aspects of farming that characterize sustainable agriculture.” —Pamela Ronald, professor in the Genome Center and the department of plant pathology at the University of California, Davis *

12. Will we ever colonize outer space? “That depends on the definition of ‘colonize.’ If landing robots qualifies, then we’ve already done it. If it means sending microbes from Earth and having them persist and maybe grow, then, unfortunately, it’s not unlikely that we’ve done that as well—possibly on Mars with the Phoenix spacecraft and almost certainly inside the Curiosity rover, which carries a heat source and was not fully baked the way Viking had been.

If it means having humans live elsewhere for a longer period of time, but not reproduce, then that’s something that might happen within the next 50 years or so. (Even some limited degree of reproduction might be feasible, recognizing that primates will be primates.) But if the idea is to construct a self-sustaining environment where humans can persist indefinitely with only modest help from Earth—the working definition of a ‘colony,’ according to the various European colonies outside of Europe—then I’d say this is very far in the future, if it’s possible at all. We currently have a very inadequate understanding of how to build closed ecosystems that are robust to perturbation by introduced organisms or nonbiological events ( Biosphere 2 , for example), and I suspect that the contained ecosystem problem will turn out to be much more challenging than the vast majority of space colonization advocates realize. There are a wide range of technical problems to solve, another being air handling. We haven’t bothered to colonize areas underwater on Earth yet. It’s far more challenging to colonize a place where there’s hardly any atmosphere at all.” —Catharine A. Conley, NASA planetary protection officer

13. Will we discover a twin Earth? “My money’s on yes. We’ve found that planets around other stars are far more abundant and diverse than scientists imagined just a couple of decades ago. And we’ve also found that the crucial ingredient for life on this planet—water—is common in space. I’d say nature seems to have stacked the deck in favor of a wide range of planets, including Earth-like planets. We just have to look for them.” —Aki Roberge, research astrophysicist focusing on exoplanets at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

14. Will there ever be a cure for Alzheimer’s? “I am not sure if there will be a cure, per se, but I am very hopeful that there will be a successful disease-modifying therapy for Alzheimer’s disease within the next decade. We have now started prevention trials that are testing biological interventions even before people show clinical symptoms of the disease. And we don’t have to cure Alzheimer’s—we just need to delay dementia by five to 10 years. Estimates show that a five-year delay in the terrible and expensive dementia stage of the disease would reduce Medicare dementia costs by nearly 50 percent. Most important, that would mean that many older people could die while out ballroom dancing rather than in nursing homes.” —Reisa Sperling, professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School and director of the Center for Alzheimer Research and Treatment

15. Will we use wearable technologies to detect our emotions? “Emotions involve biochemical and electrical signals that reach every organ in our bodies—allowing, for example, stress to impact our physical and mental health. Wearable technologies let us quantify the patterns in these signals over long periods of time. In the coming decade wearables will enable the equivalent of personalized weather forecasts for our health: 80 percent increased probability in health and happiness for you next week, based on your recent stress/sleep/social-emotional activities. Unlike with weather, however, smart wearables can also identify patterns we might choose to change to reduce unwanted ‘storm’ events: Increase sleep to greater than or equal to nine hours per night and maintain current low-moderate stress, for a 60 percent reduced likelihood of seizure in the next four days. Over the next 20 years, wearables, and analytics derived from them, can dramatically reduce psychiatric and neurological disease.” —Rosalind Picard, founder and director of the Affective Computing research group at the M.I.T. Media Lab

16. Will we ever figure out what dark matter is? “Whether we can determine what dark matter is depends on what it turns out to be. Some forms of dark matter allow detection through small interactions with ordinary matter that have so far evaded detection. Others might be detectable through their influence on structures such as galaxies. I’m hopeful we will learn more through experiments or observations. But it’s not guaranteed.” —Lisa Randall, Frank B. Baird, Jr., professor of science in theoretical physics and cosmology at Harvard University

17. Will we get control of intractable brain diseases like schizophrenia or autism? “Diseases like autism and schizophrenia remain elusive because neuroscience hasn’t found a structural problem to fix. Some interpret this to mean future answers lie purely in biochemistry, not neural circuits. Others argue the key is for the neuroscientist to start to think in terms of overall brain architecture—not specific neural failures. Still, when thinking about the future, I am reminded of the Nobelist Charles Townes’s remark that the wonderful thing about a new idea is you don’t know about it.” —Michael Gazzaniga, director of the SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind at the University of California, Santa Barbara

18. Will technology eliminate the need for animal testing in drug development? “If human organs on chips can be shown to be robust and consistently recapitulate complex human organ physiology and disease phenotypes in unrelated laboratories around the world, as suggested by early proof-of-concept studies, then we will see them progressively replace one animal model at a time. That will eventually lead to significant reductions in use of animal testing. Importantly, these devices also will open up new approaches to drug development not possible with animal models today, such as personalized medicines and development of therapeutics for specific genetic subpopulations using chips created using cells from particular patients.” —Donald E. Ingber, founding director, Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University

19. Will gender equality be achieved in the sciences? “Gender equality can be achieved, but we can’t just sit back and wait for it to happen. We need to ‘fix the numbers’ by recruiting more women into science and technology. We need to fix the institutions by implementing dual-career hiring, family-friendly policies, and new visions of what it means to be a leader. And, most importantly, we need to fix the knowledge by harnessing the creative power of gender analysis for discovery and innovation.” —Londa Schiebinger, John L. Hinds Professor of History of Science at Stanford University

20. Do you think we will one day be able to predict natural disasters such as earthquakes with warning times of days or hours? “Some natural disasters are easier to see coming than others. Hurricanes approach over days, volcanoes often build up to an eruption over days to hours, tornadoes strike within a few minutes. Earthquakes are perhaps the greatest challenge. What we know about the physics of earthquakes suggests that we will not be able to predict earthquakes days in advance. But what we can do is predict the damaging ground shaking just before it arrives and provide seconds to minutes of warning. Not enough time to get out of town, but enough time to get to a safe location.” —Richard M. Allen, director, Berkeley Seismological Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley

*Editor's Note (8/22/16): This biographical note was edited after posting to correct an error in Ronald's title. 

Your complimentary articles

You’ve read one of your four complimentary articles for this month.

You can read four articles free per month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

Question of the Month

What is the future of humanity, the following philosophical forecasts of our fate each win an unforeseeable book..

From the onset of the Industrial Revolution, human progress has been unprecedented in its sheer speed and scale. Anyone born before the mid-1980s, remembering the world before the internet, will surely appreciate technology’s power to uproot our lives. There is no doubt that advances in technology and automation will keep on transforming our lives. Soon the devices we use will respond to our voices, performing many routine chores as we talk with them. The testing of self-drive cars and of drones delivering packages have already reached an advanced state. The virtual world will become ever more developed and sophisticated, offering us yet more unimaginable ways to experience reality. Humans will in all probability make it to Mars before the end of this century; and afterwards leave our imprint further out in space. Meanwhile humanity’s dabbling with and control over nature will continue to know no bounds in the years to come, thereby helping societies more effectively combat illness, disease, infertility and ageing. But the most terrifying aspect of the future will be when the code of life is altered to suit the vanity and greed of humans, the ageing process is prolonged or postponed, and human mortality is eventually overcome. I think such developments could indeed spell the doom of humanity, as they spark an all-out war between the haves and have nots. It cannot be denied that in all epochs of history we have continuously resorted to war and violence to solve our conflicts, and to the present day humanity has failed to organise societies truly capable of addressing the unequal distribution of resources. Meanwhile the systematic degradation that has been wrought on the natural environment in the name of progress still cries out for our care and attention. Above all, climate change remains the most pressing problem to be tackled on a global scale if the future of humanity is to be safeguarded. Nevertheless, I do hold some hope that humanity can be saved if an influential world movement recognises that the availability and sustainability of natural resources must be foremost in whatever economic philosophy is advocated; that unless the sharp inequalities in different regions of the world are truly addressed, the world will remain bedevilled by uncontrollable immigration, hatred and terrorism; and that unless humanity becomes consciously aware of the futility of war and violence, the path of self-destruction will continually be sought. Alas, the future of humanity can only be truly safe if humans accept that they are mortal beings and that happiness on this planet can only be achieved if the comfort and convenience bestowed on us by technological improvements is reconciled with meaningful and uncomplicated lives.

Ian Rizzo, Zabbar, Malta

Noam Chomsky has, on more than one occasion, pointed out that the two biggest threats that face humanity are global warming and nuclear war. Let’s entertain these two ideas briefly.

Nuclear war: Although some have speculated that nuclear weapons are impractical compared to the ever-advancing smart bombs, the devastation from fallout can quickly persuade a ruler or government to end a war and submit. In violent and warring minds that may be reason enough to want to retain them – see Theresa May’s and Donald Trump’s cavalier sanctioning of nuclear strikes. The consequences of such a strike, not to mention an all-out war, would be hellish: apart from untold deaths and injuries, birth defects and ruined soil and crops for decades.

Climate change: The long-term effects of icecaps melting, of fracking, of beaches being eroded, and air and water pollution, are frightening. Equally as frightening are the unspoken effects animal agriculture is having: for example, the build-up in the oceans of waste from cattle farming (too much for plankton to break down fast enough) can create dead zones where no life exists; not to mention the land, water and food which livestock take in order to feed us a proportionally smaller amount. This creates much more scarcity in an already competitive and difficult-to-get-by-in world.

These scenarios, which seem increasingly hard to separate, unfortunately indicate a grim future for humanity of scarcity, war, nuclear fallout and environmental devastation. Although very bleak, there is always hope; and to recycle another cliché, the future is not set. Passivity on the part of those appalled by such potential futures only increases the chances of them coming about. Conscientious action is, as seems to be the norm nowadays, needed. While people may, rightly or otherwise, distrust their elected officials and the media, there are other people and groups that they can trust. A lesson taken from the revolutionary left, particularly the libertarian socialists (anarchists), would teach us that coming together and organising into groups to cause change can happen, and can succeed. Educate, agitate, organise!

Shane Mc Donnell, Navan, Co. Meath, Ireland

Based on fossils and archeological artifacts from around the world, modern humans have existed for about 200,000 years; but the roots of civilization only go back 20,000 years, to when we first began planting grain and building walls. These dates slide back and forth on history’s timeline depending on the viewpoint, but practically all sources agree that up until about sixty years ago, humanity’s footprint on the sands of time was for the most part biodegradable.

Today, the footprint of humanity has toxic radioactive waste all over it. The World Nuclear Association reported in 2016 that 450 nuclear reactors were generating electricity in thirty countries around the world. Incredibly, sixty new reactors are being built on the heels of Fukushima!

It is chilling to think that between 1962 and 1983, the world faced nuclear annihilation more than once, when the only thing between humanity and devastation was a red button under a human thumb! An age-old question here begs an answer: Is humanity an experiment gone badly wrong?

The first mainland Greek philosopher, Anaximander, theorized that all things are generated from, and returned to, an endless creative source that he called ‘the Boundless’. In more recent times Carl Jung fleshed out Anaximander’s idea somewhat with his theory of the Collective Unconscious. Jung believed that this is the collective mostly-forgotten memory of our personal relationship with a higher authority. His philosophy was that in the final analysis nothing is as important as the life of the individual, whose hidden resources ultimately transform the world. Jung wrote: “In our most private and subjective lives we are not only the passive witness of our age, and its sufferers, but also its makers. We make our own epoch.”

Ancient devastations such as a globally-remembered great flood were believed to be acts of God or gods which humanity barely survived. Perhaps humanity’s future has always rested on the shoulders of extraordinary individuals, who manage to keep us afloat during the darkest of times. God willing, such an individual will come along to show future generations how to render radioactive waste inert, or gift them with the formula for cold fusion. In the meantime, it wouldn’t hurt to show Mother Nature a little respect and quit living like there’s no tomorrow.

Connie Koehler, Austin, Texas

Let’s look at our future in terms of two adaptive strategies in the evolutionary process: competition and cooperation.

We start with single cell organisms, which become multicelled ones. They develop diffuse nervous systems. These in turn organize into central nervous systems that serve the basic needs of complex organisms. Eventually, these blossom into the frontal cortex that allows the higher cognitive functions that land us here trying to answer the big questions.

This trajectory has left us with two often-conflicting modes of negotiating an environment filled with other organisms. The competitive mode involves our baser impulses utilizing our cognitive functions strictly for the sake of our baser impulses. We can see here the brutal world described by Hobbes and Ayn Rand. By contrast, the cooperative mode sees its interest in a trajectory from inward self-interest out to the interest of others. Here, we see the less brutal world of Marx or Rawls. Consequently, we find ourselves at an important evolutionary crossroads. Do we stick with the competitive instinct which has, via capitalism, got us to this point, and risk, at best, subjecting ourselves to a global oligarchy, the dismantling of our democracies, and the depletion of our natural resources: or, worse, our extinction as a species through manmade climate change and war? Or do we turn to the next evolutionary step, and evolve? Do we become better than market economics tells us we are?

I’m not optimistic, not only because of the growing influence of the right in America and other advanced nations, but because of the sensibility of the voters perpetrating this. As a progressive in the American Midwest, in last year’s election I enjoyed a front row seat for watching otherwise decent and intelligent people succumb to dogma, sensationalism, and misinformation – a complete lack of critical inquiry supplanted by fancy – as can be seen in political campaigns that resembled some Quentin Tarantino revenge fantasy. But this only makes sense as an evolutionary backlash in which our higher cognitive functions act strictly in behalf of baser impulses and immediate self-interest.

Still, we can hope. And sometimes the only way out is through . Perhaps the current evolutionary political backlash, by demonstrating in very real terms the actual consequences of competition, is what we’ll need to put it behind us and truly evolve.

D. Tarkington, Bellevue, Nebraska

The future of humanity is speculative, and so I’ll apprehend it more with hope than knowledge. Our first two hopes are that we do not annihilate our species with global biological or nuclear warfare, and that we do not destroy our planet. If we assume that we will avoid those futures, then we can expect that science and technology will advance and provide us with many blessings, and some dangers. But I think the cardinal question about our future is, “What kind of government will we have? This is because we are political animals, as Aristotle famously said. We are part nature and part nurture, and the latter is shaped by the society we happen to be raised in, which in turn is determined by the nature of our government. Thus, our future will be largely a function of our future society and government.

About this we can expect increased globalization and commingling of peoples until, perhaps in a few millennia, we are one people with one language and a complex global federal government. Perhaps there will be an end to war, and other benefits. However, in federations, the superior government tends to accumulate power by diminishing that of subordinate governments. Power corrupts proportionately, and this presents us with the specter of a dystopian society.

Trends in history strongly indicate two possible primary developments: freedom or slavery. Many see in history an increase in individual freedom; but clearly there also has been an increase in state power. The source of the former lies in the hopes and aspirations of individuals. The source of the latter lies in the fact that the power of the elite naturally enlarges itself.

Freedom or slavery: which will it be? That is, what will be the balance of individual freedom and self-determination versus state control and state determination of what humanity is? It depends on the nature of the over-arching supergovernment. Specifically, of who will rule the rulers: the people, or an established elite? A global government may be a Frankenstein we cannot control. But then we are an amazingly adaptable species.

There are too many variables to speculate about the future fruitfully. We can only hope it will be a future of liberty.

John Talley, Rutherfordton, North Carolina

In the future, humanity will still ponder the concept of death and its meaning, but perhaps with an additional clause: the fear of our private digital minds left behind. Digital footprints, the memorial grooves in the wax, the living binary representation of lives typed, clicked, or swished by our physical hands, our handiwork floating in the digital ether forever. It is not hard to imagine with some advances in technology that the digital self, made feasible with the use of holograms, or mediums such as virtual reality could provide representations of our persona after death. A digital likeness filled with the essence of you, the ‘ghost in the machine’. In other words, I think, therefore, I am your entire life’s browser history. A collection of algorithms, from preferred GPS haunts, from online shopping preferences to your late night browsing searches, all composed and collated to represent the embodied holographic you after death. Sartre’s ‘human existence precedes essence’ made all the more relevant, the digital essence of your earthly existence left behind.

In the future, after your funeral, relatives shall be able to buy such a holographic essence. A grieving partner comforted by a more than passable intuitive Turing system finely tuned to represent you. Perhaps, also the curiosities of grandchildren, wishing to know who their grandparents really were, reanimated in the holographic flesh. Indeed, you could even give your own narcissistic eulogy, the voice from beyond the grave. In every instance, a visual binary essence that can speak, listen, gesture, reason, appear to show emotion, and bring meaning to those still in life. Unfortunately, unbeknown to your internet provider, you also shared a flat with Dave, who had a penchant for the darker side of the web. Additionally, on your daily commute, roadwork traffic lights had an uncanny knack of holding you just outside a Ku Klux Klan hall. All information impartially collected and collated, unfairly representing the essence of you. The repercussions aren’t hard to predict; loving relatives shocked to find you had a secret life, one that included nefarious activities and racist tendencies. In such a technological future, every word typed, every destination you travelled would take on an uncontrolled limbo existence. The fear of death may be relegated to second place by the anxiety of judgements passed on an eternal digital future you.

John Scotland, Kilsyth, North Lanarkshire

In the future corporations and governments will create a variety of virtual worlds, in which all humans will eventually choose to live. Most will choose to live in simulations of the Twenty First Century, because life was much better back then. Of course, these humans will not remember that their world is virtual. Some philosophers and scientists in these virtual worlds will present skeptical arguments about the existence of a real external world, but most people won’t take these arguments seriously. Some of the skeptics will argue that empirical observations are consistent with their world being a simulation. However, most people won’t care because the virtual world feels so real and people value the useful, not the true. Philosophers will also present interesting arguments about how human minds could never, in principle, fully grasp higher dimensions, just as two-dimensional minds could never know there’s a bird flying above them because there is no ‘above’ for such minds. Although a two dimensional mind could use math to infer that there is a higher dimension with some sort of entity casting the observable light-and-dark patterns, that mind could never see or even imagine it. Still, others will sometimes believe their world is virtual because they ate a special mushroom, had a mystical experience, or simply because they momentarily trusted their intuition. Most of these people will be virtually locked up. Some geniuses will argue that it is likely that we are living in a virtual world: If the universe is as big as we think, and advanced people create virtual worlds, then there are many virtual worlds and only one reality: therefore, it is more likely that the future world is virtual. But wait, the future is here.

Paul Stearns, Blinn College, Texas

The organic and inorganic will become less distinct. Bioengineers will create living cells capable of performing simple ‘Turing functions’ (programmable tasks), and on this basis, organic computers will transform humanity. Almost certainly, organs will be artificially produced, this extending human life; and with the tweaking of genes we could end up living almost indefinitely. Cancer, AIDS and other fatal diseases will be eradicated, as smallpox was in the 1970s. Unfortunately, new and deadlier diseases (such as Zika) will spring up and become lethal weapons. Disease, famine, war and terrorism will turn cities into savage ghettoes run by marauding gangs. Humans will be microchipped from birth and monitored by surveillance satellites. ‘Genetically compromised’ individuals will be sterilised, leading to mass sterilisations. Only the healthy super-rich will be able to afford to live in biodomes with pollution-free air and Eden-like forests and gardens. The rest will be forced to “defend themselves against the ever-present menace of barbaric, atavistic and reactionary forces.” (Winston Churchill in Civilization , Niall Ferguson, p.297, 2012).

Fortunately, the philanthropic wealthy will continue to repair the damage wreaked against nature since the start of the Industrial Revolution. Humanity’s goal must therefore be to diminish our ‘inner animal’ in favour of the power of reason, thereby becoming truly human – Homo sapiens victorens! “The future of humanity must gaze harder upon… looking within.” (Buddha, in Dogen’s Shobo Genzo , p.47, 2012).

Aaron V. Adosa, Swansea

There will only be two types of human beings in the future: the minority having enormous brains and tiny bodies, and the majority with tiny brains and muscular bodies. The size of the average brain will gradually diminish; not because of our innate laziness, but because of our over-concern about our physical appearance. In the old days, most people dreamt of having shelter and a stable food supply. As we no longer struggle for the basic necessities, our dreams focus instead on the search for physical beauty – how to obtain and maintain the ‘ideal body shape’ and healthy life the media promotes. Physical beauty will become the main goal of the majority. They’ll do exercises everyday, taking nutrients to maintain their shape while not noticing that their brains are shrinking. Actually, there is no doubt that they’ll work extremely hard to make their brains smaller. Unfortunately, both the majority and minority will enter states of extreme depression and show hatred towards the other set. Many who cannot categorize themselves into either the majority or the minority will eventually commit suicide as the pressure from both extremes will be overwhelming.

Science has caused the separation of intelligence and health. The misinterpretation or over-interpretation of health and evolutionary facts by the public is causing the decay of intelligence and the increase in concern about physical beauty; in fact we are just eliminating ourselves.

Cyrus Aegean Lamprecht, Hong Kong

What is the future of humanity? Answer: Extinction within a few thousand years. Mother Nature, God, or the blind forces of evolution (take your pick) has arranged it so that we higher animals reproduce by engaging in sex for pleasure, with babies as a by-product. However, human ingenuity in creating contraceptives has cut the link between the pleasure and the babies, and so in the wealthy parts of the world the replication rate has fallen below the 2.1 per couple necessary to maintain a stable population. And the world is getting steadily wealthier. So it is a fairly modest assumption that in a hundred years from now, the planetary human population will have peaked at ten billion, but most of them will be as wealthy as today’s average in the West. It is also plausible that sexbots will be widely available, be far more beautiful than most real women or men, and be far better at giving pleasure than another human. So, finally, it is plausible that the average reproduction rate will then become 1.5 or less. The rest is arithmetic. Dividing 1.5 by 2 to give the reproduction rate per person of 0.75, and taking this rate to the power of 30, we get a value less than 0.0002. So dividing, thirty generations later, or about a thousand years from now, the world population will be about two million. This will ensure civilizational collapse. But I expect the sexbots will still be there – a few thousand per person. So another few thousand years will see us all gone.

The only obstruction to this that I can see is religion imposing a sexbot ban. The Roman Catholic Church has had indifferent success in similar sexual bans; the Muslims might do a little better. But it seems unlikely that a world populated by only a few million religious believers would survive for long; and all the more intelligent and creative people will have experienced a blissful death long ago.

John Lawless, Crawley, Western Australia

In the opening chapter of The Napoleon of Notting Hill , G.K. Chesterton introduced us to the traditional game of ‘Cheat the Prophet’. This is played when, extrapolating from current trends, a wise man ( sic ) predicts how we will live in the future. He’s listened to respectfully; and, once he is dead and buried, humanity does something totally other than he predicted.

Towards the end of his life Karl Marx said that he was not a Marxist. I believe that what he meant was that he did not join in with his followers’ confident Marxist predictions. That is, he believed that his philosophy could explain the historical processes which had led to his contemporary situation, explain current trends, even exhort humanity how to respond to them; but his theories could not determine or predict the future. Despite this, Twentieth Century prophets such as Leon Trotsky, H.G. Wells, and Francis Fukuyama, have asserted that they know where humanity is going; and humanity has duly responded by going in a different direction entirely, or, when feeling particularly bloody-minded, several different directions. We have difficulty enough in understanding the past: the future is unknowable. The only safe prediction is that every prediction about the future of humanity is almost certain to be wrong (and, to paraphrase Einstein, I’m not sure about the ‘almost’).

Martin Jenkins, London

Niels Bohr supposedly said that prediction is very difficult, especially about the future. Yet a spacecraft’s path is predictable to extraordinary precision, and it must be, because by the time it gets anywhere interesting the right time to correct its trajectory has long past. Then there’s the long-term cyclic reliability of the Sun, Moon, and the planets. The future of details is difficult to predict, but if the details average out, then barring the odd black swan, the future is predictable to a degree . In the 1950s, Isaac Asimov invented ‘psychohistory’, the statistical extrapolation of future events and the behaviour of significant figures from society’s present state. However, if some unforeseeable details grow to dominate, even the broad shape of the future becomes uncertain. This is likely where many actors and forces interact, as they do in human reality. Self-reinforcing cycles can form. Thus predicting the near future is a little like forecasting the weather. So if we cannot forecast humanity’s ‘weather’, can we at least forecast its ‘climate’?

Today the world is more peaceful, better educated (particularly women) and proportionally less affected by extreme poverty than ever before. With these trends, population will level off at around ten billion, and apart from in a few wretched countries, the prospects for a democratic near-future are favourable. However, democracy relies on rising expectations being fulfilled through economic growth; and today there is a collision course between greening technology and population growth, rising emissions, and diminishing resources. A good outcome depends on cutting personal consumption and the conventional industrial employment that leads to the growing gap between richest and poorest. However, denying expectations is unpopular, and confounding them risks the instability of political reaction. The costs are so high that governments may yet seek ways to distribute wealth more evenly, even if they won’t yet admit it. Barring a world epidemic – more likely given ease of travel – or a climate or other catastrophe, population will fall gradually through elective non-replacement rather than as a result of collective action. The environment will improve, but nature may still be diminished unless people build greener cities. Earth is special, and exploration of other planetary systems will yield many wonders, but few habitats. Apart from on Mars, any colonies will be too far away to interact with Earth. Ultimately, human progress can carry life throughout the universe, but as we suppress our evolutionary pressures, this life may not be us.

Dr Nicholas B. Taylor, Little Sandhurst

Next Question of the Month

The next question is: What Sorts of Things Exist, and How? Please give and justify your ontology in fewer than 400 words. The prize is a semi-random book from our book mountain. Subject lines should be marked ‘Question of the Month’, and must be received by 12th June 2017. If you want a chance of getting a book, please include your physical address. Thanks.

This site uses cookies to recognize users and allow us to analyse site usage. By continuing to browse the site with cookies enabled in your browser, you consent to the use of cookies in accordance with our privacy policy . X

• Table of Contents
• Random Entry
• Chronological
• Editorial Information
• About the SEP
• Editorial Board
• How to Cite the SEP
• Special Characters
• Advanced Tools
• Support the SEP
• PDFs for SEP Friends
• Make a Donation
• SEPIA for Libraries
• Entry Contents

Bibliography

Academic tools.

• Friends PDF Preview
• Author and Citation Info
• Back to Top

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.

• Aristotle, Topics , in The Complete Works of Aristotle , J. Barnes (ed.), Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984, Vol. 1, 167–277.
• –––, Physics , in The Complete Works of Aristotle , Vol. 1, 315–446.
• –––, History of Animals , in The Complete Works of Aristotle , Vol. 1, 774–993.
• –––, Parts of Animals , in The Complete Works of Aristotle , Vol. 1, 994–1086
• –––, Metaphysics , in The Complete Works of Aristotle , Vol. 2, 1552–1728
• –––, Nicomachean Ethics , in The Complete Works of Aristotle , Vol. 2, 1729–1867
• –––, Politics , in The Complete Works of Aristotle , Vol. 2, 1986–2129.
• Balme, D. M., 1980, “Aristotle’s Biology Was Not Essentialist”, Archiv Für Geschichte Der Philosophie , 62(1): 1–12. doi:10.1515/agph.1980.62.1.1
• –––, 1987, “Aristotle’s Use of Division and Differentiae”, in Gotthelf and Lennox 1987: 69–89. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511552564.008
• Bickerton, Derek, 2005, “Language First, Then Shared Intentionality, Then a Beneficent Spiral”, Behavioral and Brain Sciences , 28(5): 691–692. doi:10.1017/S0140525X05220125
• Boulter, Stephen J., 2012, “Can Evolutionary Biology Do Without Aristotelian Essentialism?”, Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement , 70: 83–103. doi:10.1017/S1358246112000057
• Boyd, Richard, 1991, “Realism, Anti-Foundationalism and the Enthusiasm for Natural Kinds”, Philosophical Studies , 61(1–2): 127–148. doi:10.1007/BF00385837
• –––, 1999a, “Homeostasis, Species and Higher Taxa”, in R. Wilson 1999b: 141–185.
• –––, 1999b, “Kinds, Complexity and Multiple Realization”, Philosophical Studies , 95(1/2): 67–98. doi:10.1023/A:1004511407133
• Buller, David J., 2006, Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Carroll, Sean B, 2000, “Endless Forms: The Evolution of Gene Regulation and Morphological Diversity”, Cell , 101(6): 577–580. doi:10.1016/S0092-8674(00)80868-5
• Cassirer, Ernst, 1944, An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Culture , New Haven: Yale University Press.
• Cela-Conde, Camilo José and Francisco J. Ayala, 2017, “The Advent of Biological Evolution and Humankind”, in On Human Nature: Biology, Psychology, Ethics, Politics, and Religion , Michel Tibayrenc, and Francisco J. Ayala (eds.), London: Elsevier, 3–15. doi:10.1016/B978-0-12-420190-3.00001-6
• Charles, David, 2000, Aristotle on Meaning and Essence , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/019925673X.001.0001
• Coyne, Jerry A. and H. Allen Orr, 2004, Speciation , Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates.
• Crow, Tim J. (ed.), 2003, The Speciation of Modern Homo Sapiens (Proceedings of the British Academy, 106), Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• de Queiroz, Kevin, 1999, “The General Lineage Concept of Species and the Defining Properties of the Species Category”, in R. Wilson 1999b: 49–89.
• –––, 2005, “Different Species Problems and Their Resolution”, BioEssays , 27(12): 1263–1269. doi:10.1002/bies.20325
• de Sousa, Ronald, 2000, “Learning to be Natural”, in Roughley 2000: 287–307.
• Devitt, Michael, 2008, “Resurrecting Biological Essentialism*”, Philosophy of Science , 75(3): 344–382. doi:10.1086/593566
• –––, 2010, “Species Have (Partly) Intrinsic Essences”, Philosophy of Science , 77(5): 648–661. doi:10.1086/656820
• Downes, Stephen M., 2010, “The Basic Components of the Human Mind Were Not Solidified during the Pleistocene Epoch”, in Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Biology , Francisco J. Ayala and Robert Arp (eds.), Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 243–252. doi:10.1002/9781444314922.ch14
• Dupré, John, 1993, The Disorder of Things: Metaphysical Foundations of the Disunity of Science , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• –––, 2001, Human Nature and the Limits of Science , Oxford: Clarendon Press. doi:10.1093/0199248060.001.0001
• –––, 2003, “On Human Nature”, Human Affairs , 2003(2): 109–122. [ Dupré 2003 available online ]
• Eberl, Jason T., 2004, “Aquinas on the Nature of Human Beings”, Review of Metaphysics , 58(2): 333–365.
• Ereshefsky, Marc, 1991, “Species, Higher Taxa, and the Units of Evolution”, Philosophy of Science , 58(1): 84–101. doi:10.1086/289600
• –––, 2001, The Poverty of the Linnean Hierarchy. A Philosophical Study of Biological Taxonomy , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511498459
• –––, 2008, “Systematics and Taxonomy”, in A Companion to the Philosophy of Biology , Sarkar Sahotra and Anya Plutynski (eds.), Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 99–118. doi:10.1002/9780470696590.ch6
• Ereshefsky, Marc and Mohan Matthen, 2005, “Taxonomy, Polymorphism, and History: An Introduction to Population Structure Theory*”, Philosophy of Science , 72(1): 1–21. doi:10.1086/426848
• Foot, Philippa, 2001, Natural Goodness , Oxford: Clarendon Press. doi:10.1093/0198235089.001.0001
• Geertz, Clifford, 1973, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays , New York: Basic Books.
• Ghiselin, Michael T., 1974, “A Radical Solution to the Species Problem”, Systematic Zoology , 23(4): 536–544. doi:10.2307/2412471
• –––, 1987, “Species Concepts, Individuality, and Objectivity”, Biology & Philosophy , 2(2): 127–143. doi:10.1007/BF00057958
• –––, 1997, Metaphysics and the Origin of Species , Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
• Glackin, Shane N., 2016, “Three Aristotelian Accounts of Disease and Disability”, Journal of Applied Philosophy , 33(3): 311–326. doi:10.1111/japp.12114
• Godfrey-Smith, Peter, 2014, Philosophy of Biology , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Gotthelf, Allan and James G. Lennox (eds.), 1987, Philosophical Issues in Aristotle’s Biology , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511552564
• Gould, Stephen Jay, 1977, Ontogeny and Phylogeny , Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.
• Griffiths, Paul E., 1999, “Squaring the Circle: Natural Kinds with Historical Essences”, in R. Wilson 1999b: 209–228.
• –––, 2011, “Our Plastic Nature”, in Transformations of Lamarckism: From Subtle Fluids to Molecular Biology , Snait B. Gissis, and Eva Jablonka (eds.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 319–330. doi:10.7551/mitpress/8686.003.0038
• Griffiths, Paul E. and James Tabery, 2013, “Developmental Systems Theory: What Does It Explain, and How Does It Explain It?”, in Embodiment and Epigenesis: Theoretical and Methodological Issues in Understanding the Role of Biology within the Relational Developmental System. Part A: Philosophical, Theoretical, and Biological Dimensions , Richard M. Lerner and Janette B. Benson (eds.), (Advances in Child Development and Behavior 44), Amsterdam: Elsevier, 65–94. doi:10.1016/B978-0-12-397947-6.00003-9
• Griffiths Paul E. and Karola Stotz, 2013, Genetics and Philosophy: An Introduction , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Habermas, Jürgen, 1958, “Anthropologie”, in Philosophie , A. Diemer, and I. Frenzel (eds.), Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, pp. 18–35.
• Hannon, Elizabeth and Tim Lewens (eds.), 2018, Why We Disagree About Human Nature , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/oso/9780198823650.001.0001
• Herder, Johann Gottfried, 1772 [2008], Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache . Translated as “Treatise on the Origins of Language”, Michael N. Forster (trans.) in Herder: Philosophical Writings , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008, pp. 65–164. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139164634.007
• Hull, David L., 1965, “The Effect of Essentialism on Taxonomy—Two Thousand Years of Stasis (I)”, The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science , 15(60): 314–326. doi:10.1093/bjps/XV.60.314
• –––, 1978, “A Matter of Individuality”, Philosophy of Science , 45(3): 335–360. doi:10.1086/288811
• –––, 1984, “Historical Entities and Historical Narratives”, in Minds, Machines and Evolution: Philosophical Studies , Christopher Hookway (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 17–42.
• –––, 1986, “On Human Nature”, PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , 1986(2): 3–13. doi:10.1086/psaprocbienmeetp.1986.2.192787
• –––, 1987, “Genealogical Actors in Ecological Roles”, Biology & Philosophy , 2(2): 168–184. doi:10.1007/BF00057961
• Hume, David, 1739–40, A Treatise of Human Nature , London: John Noon. Reprinted Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978.
• –––, 1748, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding , London: A. Millar. Reprinted in Enquiries Concerning the Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals , Oxford: Clarendon Press 1970.
• Hursthouse, Rosalind, 1999, On Virtue Ethics , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/0199247994.001.0001
• –––, 2012, “Human Nature and Aristotelian Virtue Ethics”, Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement , 70: 169–188. doi:10.1017/S1358246112000094
• Hutcheson, Francis, 1730 [1933], “Glasgoviensis de naturali hominum socialitate: Oratio inauguralis”, Glasgoviæ: Typis academicis. Translated as “Inaugural Lecture on the Social Nature of Man”, Thomas Mautner and Colin Mayrhofer (trans), in Two Texts on Human Nature , Thomas Mautner (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 124–147.
• Kant, Immanuel, 1785 [1996], Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten , Riga. Translated as “Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals”, in Practical Philosophy , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 37–108.
• Kappeler, Peter M., Claudia Fichtel, and Carel P. van Schaik, 2019, “There Ought to Be Roots: Evolutionary Precursors of Social Norms and Conventions in Non-Human Primates”, in The Normative Animal? The Anthropological Significance of Social, Moral and Linguistic Norms , Neil Roughley and Kurt Bayertz (eds.), New York: Oxford University Press, 65–82. doi:10.1093/oso/9780190846466.003.0003
• Kitcher, Philip, 1984, “Species”, Philosophy of Science , 51(2): 308–333. doi:10.1086/289182
• Korsgaard, Christine M., 1996, The Sources of Normativity , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• –––, 2006, “Morality and the Distinctiveness of Human Action”, in Frans de Waal, Primates and Philosophers. How Morality Evolved , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 98–119.
• –––, 2008, “Aristotle’s Function Argument”, in her The Constitution of Agency: Essays on Practical Reason and Moral Psychology , Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 129–150.
• –––, 2018, Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to Other Animals , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/oso/9780198753858.001.0001
• Kripke, Saul A., 1972 [1980], Naming and Necessity , in Semantics of Natural Language , Donald Davidson and Gilbert Harman (eds), Dordrecht: D. Reidel. Revised and published separately, 1980, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Kronfeldner, Maria, 2018, What’s Left of Human Nature? A Post-Essentialist, Pluralist, and Interactive Account of a Contested Concept , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. doi:10.7551/mitpress/11606.001.0001
• Kronfeldner, Maria, Neil Roughley, and Georg Toepfer, 2014, “Recent Work on Human Nature: Beyond Traditional Essences”, Philosophy Compass , 9(9): 642–652. doi:10.1111/phc3.12159
• Lenman, James, 2005, “The Saucer of Mud, the Kudzu Vine and the Uxorious Cheetah: Against Neo-Aristotelian Naturalism in Metaethics”, European Journal of Applied Philosophy , 1(2): 37–50.
• Lennox, James G., 1987, “Kinds, Forms of Kinds, and the More and the Less in Aristotle’s Biology”, in Gotthelf and Lennox 1987: 339–359. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511552564.019
• –––, 1999, “The Place of Mankind in Aristotle’s Zoology:”, Philosophical Topics , 27(1): 1–16. doi:10.5840/philtopics199927116
• –––, 2009, “Form, Essence, and Explanation in Aristotle’s Biology”, in A Companion to Aristotle , Georgios Anagnostopoulos (ed.), Malden, MA: Wiley, pp. 348–367. doi:10.1002/9781444305661.ch22
• Lewens, Tim, 2009, “Evo-Devo and ‘Typological Thinking’: An Exculpation”, Journal of Experimental Zoology Part B: Molecular and Developmental Evolution , 312B(8): 789–796. doi:10.1002/jez.b.21292
• –––, 2012, “Human Nature: The Very Idea”, Philosophy & Technology , 25(4): 459–474. doi:10.1007/s13347-012-0063-x
• Lloyd, G. E. R., 1983, Science, Folklore and Ideology: Studies in the Life Sciences in Ancient Greece , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Locke, John, 1689, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding , London: Thomas Basset.
• Machery, Edouard, 2008, “A Plea for Human Nature”, Philosophical Psychology , 21(3): 321–329. doi:10.1080/09515080802170119
• –––, 2018, “Doubling Down on the Nomological Notion of Human Nature”, in Hannon and Lewens 2018: 18–39.
• MacIntyre, Alasdair C., 1999, Dependent Rational Animals. Why Human Beings Need the Virtues , London: Duckworth.
• Mayr, Ernst, 1959 [1976], “Typological versus Population Thinking”, in Evolution and Anthropology: A Centennial Appraisal , Washington, DC: The Anthropological Society of Washington, pp. 409–412. Reprinted in Mayr 1976: 26–29.
• –––, 1968, “Theory of Biological Classification”, Nature , 220(5167): 545–548. Reprinted in Mayr 1976: 425–432. doi:10.1038/220545a0
• –––, 1976, Evolution and the Diversity of Life , Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.
• –––, 1982, The Growth of Biological Thought. Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance , Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.
• McBrearty, Sally and Alison S. Brooks, 2000, “The Revolution That Wasn’t: A New Interpretation of the Origin of Modern Human Behavior”, Journal of Human Evolution , 39(5): 453–563. doi:10.1006/jhev.2000.0435
• McDowell, John, 1980 [1998], “The Role of Eudaimonia in Aristotle’s Ethics”, in Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics , Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (ed.), Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 359–376. Reprinted in McDowell 1998: 3–22. doi:10.1525/9780520340985-022
• –––, 1996 [1998], “Two Sorts of Naturalism”, in Virtues and Reasons: Philippa Foot and Moral Theory , Rosalind Hursthouse, Gavin Lawrence, and Warren Quinn (eds), Oxford: Clarendon Press, 149–179. Reprinted in McDowell 1998: 167–197.
• –––, 1998, Mind, Value, and Reality , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Midgley, Mary, 2000, “Human Nature, Human Variety, Human Freedom”, in Roughley 2000: 47–63.
• Montagu, Ashley, 1956, The Biosocial Nature of Man , Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
• –––, 1961, “Neonatal and Infant Immaturity in Man”, Journal of the American Medical Association , 178(1): 56. doi:10.1001/jama.1961.73040400014011
• Nadaf, Gerard, 2005, The Greek Concept of Nature , Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
• Nussbaum, Martha C., 1992, “Human Functioning and Social Justice: In Defense of Aristotelian Essentialism”, Political Theory , 20(2): 202–246. doi:10.1177/0090591792020002002
• –––, 1995, “Aristotle on Human Nature and the Foundations of Ethics”, in World, Mind, and Ethics: Essays on the Ethical Philosophy of Bernard Williams , J. E. J. Altham and Ross Harrison (eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 86–131. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511621086.007
• –––, 2006, Frontiers of Justice. Disability, Nationality, Species Membership , Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.
• Okasha, Samir, 2002, “Darwinian Metaphysics: Species And The Question Of Essentialism”, Synthese , 131(2): 191–213. doi:10.1023/A:1015731831011
• Pellegrin, Pierre, 1982 [1986], La Classification des animaux chez Aristote: Statut de la biologie et unité de l’aristotélisme , Paris: Société d’édition “Les Belles Lettres”. Translated as Aristotle’s Classification of Animals: Biology and the Conceptual Unity of the Aristotelian Corpus , Anthony Preus (trans.), Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. doi:10.1525/9780520330412
• Pico della Mirandola, 1486 [1965], De hominis dignitate . Translated as On the Dignity of Man , Charles Wallis, Paul Miller, and Douglas Carmichael (trans.), Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1965.
• Plato, Statesman , Julia Annas and Robin Waterfield (eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
• Plessner, Helmuth, 1928 [1975], Die Stufen Des Organischen Und Der Mensch: Einleitung in Die Philosophische Anthropologie , Berlin: De Gruyter. Reprinted Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 1975. doi:10.1515/9783111537429
• Portmann, Adolf, 1951, Biologische Fragmente zu einer Lehre vom Menschen , Basel: Schwabe.
• –––, 1967, “Die Stellung des Menschen in der Natur”, in Zoologie aus vier Jahrzehnten. Gesammelte Abhandlungen , München: Piper, pp. 312–336.
• Prinz, Jesse J., 2012, Beyond Human Nature. How Culture and Experience Shape Our Lives , London: Allen Lane.
• Ramsey, Grant, 2013, “Human Nature in a Post-Essentialist World”, Philosophy of Science , 80(5): 983–993. doi:10.1086/673902
• Richards, Richard A., 2010, The Species Problem: A Philosophical Analysis , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511762222
• Richter, Daniel S., 2011, Cosmopolis. Imagining Community in Late Classical Athens and the Early Roman Empire , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199772681.001.0001
• Rosenberg, Karen and Wenda Trevathan, 1995, “Bipedalism and Human Birth: The Obstetrical Dilemma Revisited”, Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews , 4(5): 161–168. doi:10.1002/evan.1360040506
• Roughley, Neil (ed.), 2000, Being Humans: Anthropological Universality and Particularity in Transdisciplinary Perspectives , Berlin/New York: De Gruyter. doi:10.1515/9783110822809
• –––, 2011, “Human Natures”, in Human Nature and Self Design , Sebastian Schleidgen, Michael Jungert, Robert Bauer, and Verena Sandow (eds), Paderborn: Mentis, pp. 11–33.
• Samuels, Richard, 2012, “Science and Human Nature”, Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement , 70: 1–28. doi:10.1017/S1358246112000021
• Sartre, Jean-Paul, 1946 [2007], L’Existentialisme est un humanisme , Paris: Nagel. Translated as Existentialism is a Humanism , Carol Macomber (trans.), New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007.
• Scruton, Roger, 2017, On Human Nature , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Sedley, David, 2010, “Teleology, Aristotelian and Platonic”, in Being, Nature, and Life in Aristotle: Essays in Honor of Allan Gotthelf , James G. Lennox and Robert Bolton (eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 5–29. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511919275.004
• Silvers, Anita, 1998, “A Fatal Attraction to Normalizing. Treating Disabilities as Deviations from ‘Species-Typical’ Functioning”, in Arguing About Human Nature: Contemporary Debates , Stephen M. Downes, and Edouard Machery (eds), New York: Routledge, pp. 503–520.
• Sober, Elliott, 1980, “Evolution, Population Thinking, and Essentialism”, Philosophy of Science , 47(3): 350–383. doi:10.1086/288942
• Sterelny, Kim, 2011, “From Hominins to Humans: How Sapiens Became Behaviourally Modern”, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences , 366(1566): 809–822. doi:10.1098/rstb.2010.0301
• –––, 2012, The Evolved Apprentice: How Evolution Made Humans Unique , Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. doi:10.7551/mitpress/9780262016797.001.0001
• –––, 2018, “Sceptical Reflections on Human Nature”, in Hannon, and Lewens 2018: 108–126.
• Sterelny, Kim and Paul E. Griffiths, 1999, Sex and Death. An Introduction to the Philosophy of Biology , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Stotz, Karola, 2010, “Human Nature and Cognitive–Developmental Niche Construction”, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences , 9(4): 483–501. doi:10.1007/s11097-010-9178-7
• Stotz, Karola and Paul E. Griffiths, 2018, “A Developmental Systems Account of Human Nature”, in Hannon, and Lewens 2018: 58–75.
• Thompson, Michael, 2004, “Apprehending Human Form”, in Modern Moral Philosophy , Anthony O’Hear (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 47–74. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511550836.004
• –––, 2008, Life and Action. Elementary Structures of Practice and Practical Thought , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Tooby, John and Leda Cosmides, 1990, “On the Universality of Human Nature and the Uniqueness of the Individual: The Role of Genetics and Adaptation”, Journal of Personality , 58(1): 17–67. doi:10.1111/j.1467-6494.1990.tb00907.x
• –––, 1992, “The Psychological Foundations of Culture”, in The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture , Jerome H. Barkow, Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 19–136.
• Walker, Alan and Christopher B. B. Ruff, 1993, “Reconstruction of the Pelvis”, in The Nariokotome Homo Erectus Skeleton , Richard Leakey and Alan Walker (eds.), Cambridge: Harvard University Press, pp. 221–233.
• Walsh, Denis, 2006, “Evolutionary Essentialism”, The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science , 57(2): 425–448. doi:10.1093/bjps/axl001
• Wilkins, John S., 2018, Species. The Evolution of an Idea , second edition, Boca Raton, LA: CRC Press.
• Willmore, Katherine E., 2012, “The Body Plan Concept and Its Centrality in Evo-Devo”, Evolution: Education and Outreach , 5(2): 219–230. doi:10.1007/s12052-012-0424-z
• Wilson, David Sloan, 1994, “Adaptive Genetic Variation and Human Evolutionary Psychology”, Ethology and Sociobiology , 15(4): 219–235. doi:10.1016/0162-3095(94)90015-9
• Wilson, Robert A., 1999a, “Realism, Essence, and Kind. Resuscitating Biological Essentialism?”, in R. A. Wilson (ed.) 1999b: 188–207.
• ––– (ed.), 1999b, Species: New Interdisciplinary Essays , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Wilson, Robert A., Matthew J. Barker, and Ingo Brigandt, 2007, “When Traditional Essentialism Fails: Biological Natural Kinds”, Philosophical Topics , 35(1): 189–215. doi:10.5840/philtopics2007351/29
• Wimsatt, William C., 2003, “Evolution, Entrenchment, and Innateness”, in Reductionism and the Development of Knowledge , Terrance Brown, and Leslie Smith (eds), Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, pp. 53–81.
• Winsor, Mary P., 2003, “Non-Essentialist Methods in Pre-Darwinian Taxonomy”, Biology & Philosophy , 18(3): 387–400. doi:10.1023/A:1024139523966
• –––, 2006, “The Creation of the Essentialism Story: An Exercise in Metahistory”, History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences , 28(2): 149–174.

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

[Please contact the author with suggestions.]

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

Acknowledgments

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

Copyright © 2021 by Neil Roughley < neil . roughley @ uni-due . de >

• Accessibility

Support SEP

Mirror sites.

View this site from another server:

• Info about mirror sites

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is copyright © 2023 by The Metaphysics Research Lab , Department of Philosophy, Stanford University

Library of Congress Catalog Data: ISSN 1095-5054

• Mission and history
• Platform features
• Library Advisory Group
• What’s in JSTOR
• For Librarians
• For Publishers

In defense of the humanities: Upholding the pillars of human understanding

This essay is part of a series exploring the enduring importance of the humanities. Stay tuned for more insights on why the humanities still matter.

Loss and literature

Maria and her grandmother, 2003.

Often, the shortest stories are the most resonant. 

In 2020, I lost my maternal grandmother. “Maternal,” in her case, was more than a qualifier–she quite literally played the role of “mother” in my life. My first words, my first steps, and the most formative milestones of my childhood and adolescence happened in her care. She bore the brunt of my insufferable teenage angst, offering a consoling embrace when life seemed to get ahead of me. When I lost her, a chapter of my life ended.

To lose such a constant in one’s early twenties is to lose a tether to one’s reality. The years after my grandmother’s death have been fraught with uncertainty. How could I possibly recover from such a loss? How are my accomplishments meaningful if she is not present to witness them? And, perhaps most disconcerting: who will I be by the time my own life begins to wane? 

Everyone copes with and experiences loss differently. For me, it was acutely alienating. My relationship with my grandmother was singular, making my perspective on loss unique. I operated for what felt like ages on the assumption that no matter how much support I had, I could not possibly be seen.

That is, until I picked up A Very Easy Death . This brief, 112-page memoir by Simone de Beauvoir details her mother’s final days from an honest, compassionate perspective. Laden with recollections of a mother-daughter relationship and personal confrontations with mortality, it resonated with me in a way that no other text had. The acts of death and grief are explored in her memoir as though de Beauvoir were sitting across from me at a bistro recounting the experience. For the first time since my own experience and despite preceding me by thirty-six years, someone had finally seen me.

The humanities: Studies of the human condition

The connection I achieved through literature highlights the critical importance of the humanities. Encompassing history, literature, philosophy, art, and more, the humanities provide a lens through which one can view one’s personal experiences–making the universal personal and the personal universal.

The humanities and humanism have evolved significantly over centuries. In Western society, humanism traces back to Greece in the fourth and fifth centuries BCE. Sophists saw humanism as a cultural-educational program, aiming for the development of human faculties and excellence, as noted in Perez Zagorin’s “On Humanism Past & Present.”  

Agrippa: Human Proportions in Square. n.d. Wellcome Collection.

In Rome, the concept evolved into “an ideal expressed in the concept of humanitas … [which] designated a number of studies–philosophy, history, literature, rhetoric, and training in the oratory.” Most influential, though, was the humanism that emerged from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries that was “centered increasingly upon human interests and moral concerns rather than religion.” Its purpose was to cultivate a population of Christian men who were well-spoken, literate, and capable of integrating with high society. 

Growing more secular over time, humanist values began to compete with the physical and biological sciences, the social sciences, and other modern subjects which comprised nineteenth century liberal education. Zagorin suggests that scientific and empirical research approaches overtook human-centered perspectives, particularly after the massive loss of life in World War I and the disillusionment that followed. 

“Through de Beauvoir’s philosophical inquiries into life and death, I was able to confront and process my own grief more profoundly. Her reflections on mortality and the mother-daughter relationship resonated deeply with me, helping me to navigate my personal loss while also offering insights into the universal human condition.”

Scholarly perspectives on the importance of the humanities

Scholars argue that the humanities are essential for comprehending complex social dynamics and ethical questions. In “The Power of the Humanities and a Challenge to Humanists,” Richard J. Franke argues that humanistic interpretation “contributes to a tradition of interpretation.” Franke posits that human emotions and values are at the core of humanistic study, offering the ability to explore domains that “animate the human experience.” This is precisely how my engagement with Simone de Beauvoir’s memoir, A Very Easy Death, provided a foundation for evaluating broader human concerns.

Le Brun, Charles, 1619-1690., and Hebert, William, fl. 18th century. A Man Whose Profile Expresses Compassion. n.d. Wellcome Collection.

Through de Beauvoir’s philosophical inquiries into life and death, I was able to confront and process my own grief more profoundly. Her reflections on mortality and the mother-daughter relationship resonated deeply with me, helping me to navigate my personal loss while also offering insights into the universal human condition. This connection underscores the humanities’ power to transform personal experiences into a deeper understanding of shared human emotions and values.

Moreover, Franke postulates that subjects under the humanities all lend themselves to critical thinking, which he defines as “that Socratic habit of articulating questions and gathering relevant information in order to make reasonable judgements.” Through the humanities, one can approach topics from varied vantage points to develop a holistic understanding of them. 

In a study published in 2018 by the Journal of General Internal Medicine , medical students across institutions suggested that exposure to the humanities had an appreciable influence on their “tolerance of ambiguity, empathy, and wisdom.” The study’s discussion section further indicates that both the performance and observance of drama increase empathy, and that “even good literature prompts better detection of emotions.” These findings highlight that studying the humanities cultivates essential skills and attributes that have practical applications in real-world settings.

Scholarship, then, suggests that the humanities teach us to be human, whether through the ability to form nuanced questions or to feel empathy. I experienced this firsthand while reading Simone de Beauvoir’s A Very Easy Death. Her detailed account of her mother’s final days helped me navigate my own grief. It also gave me a deeper understanding of the emotional complexities involved in facing mortality as a concept. These characteristics—developed through engagement with the humanities—can improve interpersonal relationships and foster a more empathetic and accepting society.

The impact of the humanities extends beyond personal growth; it influences professional practices and societal outcomes. The empathy and wisdom nurtured by humanities education can enhance the quality of patient care in the medical field, as evidenced by the medical students’ testimonies. Similarly, professionals in law, education, and public policy benefit from the critical thinking and ethical reasoning stimulated by humanities education. By emphasizing these real-world applications, we can better advocate for the continued support and integration of the humanities in various sectors of society.

Challenges affecting the humanities: Economic pressures and academic isolation

Even in light of their demonstrated value, the humanities face significant challenges that threaten their vitality and relevance. In “ The Decline of the Humanities and the Decline of Society,” Ibanga B. Ikpe describes how today’s labor market increasingly demands qualifications for specific sectors. Courses in the humanities that are not tailored to particular career paths put them at a disadvantage in universities. 

Ikpe also attributes the decline in humanities education to the fact that “economic rather than academic motivations have become the primary basis for decision making in universities.” He raises the notion that the humanities and similar disciplines cannot be elucidated into digestible pieces of information, which makes them more difficult to sell. The more defined the subject, the more profitable. Thus, funding for humanities programs at educational institutions has reduced significantly. This has both limited resources for teaching and research and signaled a devaluation of the humanities as a whole. 

Finally, Ikpe presents the argument that humanities scholars are partially to blame for the current state of the humanities. He raises the accusation that humanities scholars have become withdrawn from greater society, sequestering themselves in academia. The niche views and dialogues they produce in this environment may sever their connection with a broader audience. 

Sustaining the humanities today

The future implied by the above rings grim, but there are still significant opportunities to advocate for the humanities by highlighting their interdisciplinary relevance to contemporary issues. For example, the study of ethics in philosophy can provide crucial insights into debates on artificial intelligence and biotechnology. Similarly, understanding historical contexts can help policymakers make informed decisions about current social and political challenges.

Organizations like JSTOR play a crucial role in preserving and promoting the humanities. JSTOR’s vast digital library of academic journals, books, and primary sources ensures that humanities scholarship remains accessible to students, researchers, and the public, advancing knowledge, strengthening critical thinking, and supporting interdisciplinary studies.

ITHAKA, the parent organization of JSTOR, is also increasing the utility of this knowledge. More than a mere repository, ITHAKA uses technology to analyze and contextualize vast amounts of information, making it more accessible and meaningful. By doing so, they help transform scholarly resources into practical tools that can drive real change in society. Their initiatives facilitate connections between research and practice, allowing the humanities to inform solutions to contemporary challenges.

By leveraging the support of organizations like JSTOR and embracing technological advancements, we can turn the tide in favor of the humanities. Advocating for their interdisciplinary relevance and addressing contemporary social issues will ensure that these vital disciplines thrive. The humanities are not relics of the past—they are essential to navigating the complexities of the present and shaping the future.

• Skip to main content
• Skip to secondary menu
• Skip to primary sidebar
• Skip to footer

A Plus Topper

Improve your Grades

Humanity Essay | Essay on Humanity for Students and Children in English

February 13, 2024 by Prasanna

Humanity Essay: The definition of humanity would be as quality of being human; the precise nature of man, through which he is differentiated from other beings. But being human does not necessarily mean that an individual possesses humanity. If you want to know the quality of humanity in a person take notice of how they do for people who give nothing back in return to the favour they have offered.

You can also find more  Essay Writing articles on events, persons, sports, technology and many more. Like, see many more facts and matters about humanity essay in this link, What is humanity essay.

Long and Short Essays on Humanity for Students and Kids in English

We provide children and students with essay samples on a long essay of 500 words and a short essay of 150 words on the topic “Humanity” for reference.

Long Essay on Humanity 500 Words in English

Long Essay on Humanity is usually given to classes 7, 8, 9, and 10.

When we talk about humanity, there can be various perspectives to look at it. The most common way to understand humanity is through this simple definition – the value of kindness and compassion towards other beings. When we scroll through the pages of history, we come across lots of acts of cruelty being performed by humans, but at the same time, there are many acts of humanity that have been done by few great people.

The thoughts of such great humanitarian have reached the hearts of many people across this planet. To name a few people, such as them are Mother Teresa, Mahatma Gandhi, and Nelson Mandela. These are just a few names with which most of us are familiar with. By taking Mother Teresa, as an example of a humanitarian, we see that she had dedicated her entire life to serving the poor and needy from a nation who she barely had any relation. She saw the people she served for, as humans, a part of her fraternity.

The great Indian poet, Rabindranath Tagore, expressed his strong beliefs on humanity and religion in his Nobel prize-winning piece, Gitanjali. He believed that to have contact with the divine one has to worship humanity. To serve the needy was equivalent to serving the divine power. Humanity was his soul religion. Their ways of life have taught us and will be teaching the future generation what it means to be a human—the act of giving back and coming to aid the ones in need. Humanity comes from the most selfless act, and the compassion one has.

But as we are progressing as a human race into the future, the very meaning of humanity is slowly being corrupted. An act of humanity should not and can never be performed with thoughts or expectations of any personal gain of any form; may it be fame, money or power.

Now we live in a world that, although it has been divided by borders, it is limitless. People have the freedom to travel anywhere, see and experience, anything and every feeling that ever existed, but we still are not satisfied. Nations fight now and then to attain pieces of land in the name of religion or patriotism, while millions of innocent lives are lost, or their homes are destroyed who are caught in the middle of this meaningless quarrels. The amount of divisiveness caused by human-made factors such as religion, race, nationalism, the socio-economic class is causing humanity to disintegrate slowly.

Humanitarian crisis such as the ones in Yemen, Myanmar and Syria has cost the lives of million people. Yet the situation is still far from being resolved. All it needs to save them is for people all across the globe to come ahead and help them. Humanity is just not limited to humans. It’s also caring for the environment, the nature and every living being in this universe. But most humans are regressing to the point that they don’t even care about their surroundings.

In this era of technology and capitalism, we are in desperate need to spread humanity. The global warming, pollution, extinction of species every day could be controlled if we and the future generation understand the meaning of humanity rather than just subduing ourselves to the rat race.

Short Essay on Humanity 150 Words in English

Short Essay on Humanity is usually given to classes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6.

Humanity is an integral part of life which tells that to help other living beings, try to understand others and realize their problems with our perspective and try to help them. For expressing humanity, you don’t need to be a well-off person; everyone can show humanity by helping someone or sharing with them, part of our ration. Every religion in this world tells us about humanity, peace and love.

But humans have always indulged in acts that defy humanity, but we, as a generation, have to rise and strive to live in a world where everybody is living a fair life. And we can attain by acts of humanity. In last I would only say to any religion you belong to be a human first be a human lover strive for humanity as every religion teach us humanity and share your life with others as life is all about living for others and serving humanity that is why “no religion is higher than Humanity.”

10 Lines on Humanity in English

• Humanity is a collective term for all human beings.
• Humanity is also used to describe the value of kindness and compassion towards other beings.
• Humanity is one of the characteristics that differentiate us from other animals.
• Humanity is also a value that binds us together.
• When humans achieve something of importance, it is generally referred to as an achievement for humanity or the human race.
• Humanitarian is a person who wants to promote humanity and human welfare.
• Examples of a few famous Humanitarians are- Mother Teresa, Swami Vivekananda, Nelson Mandela.
• The world at present is facing several humanitarian crises.
• Yemen is the largest humanitarian crisis in the world, with more than 24 million people (some 80% of the population) in need of humanitarian assistance.
• The divided world right now needs the religion of humanity to guide them.

FAQ’s on Humanity Essay

Question 1. What defines humanity?

Answer:  The definition of humanity is the entire human race or the characteristics that belong uniquely to human beings, such as kindness, mercy and sympathy.

Question 2. What are the qualities of humanity?

Answer: Qualities that form the foundation of all other human qualities are honesty, integrity, wholeheartedness, courage and self-awareness. These factors define who we are as human beings.

Question 3. How do we show humanity?

Answer:  Some says to show humanity is to model genuine empathy, to show gratitude, and to express respect and humility.

• Picture Dictionary
• English Speech
• English Slogans
• English Letter Writing
• English Essay Writing
• English Textbook Answers
• Types of Certificates
• ICSE Solutions
• Selina ICSE Solutions
• ML Aggarwal Solutions
• HSSLive Plus One
• HSSLive Plus Two
• Kerala SSLC
• Distance Education

Friday essay: reflections on the idea of a common humanity

Professorial Fellow, Faculty of Arts and the Melbourne Law School, The University of Melbourne

Disclosure statement

Raimond Gaita does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

University of Melbourne provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation AU.

View all partners

It is striking how often people now speak of “a common humanity” in ethically inflected registers, or ethically resonant tones that express a fellowship of all the peoples of the earth, or sometimes the hope for such a fellowship.

It is also striking how often we speak of our humanity as something that is not given to us once and for all, as species membership is, but something towards which we are called upon to rise – not until such time as we achieve it, which could be different from one person to another – but unendingly, until we die.

The two seem interdependent: to recognise the humanity of others we must rise to the humanity in ourselves, but to do that we must at least be open to seeing fully the humanity of all people.

In a similar way, the acknowledgement of human rights – rights that all people are said to possess merely by virtue of being human – appears to be interdependent with the acknowledgement of a common humanity with them.

The same is true for the recognition of the “Dignity of Humanity” to which, we are told in preambles to important instruments of international law, an unconditional respect is owed, as it exists, inalienably, in every human being.

More often than not, we refer to the idea of a common humanity when we lament the failure of its acknowledgement. The forms of that failure are depressingly many: racism, sexism, homophobia, the dehumanisation of our enemies, of unrepentant criminals and those who suffer severe and degrading affliction.

As often as someone reminds us that “we are all human beings”, someone will reply that to be treated like a human being you must behave like one.

There are two kinds of explanations for this. Each has its place. One assumes that we retain a firm hold on the idea that all peoples of the earth share a common humanity, but for various psychological, social, moral and political reasons fail to live up to our acknowledgement of it.

The other suggests that the very idea of a common humanity waxes and wanes with us and at times – when we dehumanise our enemies or are vulnerable to racism, for example – becomes literally unintelligible to us.

Racism is again on the rise in many parts of the world. So is the dehumanisation – in some cases demonisation – of our enemies. They have come together in attitudes to ISIS and have spread to Muslims and some immigrants as effortlessly as water flowing downwards in a channel.

For that reason, many people now fear that within ten years or so, national and international politics will be dominated by crises that are caused and inflamed by the shameful gap between the rich and the poor nations, aggravated by the effects of climate change.

We now have reason to believe that instability in many regions of the earth may cause even more people to be uprooted than were last century. Strong nations are likely to protect themselves in ways that become increasingly brutal, testing the relevance and the authority of international law.

It is, I believe, almost certain that my grandchildren’s generation will not be protected as mine has been from the terrors suffered by most of the peoples of the earth, because of impoverishment, natural disasters and the evils inflicted upon them by other human beings.

More and more, I fear, the reality of affliction together with unrelenting exposure to what is morally horrible – to evil if you have use for that word – will test their understanding of what it means to share a common humanity with all the peoples of the earth, and to a degree almost to awful to imagine, their faith that the world is a good world despite the suffering and the evil in it.

Inherent dignity and inalienable rights

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1948, stated in its preamble that

the recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.

It also spoke of crimes that had recently “shocked the conscience of mankind”.

Two years earlier, the UN’s Resolution on Genocide declared genocide to be a “shock to the conscience of mankind … contrary to moral law and to the spirit and aims of the United Nations” and a crime “which the civilized world condemns”.

Yet at the time those words were written, the peoples of the European nations who drafted them and created international law looked upon most of the peoples of the earth as primitive savages who, of their very nature, lacked the kind of understanding presupposed in what is meant by speaking of genocide as “a shock to the conscience of mankind” - even though some of them had been victims of colonial genocides.

Racism of that kind was then, and is now, often marked by incapacity to see depth in the lives of Blacks, Asians and Central and South Americans. Some other forms of racism are different. Anti-Semitism is different in many ways from the racism of whites towards coloured peoples. I do not know enough about racism of coloured peoples to one another and towards whites to comment on it.

At issue in the kind of racism I will be talking about is not the truth of the factual stereotypes to which racists often appeal in order defend their attitudes, but rather the meaning they are able to see – or fail to see – in the lives of the peoples they denigrate.

When James Isdell, Protector of Aborigines in Western Australia in the 1930s, was asked how he felt when he took children of mixed blood from their mothers , he answered that he

would not hesitate for a moment to separate any half caste from its aboriginal mother, no matter how frantic her momentary grief might be at the time.

They “soon forget their offspring”, he explained. It was literally unintelligible to him that “they” could grieve as “we” do, that grief for a dead child could lacerate a black woman’s soul for the remainder of her life.

To get the hang of what I mean by “unintelligible”, think of why one couldn’t cast someone who looked like a racist caricature from a Black and White Minstrel Show, to play Othello. Such a face can express nothing deep. Not even an omniscient God could see in it the expressiveness needed for such a role.

It’s hardly disputable that expressions like “failing full to see the humanity of peoples” come naturally in discussions of racism of the kind betrayed by Isdell’s remark.

So when I speak of a common humanity of all the peoples of the earth I mean, at least in the first instance, that there are no peoples who are as Isdell saw Aboriginal Australians. Given my earlier remarks about the colonial context in which the Universal Declaration of Human rights emerged, and the resurgence of racism world wide, the importance of such an affirmation cannot be overstated.

In making it, however, I do not want to suggest that I understand what it is to be fully human, that I and others who make the same affirmation discovered it and wish to impose that discovery to formerly denigrated peoples.

But when I say we have not discovered it, that we do not know what full humanity is, I don’t mean that we might one day. There is no such thing to discover.

Earlier, I said that we sometimes speak of humanity as something towards which we are called upon to rise, that it is task with no end, and would have no end even if we lived a thousand years. That is the idea of humanity that informs what I have been saying about this topic. Reviewing my book A Common Humanity: Thinking about Love and Truth and Justice (1999), Greg Dening said that “for Gaita, humanity is a verb, not a noun”. I couldn’t have put it better.

What it means to be human

It is, I think, uncontroversial that Australia’s Aboriginal peoples think differently about what it means to be human than non-aboriginal Australians do – a difference expressed, not discursively, but as the great Australian anthropologist WH Stanner put it, in

all the beauty of song, mime, dance and art of which human beings are capable.

The difference can be described most generally as being in their attitude to the natural world and their place in it. That is vague, of course, but it is enough to sustain the point that the difference has inevitably shown itself politically in, for example, disputes and court rulings about land and title and in the many, sometimes angry, arguments about what counts truly (practically) as reconciliation as opposed to merely symbolic gestures towards it.

Perhaps the most bitter disagreements were over whether genocide was at least sometimes, in some parts of Australia, committed against the Stolen Generations, as the 1997 Bringing Them Home report alleges.

I want to comment on this, though not in order to set new fires burning. Genocide is perhaps one of the most controversial concepts of international law. There is disagreement over whether it entails murder and over whether the Holocaust should be regarded as its paradigm or only as an extreme instance of a crime that, at its other extreme, might be forced assimilation.

Bringing Them Home consists largely of heartbreaking stories. The argument that genocide was committed is brief and depends on its definition. The 1948 Convention on the Prevention and punishment of the Crime of Genocide allows that there may be genocide without a single killing in service to a genocidal intent and that taking the children of a group may be a means to genocide, if it is done with the intention to destroy, “in whole or in part, the group as such”.

Stories, I have argued elsewhere, cannot of themselves tell us whether that allegation is right. Stories, no matter how many and how moving, cannot settle the controversies about the nature of genocide.

In the West, where the concept was developed, stories or narratives like Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man (1979) which played such an important role in our understanding of the Holocaust, speak to us only against the background of a common understanding. It is the work of discursive thought, usually in disciplines like anthropology, philosophy and history to try to render it reasonably perspicuous. But I must enter two important qualifications to that point.

Firstly, the kind of thought that engages with the stories should be answerable to the same critical concepts that determine the degree to which the stories contribute to understanding, rather than to edification or to delight. Those concepts are, of course, partly those with which we assess literature.

About virtually everything that matters in life, including matters of law, we argue not only about facts and the logical inferences made from them, but also about whether certain accounts of them move us only because we are vulnerable to sentimentality, or pathos, are deaf to what rings false, and so on.

For that reason, there can be no marked distinction between the concepts with which we critically assess narratives and those to which discursive engagement with them is answerable.

Bringing Them Home was criticised for being emotional. Hostile to its allegation of genocide, many Australians said that it convinced only people whose reason had given way to their emotions. Kim Beazley, some of you may remember, wept in Parliament when he read out some of those stories.

It is, of course, a failing – sometimes a very serious one – to be “emotional” in the pejorative sense of the term. Then we ignore or deny facts and arguments that are not congenial to beliefs to which we are emotionally committed. That is usually what people have in mind when they say “stop being so emotional”. Hold on to your reason, they say, especially in turbulent times like ours – like advising someone to hold onto to their hat in a storm.

But there is a danger here that threatens our capacity, indeed our desire, to see things. It is the tendency to oppose reason to emotion in a way that makes us insensible to, or uneducated in, a form of understanding in which thought and feeling and form and content are inseparable.

Sentimentality, a disposition to pathos, a failure to register what rings true, a tin ear for irony – these undermine understanding more often and surely than when emotion usurps reason, if reason is conceived as separate from and unfriendly to emotion.

When that happens it is not because emotion defeated reason that we affirm beliefs that we regret holding and having acted upon when we become morally clear sighted. It is because we were bereft of a sensibility, educated and disciplined, that would have enabled us to detect the sometimes crude, sometimes sophisticated, sentimentality, pathos and so on in what seduced us.

I come now to my second qualification. There is no shared understand between Aboriginal and non-aboriginal Australians about what it means to be human, and therefore, I think, no shared understanding of what we would naturally call crimes against humanity – if the concept of humanity plays any serious role in the ethical characterisation of such crimes.

Aboriginal peoples have no power of the kind that could force anything on non-Indigenous peoples, no power to force them to negotiate a treaty, for example.

Awful though it must be to peoples treated as they have been by their colonisers and their descendants, whatever further justice they are given will be a function of the openness of non-aboriginal Australians to seeing that justice must be done and, most importantly, seeing what that comes to if it is true to the history of this land.

For that to happen, non-aboriginal peoples must come to see what is at issue from the perspective of the Aboriginal peoples. That requires more than we usually mean by empathy, because it depends on acquiring new concepts or modifying old ones – concepts that are a condition of empathy, rather than its product.

For most non aboriginal Australians, that will involve a perceptual gestalt switch of the kind, which, for example, would enable them fully to acknowledge that this land is under occupation, if not legally as defined in international law, but morally, nonetheless.

If you think that is an exaggeration, a step way too far, then listen to Pat Dodson.

While the 1788 invasion was unjust, the real injustice was the denial by [Governor] Phillip and subsequent governments, of our right to participate equally in the future of a land we had managed successfully for millenniums. Instead, the land was stolen, not shared. Our political sovereignty was replaced by a virulent form of serfdom; our spiritual beliefs denied and ridiculed; our system of education undermined. We were no longer able to inculcate our young with the complex knowledge that is acquired from intimate engagement with the land and its waterways. The introduction of superior weapons, alien diseases, a policy of racism and enforced biogenetic practices created dispossession, a cycle of slavery and attempted destruction of our society. The 1997 report Bringing Them Home highlighted the infringement of the UN definition of genocide and called for a national apology and compensation of those Aborigines who had suffered under laws that destroyed indigenous societies and sanctioned biogenetic modification of the Aboriginal people.

For many people, to see Australia like that, really to see it like that, will at first be like seeing one aspect and then the other of an ambiguous drawing.

Crimes and lacerated souls

There is, of course, much more to understanding Aboriginal cultures than seeing the impact on them of the crimes committed against the Aboriginal peoples. But if we are to talk seriously about a treaty then we cannot avoid talking about crimes.

Understanding the crimes committed against the indigenous peoples of this country depends on an ethical understanding of what they suffered. Understanding of that can never be too distant from their stories and other forms of art that express that suffering.

If that is so, then it is obvious that, for the most part, Aboriginal and non-aboriginal peoples of this country do not have a shared understanding of that suffering and, therefore, of how it should enter the ethical characterisation of the crimes against them.

The development of such understanding will be unnerving, radical and almost certainly novel to the classical traditions of Western political thought.

When people’s souls have been lacerated by the wrongs done to them, individually or collectively, openness to their voices requires humbled attentiveness. Such attentiveness is growing in Australia, I believe: slowly, by no means surely, but growing nonetheless

Philosopher Martin Buber said that the basic difference between monologues and “fully valid conversation” is “the otherness, or more concretely, the moment of surprise”. His point is not merely that we must be open to hearing surprising things.

We must be open to being surprised at the many ways we may justly and humanly relate to one another in a spirit of truthful dialogue. It is in conversation, rather than in advance of it, that we discover, never alone but always together, what it means really to listen and what tone may properly be taken. In conversation we discover the many things conversation can be.

No one can say what will happen when, through such conversations, we understand better how Aboriginal peoples have experienced – in the past and now – the crimes committed against them and, therefore, how that understanding should inform the ways that Aboriginal and non aboriginal peoples will be able to say “we”, truthfully and justly, in political fellowship.

It might not be “we Australians”. We might change the name of the country. Maybe not, but I cannot see how one can respond with truth-seeking humility to Dodson’s words and at the same time rule that out.

An act of faith

As things stand, the preambles to some of the most important instruments of international law that I mentioned earlier deploy Eurocentric concepts to express the ethical significance of those laws, to reveal what it means ethically to break them. The Dignity of Humanity and the inalienable dignity of every human being are amongst those concepts.

Elsewhere, I have expressed deep reservations about the way we speak of human rights and Human Dignity with a capital D (the capital D is necessary because the issue is not the alienable dignity people fear to lose as a result of injury, or enfeeblement in old age).

Like French philosopher Simone Weil , I fear that the way we now speak about human rights rests on an illusion. The illusion is that no matter how unrelentingly savage or cruel our oppressors, we can retain a Dignity that they cannot touch.

Some people suffer affliction so terrible, either through natural causes or because of human cruelty, affliction that crushes their spirits so completely, that the heroic key in which we talk about Dignity and inalienable human rights sounds like whistling in the dark.

But I have also said that the battles for what we call “human rights” and for the acceptance that all the peoples of the earth share an inalienable Dignity that defines their common humanity have been amongst the noblest in Western history. God only knows where we would have been had we not fought and won so many of them.

Talk of inalienable dignity is often an attempt to capture the shock of encountering the violation of something precious, a kind of wrong that cannot fully be captured by reference to the physical or psychological harm that is part of, sometimes integral, to it.

In much of my work, I have developed the implications of the fact, wonderful but also commonplace, that sometimes we see something as precious only in the light of someone’s love for it.

Our sense of the kind of preciousness that we feel is violated when we speak of a person’s inalienable dignity was historically shaped, I believe, by the works of saintly love. They were the inspiration, I believe, for what we mean when we say that even people who have committed the most terrible crimes and those who suffer severe and ineradicable affliction possess inalienable dignity.

Kant, to whom we owe the modern heroic inflections attached to those ways of speaking, was right to say that we have obligations to those we cannot love and may even despise.

He was right. But it was the works of saintly love, I believe, that transformed our understanding of what it means to be human and in fact are the source of the affirmation that we owe unconditional respect to the inalienable dignity possessed by every human being.

One doesn’t have to be religious – I am not – to acknowledge that. Doing so will enable us to talk of the inalienable dignity of every human being without falling victim to the illusion that its heroic resonances encourage.

I spoke earlier of my fears for the world my grandchildren will grow into.

I dread the prospect of a world in which my grandchildren could no longer affirm – for it is an affirmation, an act of faith to be true to what love has revealed but reason cannot secure – that even the most terrible evildoers, those whose characters appear to match their deeds, who are defiantly unremorseful and in whom we can find nothing from which remorse could grow – are owed an unconditional respect, are always and everywhere owed justice, for their sake, rather than because we fear the consequences if we do not accord it to them.

I dread the prospect of a world in which we no longer even it find intelligible that those who suffer radical, degrading and ineradicable affliction could be accorded a respect that is without trace of condescension, and thereby kept fully amongst us, mysteriously our equals.

This is an edited version of a lecture Raimond Gaita gave on Wednesday August 10 in the series The Wednesday Lectures, held at the University of Melbourne.

Professor Gaita will be available for an author Q&A on Friday 12 between 3.30 and 4.30pm AEST. Post your questions in the comments below.

• Reconciliation
• Stolen Generation
• Race relations
• Immanuel Kant
• Moral philosophy
• Friday essay
• Apology to the Stolen Generations

Director of STEM

Community member - Training Delivery and Development Committee (Volunteer part-time)

Chief Executive Officer

Finance Business Partner

Head of Evidence to Action

45,000+ students realised their study abroad dream with us. Take the first step today

Meet top uk universities from the comfort of your home, here’s your new year gift, one app for all your, study abroad needs, start your journey, track your progress, grow with the community and so much more.

Verification Code

An OTP has been sent to your registered mobile no. Please verify

Thanks for your comment !

Our team will review it before it's shown to our readers.

• School Education /

✍️Essay on Humanity in 100 to 300 Words

• Updated on  
• Oct 26, 2023

Humanity could be understood through different perspectives. Humanity refers to acts of kindness, care, and compassion towards humans or animals. Humanity is the positive quality of human beings. This characteristic involves the feeling of love, care, reason, decision, cry, etc. Our history reveals many acts of inhuman and human behaviour. Such acts differentiate the good and the bad. Some of the key characteristics of Humanity are intelligence, creativity , empathy and compassion. Here are some sample essay on Humanity that will tell about the importance and meaning of Humanity!

Table of Contents

• 1 Essay on Humanity 100 Words
• 2.1 Importance of Humanity 

Also Read: Essay on Family

Essay on Humanity 100 Words

Humanity is the sum of all the qualities that make us human. We should seek inspiration from the great humanitarians from our history like Mahatma Gandhi , Nelson Mandela , Mother Teresa , and many more. They all devoted their life serving the cause of humanity. Their tireless efforts for the betterment of the needy make the world a better place. 

In a world suffering from a humanitarian crisis, there is an urgent need to raise awareness about the works of humanitarians who died serving for a noble cause. World Humanitarian Day is celebrated on 19 August every year to encourage humanity. 

Here are some examples of humanity:

• Firefighters risking their lives to save someone stuck in a burning building.
• Raising voices for basic human rights.
• Blood donation to save lives is also an example of humanity.
• A doctor volunteering to work in a war zone.

Also Read: Famous Personalities in India

Essay on Humanity 300 Words

Humanity is the concept that lies at the core of our existence. It contains the essence of what makes us humans. It encompasses our capacity for empathy, compassion, and understanding, and it is a driving force behind our progress as a species. In a world often characterized by division and war, the essence of humanity shines as a ray of hope, reminding us of our shared values and aspirations.

One of the defining characteristics of humanity is our ability to empathize with others. Empathy allows us to connect with people on a profound level, to feel their joys and sorrows, and to provide support in times of need. It bridges the gaps that might otherwise separate us, creating a sense of unity in the face of adversity. Even comforting a friend in distress is a sign of humanity. 

Also Read: Emotional Intelligence at Workplace

Importance of Humanity 

Compassion is the fundamental element of humanity. It is the driving force behind acts of kindness, charity, and selflessness. Humanity is important to protect cultural, religious, and geographical boundaries, as it is a universal language understood by all.

When we extend some help to those in need out of humanity, we affirm our commitment to the well-being of others and demonstrate our shared responsibility for the betterment of society.

Humanity balances out the evil doings in the world. It creates a better world for all to reside. Humanity is the foundation of the existence of humans because it makes us what we are and differentiate us from other living organism who do not possess the ability to think and feel. It is a testament to our potential for progress and unity.

In conclusion, humanity, with its pillars of empathy, compassion, and understanding, serves as a guiding light in a complex and divided world. These qualities remind us that, despite our differences, we are all part of the human family. 

Related Articles

Humanity is a complex characteristic of any human being. It includes the ability of a person to differentiate between good and bad and to show sympathy and shared connections as human beings. The human race can win any war be it harsh climatic conditions, pandemic, economic crisis, etc, if they have humanity towards each other. Humans have the potential to solve problems and make the world a better place for all.

An essay on humanity should be started with an introduction paragraph stating the zest of the complete essay. It should include the meaning of humanity. You need to highlight the positive characteristics of the act of humanity and how it can work for the betterment of society.

Humanity is very important because this characteristic of human beings makes the world a better place to live. It is what makes us humans. Humanity is the feeling of care and compassion towards other beings and gives us the ability to judge between right and wrong.

For more information on such interesting topics, visit our essay writing page and follow Leverage Edu .

Kajal Thareja

Hi, I am Kajal, a pharmacy graduate, currently pursuing management and is an experienced content writer. I have 2-years of writing experience in Ed-tech (digital marketing) company. I am passionate towards writing blogs and am on the path of discovering true potential professionally in the field of content marketing. I am engaged in writing creative content for students which is simple yet creative and engaging and leaves an impact on the reader's mind.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Contact no. *

Connect With Us

45,000+ students realised their study abroad dream with us. take the first step today..

Resend OTP in

Need help with?

Study abroad.

UK, Canada, US & More

IELTS, GRE, GMAT & More

Scholarship, Loans & Forex

Country Preference

New Zealand

Which English test are you planning to take?

Which academic test are you planning to take.

Not Sure yet

When are you planning to take the exam?

Already booked my exam slot

Within 2 Months

Want to learn about the test

Which Degree do you wish to pursue?

When do you want to start studying abroad.

January 2024

September 2024

What is your budget to study abroad?

How would you describe this article ?

Please rate this article

We would like to hear more.

Have something on your mind?

Make your study abroad dream a reality in January 2022 with

India's Biggest Virtual University Fair

Essex Direct Admission Day

Why attend .

Don't Miss Out

Home / Essay Samples / Philosophy / Human Nature / The Intrinsic Nature of Humanity: Exploring What it Means

The Intrinsic Nature of Humanity: Exploring What it Means

• Category: Psychology , Philosophy
• Topic: Human Behavior , Human Nature

Pages: 2 (1074 words)

Views: 2364

• Downloads: -->

--> ⚠️ Remember: This essay was written and uploaded by an--> click here.

Found a great essay sample but want a unique one?

are ready to help you with your essay

You won’t be charged yet!

Philosophy of Life Essays

Philosophy of Education Essays

Virtue Ethics Essays

Transcendentalism Essays

Personal Identity Essays

Related Essays

We are glad that you like it, but you cannot copy from our website. Just insert your email and this sample will be sent to you.

By clicking “Send”, you agree to our Terms of service  and  Privacy statement . We will occasionally send you account related emails.

Your essay sample has been sent.

In fact, there is a way to get an original essay! Turn to our writers and order a plagiarism-free paper.

samplius.com uses cookies to offer you the best service possible.By continuing we’ll assume you board with our cookie policy .--> -->