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Neo-Confucianism, emerging in the Song dynasty (960-1279) in China, represents a renaissance and reinterpretation of traditional Confucian ideas and practices. It was developed partly in response to the challenges posed by Buddhism and Daoism, integrating metaphysical and cosmological elements into Confucianism. Here are the main concepts of Neo-confucianism.

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Neo-Confucianists introduced the concept of 'Li', a fundamental principle that signifies the underlying order of the universe and nature. It's an abstract pattern or rationale which things must follow.

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9. Neo-Confucianism: Zhu Xi and Wang Yangming

As the Empire regrouped and neo-Confucianism (see Neo-Confucian philosophy), referred to as ' dao learning' in Chinese, began to take shape in the medieval period, the speculative and the practical extremes of Buddhism came to exert an influence on the revival of Confucianism and to set the agenda for rival claims to orthodoxy within the neo-Confucian ranks. On one extreme, the Cheng-Zhu school favoured broad text-based learning and 'the investigation of things' ( gewu) while the competing Lu-Wang school rejected canonical studies for a more subjective, meditative approach to personal realization. What these contesting traditions shared in common was philosophical ambition encouraged by the presumption that there is a direct line between personal cultivation and an understanding of natural and moral order. This led to extended reflections on the nature and order of all things, and heated discussions about the relationships that obtained among the most abstract distinctions which could be marshalled in explanation of cosmic regularities. Where these two extremes of neo-Confucianism disagreed most fundamentally was on the most effective method of self-cultivation (see Self-cultivation in Chinese philosophy).

Zhu Xi is representative of the systematic and theoretical wing of neo-Confucianism. His extensive commentaries established the Four Books (the Analects, the Mengzi, the Daxue (Great Learning) and the Zhongyong (Doctrine of the Mean)) as the core curriculum for official examinations, an orthodoxy that persisted into the twentieth century. The authority of Zhu Xi's project lay in his claim to retrieve and revive the import of classical Confucianism. In so doing, he made use of the traditional philosophical vocabulary, but augmented it with complex theoretical discussions of li (the patterned regularity of existence) and qi (the psychosomatic stuff of existence), giving precedence to the former as identical with the grounding principle of Zhou Dunyi's cosmology, the Great Ultimate ( taiji) (see Li; Qi; Zhou Dunyi). Hence, Zhu Xi's wing of neo-Confucianism is often referred to as ' li learning'. These abstract distinctions had moral significance. They could be appealed to qualitatively in explanation of both the goodness of humanity and how to realize it. Although Zhu Xi did not rule out introspection as a means to illumination, the emphasis of his programme was clearly on scholarly learning.

The most eminent of the thinkers representing an emphasis upon internal cultivation was Wang Yangming. He rejected the intellectualization of personal realization by identifying the heart-and-mind (see Xin (heart-and-mind)) with li, or pattern. For Wang, the human mind is both the locus and the standard of sagehood. Perhaps the most celebrated theme in Wang is his belief in the continuity and inseparability of knowledge and practice.

There is some question among contemporary scholars as to whether neo-Confucian philosophy, launched with the eleventh century cosmological speculations of Shao Yong and Zhou Dunyi, abandoned the tradition of ars contextualis and became metaphysical in a more recognizably Western sense. This involves the question as to whether notions of 'transcendence', 'objective essences' and 'natural kinds' were at least tacitly introduced. At the very least, one can say that Western philosophers would find the language of neo-Confucian philosophers more familiar than that of most other Chinese thinkers. Having allowed this surface familiarity, one must consider that the philosophical substance of tradition weighs heavily against any assumption that neo-Confucianism was dualistic, and was thus disposed to move in an essentialist direction.

Historically, the speculative, cosmological turn in Chinese philosophy came under formidable attack with the founding of the Qing dynasty in the seventeenth century. Evidential research ( kaozhengxue) brought with it an attempt to get behind the 'empty' commentaries of neo-Confucianism and a return to the philologically-centered historical scholarship of 'Han learning' ( Hanxue). On the premise that new problems require new solutions, the abstract theorizing and universalistic tendencies of Song-Ming ' dao learning' gave way to the analysis of particular historical events and cultural artifacts as a resource for finding answers to the specific issues of the day. Thinkers such as Wang Fuzhi and Dai Zhen recovered and reaffirmed the correlative and interdependent relationship between historical event and the principles of order. Once again, it can be seen how the pragmatic concerns of most Chinese intellectuals militate against the exercise of philosophical speculations that move too far afield from the concrete problems of human beings, or which could conceivably serve to introduce contentiousness among intellectuals.

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Chinese philosophy - Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy

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They emphasized 'Qi', the material force or vital energy that animates the universe and manifests in all physical existence. 'Li' and 'Qi' together explain the workings of the universe and life.

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Focusing on the moral and ethical improvement of the individual, Neo-Confucianism stresses internal spiritual development, combining philosophical inquiry with personal ethics.

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Part of the Palgrave Studies in Comparative East-West Philosophy book series (PSCEWP)

1

Let's first talk about Lawrence Kohlberg's "cognitive-developmentalism."1Kohlberg's approach derives in great part from the work of Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, and both Piaget and Kohlberg saw the teaching and learning of morality in neo-Kantian terms as essentially a cognitive process. Following Piaget, Kohlberg saw moral development and reasoning as occurring through three basic levels: the pre-conventional, the conventional, and the post-conventional, with attainment of the final level characterized by an ability to think of moral problems in terms of very general or abstract principles like Kant's Categorical Imperative. But Kohlberg's account of how moral thinking develop doesn't do much to explain the origins and development of moral motivation, the desire actually to do what (more and more advanced) moral injunctions and principles tell us we ought to do. This point has been made by numerous critics, and Kohlberg himself allows that purely cognitive development cannot ensure substantial moral motivation. He even talks about empathy as somehow involved in moving (people) beyond the cognizance of moral norms to reliable moral motivation, but he never nails any of this down, and I shall argue here that empathy gives us our best purchase both on moral motivation and on how moral education most readily occurs.

Nowadays, we English-speakers tend to distinguish empathy from sympathy in a fairly uniform way. Roughly speaking, empathy is what Bill Clinton was self-ascribing when he famously said: I feel your pain. But sympathy involves feeling sorry for someone who is in pain and wanting to do something or see something done about it. Some more mature "feats" of empathy can depend on our possession of certain concepts and on cognitive maturation/learning more generally: as when we empathize with some whole group of people we have never met, for example, the starving or oppressed people of a certain country. Most importantly for present purposes, many contemporary psychologists hold that our altruistic and general moral tendencies depend on and are strengthened by our being empathic. And let me now say something more specific about how they view these matters.

The first step toward understanding the role of empathy in moral development was made, I believe, by the psychologist Martin Hoffman.2Hoffman holds that the development of altruistic moral motivation and behavior requires the intervention of parents and others making use of what he calls "inductive discipline" or often just "induction." Induction contrasts with the "power-asserting" attempt to discipline, train, or influence a child through sheer threats (carried out if the child doesn't comply) and with attempts to inculcate moral thought, motivation, and behavior (merely) by citing or admonishing with explicit moral precepts or injunctions. Inductive training depends, rather, on the child's initial capacity for empathy with others and involves (say) a parent's noticing when their child hurts others and then (in a non-threatening but firm manner) making the child vividly aware of the harm that he or she has done-most notably by getting the child to focus on and feel how things must feel for the child whom they have hurt. This leads the normal child with a good relationship with his or her parents to feel bad-a kind of rudimentary guilt-about what s/he has done.

Hoffman believes that if such training is applied consistently over time, the child will come to associate bad feelings (guilt) with situations in which the harm s/he can do is not yet done, an association that is functionally autonomous of parents' or others' actual intervention and constitutes or supports altruistic motivation. And he also holds that this process helps to support the motivational efficacy of moral rules and moral injunctions when these are (eventually) directed at the child. In addition, he says that educative techniques similar to induction can reinforce or strengthen children's empathy with and concern for other people generally. Both parents and schools can expose children to literature, films, or television programs that make the troubles and tragedies of distant or otherwise-unknown (groups of) people vivid to them-and they can encourage their empathic sensitivity to such people by asking students/children to imagine how they or some family member would feel if such things were happening to them or if they themselves had caused such things to happen to others.

But empathy plays another role in induction and in moral education more generally that Hoffman never mentions. When parents use induction, they demonstrate an empathic concern for the (say) child who has been hurt by their own child, and there is in fact no reason why a child can't take in such an attitude or such motivation directly from their parent.3Hume (in A Treatise of Human Nature and elsewhere) held that people's basic feelings can spread to others by contagion or infusion, but he also believed that moral opinions and attitudes can spread in that way. So in most cases induction will not only involve a parent's deliberately making their child more empathically sensitive to the welfare or feelings of others, but also the child's directly taking in, by a kind of empathic osmosis, the parent's own empathic concern for others. (The parents function as a model for the child, but the child may not be consciously aware that this is happening.) And the taking in of parental attitudes or dispositions will presumably not be limited to occasions where induction is employed, but will occur or be occurring at other times when the child notices how empathically altruistic their parent is. So there are at least two important and understandable ways-induction and modeling-in which empathic concern for other people can be strengthened and the aim(s) of moral education furthered, but notice that neither of these processes involves deliberate or conscious self-cultivation or self-shaping on the part of the child.

However, we now need to consider what the Aristotelian tradition has to say about how moral education occurs. Aristotelianism (along with the largely American school of "character education" that takes itself as in certain ways derivative from Aristotelianism) regards the moral education of any given individual as typically involving quite a lot of input from other people. But the Aristotelian emphasis is on habituation, on repetitive and habitual activity. According to Aristotle, parents can accustom their children to doing the right thing in various situations, and developing rational insight will then (somehow) work together with good habits in facilitating and motivating right actions after the child is no longer under parental tutelage.

The habituation or repetition that parents impose seems, however, to be more a matter of power assertion than of any other motivating factor, and as is well known, power assertion is much less effective than empathically-grounded induction in developing or enhancing altruistic concern for others.4 I am saying, therefore, that Aristotle and Aristotelianism emphasize repetition and habituation, but don't offer us a satisfactory explanation of the role these play in the process of moral education. The Aristotelian methodology of or for moral education seems much less likely to create morally altruistic individuals than methods that rely explicitly and deeply on factors relating to empathy. But this is just the beginning of what I shall be saying here about the problems and prospects of Aristotelian moral education. When I discuss Aristotle's views about the voluntariness of moral character further along in this chapter, I will return to the issue of habituation and discuss it in a somewhat fuller way. But I think we have already seen enough to make us suspicious about the Aristotelian picture of moral education, and I think it is now time to see how the previous discussion bears on the question whether moral self-cultivation makes realistic and plausible sense in the terms in which the Chinese traditions have described and advocated it.

2

The idea of (deliberate) moral self-cultivation entails a process that an individual can take charge of and accomplish largely through his or her own efforts. When we talk of self-education in specific school subjects, we mean that an individual learns more and more geography or mathematics largely (though not necessarily entirely) on his or her own, and the same is true across a quite wide range of reflexive verbs. Chinese thinkers often say or imply that individuals can at some point undertake their own moral self-cultivation and become more virtuous through what are basically (though they don't have to be exclusively) their own efforts, but I have doubts about this.

Modeling and induction don't give us good examples of deliberate moral self-cultivation, but let us spread our net more widely and consider a case where, unlike standard cases of modeling and induction, the individual who improves morally has to engage in a certain amount of ( self-) reflection. Imagine, for instance, a factory owner who has always been quite insensitive to the feelings of his workers; he has been haughty with them and hard on them, and the employees for their part have always kept their feelings about their employer pretty well hidden. One day, however, he is in the factory and acting in his usual haughty manner, and (for some unexplained reason) he turns around suddenly to where no one has expected him to be looking. When he does so, he notices a look of fear and distaste on the face of one of the workers, and the factory owner immediately also sees that that face represents a response to the way he, the owner, has just been acting. This shakes him out of his usual mood and manner and makes him leave the factory immediately; and once he does, he starts reflecting on the meaning of what he has just seen. He soon (or eventually) realizes that what he has seen is just the tip of the iceberg. He was acting no differently today from the way he has always acted, but this time, by a kind of moral luck, he saw the reaction he caused in a given worker; and he is now able to generalize this, to recognize that he has hurt the feelings of a lot of people in the factory and not just on one occasion but over many years.

Such reflection will quite possibly lead the factory owner to become more sensitive to the feelings of his employees and of others as well. The result might be quite similar to what induction is supposed to bring about in children: namely, a greater empathic sensitivity to the feelings of others and a (greater) reluctance to do certain kinds of things that hurt or harm people. But although the case of the factory owner doesn't involve anyone else teaching him a deliberate moral lesson and does involve a certain amount of self-reflection (reflection, e.g., on the meaning of the given worker's hurt look), I don't think we yet have an example of moral self-cultivation. Moral self-cultivation is something one deliberately sets out to do, and this factory owner had no intention of becoming a better person as a result of his trip to his own factory on a given morning. Yet this is what happened, and it happened because of external factors (that look!) that had totally unanticipated effect on both his feelings and his life. Therefore, if moral learning or education can occur through a process of moral self-cultivation, we need some other kind of example to demonstrate that possibility, and although I believe it is possible to find such examples, I think they are fairly rare, fairly difficult to come by. And as I hope to show you in what follows, that very rareness gives us reason to wonder about the overall usefulness and feasibility of the kind of overall or large-scale moral self-cultivation Chinese thought has emphasized the need for and desirability of. No Chinese thinker has ever said that successful moral development cannot occur in the absence of educative help from others, but I hope that by the time you reach the end of this chapter you will agree with me that such moral development is psychologically impossible. To develop morally we very much need the help or influence of others. (I have been shaping my discussion here to take account of suggestions that have been made by Huang Yong.)

However, I am absolutely not denying that moral self-cultivation ever occurs. In certain circumstances it can occur in a somewhat limited way. Consider, for example, a Caucasian American man married to a very Americanized Korean-American woman. The woman has introduced him to her very traditional family, and although the Caucasian man tries to keep his reactions to himself, he doesn't entirely succeed. He finds the family weird and unattractive, and it turns out that his brother-in-law has noticed this fact about him. The man finds this out through his wife's telling him so, and he immediately feels very bad about what has been happening. His wife is very understanding, very forgiving, about it all, but the man himself feels he hasn't tried hard enough to understand and warm to his in-laws, and upon reflection he decides to do something very specific to make things better. He decides to read a lot of Korean history and literature in order to become more sympathetic with that culture and with his own new family (also for the sake of future children), and if he carries out this resolution, it will be an example of very deliberate moral self-cultivation. In fact, the educative process he has deliberately chosen may end up making him more sensitive to the Korean culture and to Korean people and to some extent, therefore, a better person.

But notice two things about this example. It depends, in the first instance, on the intervention or input of others. He doesn't think to cultivate his empathic sensitivity to Korean people all on his own, but decides to do that in response to what he wife tells him. Second, this is a very unusual example. Maybe people should go around reading series of books in order to become more empathic with others, but it doesn't often happen, and it isn't realistic to expect it to start happening very often. And the reason why is that the event that led the Caucasian who has married a Korean-American to undertake a course of readings in Korean history and literature is a fairly rare and unpredictable one. To be sure, such events do happen to people, but it doesn't seem reasonable to expect such events to occur often enough to help everyone become more (and more) sensitive and altruistic. If we want altruism and moral virtue, we need to use the techniques of moral education I spoke about earlier. But this assumes that the example of moral self-cultivation I have just described is basically the only kind of example one can realistically find, and I believe this goes against the entire tradition of Confucian moral teaching(s). So I propose now to consider what some of the main figures of Chinese Confucian ethical thought have to say on the topic of moral self-cultivation.

3

Let's begin our discussion with Kongzi (Confucius). The Analects contains a good deal of wisdom about moral education/learning and other topics. But I want to confine my comments to what Kongzi says about moral self-cultivation. Kongzi believed that people could or can fundamentally transform or shape themselves in moral terms, and he speaks of rituals or rites as helpful in effecting moral (self-)transformation. Many of his followers lay similar stress on rites or rituals as helpful to moral learning or education. But I wonder how many rituals actually help to make people better as people.

Take ritualized or institutionalized athletic contests. Kongzi seems to have thought that such contests take aggressive energy away from more destructive or divisive activities, and he may have been right about this.5 But does an interest in and devotion to athletic contests do anything more than make people temporarily less aggressive? Does it transform them in such a way that they later become less aggressive and less in need of athletic contexts to draw off their aggressive energies? I see no reason to think so, though we would need to appeal to social science (or the science of biology?) to help us with this question.

Consider other kinds of ritualized behavior, cases where the term "ritual" actually seems more apt than it does in reference to most athletic contests. Imagine, for example, that there are certain ceremonies that parents take their children to and that require the children to sit still for a while and to take in certain aspects or elements of their own religious or ethical culture. Kongzi and his followers seem to have thought that such rituals were/are likely to curb children's bad habits, make them more patient, more willing to cooperate in social institutions and enterprises. But I don't know. If the children are made to sit through the rituals, perhaps they will resent what they have to do or go through, and perhaps they will "itch" not to have to do what they are being required by their parents to do. Maybe they will try to avoid such rituals whenever they can get away with it, and maybe the rituals, rather than increasing their patience, will make them less patient with what life requires of them. Who knows? The Confucians assume that the rituals will have various good effects on the character of those who participate in them, but with children at least the participation is typically not voluntary. The parents exert various forms of power assertion in order to get their children to attend church or regularly go through traditional and institutionalized social ceremonies, and the literature of psychology suggests that power assertion isn't very effective in making people more caring and altruistic-and may actually tend to have the opposite effect (children can resent their parents or the priests who force them to sit through, go through, various potentially tedious ceremonies). Of course, if children love their parents, they may empathically pick up on their parents' positive attitudes toward given rituals, but it is still unclear how any of that could make them become more moral or altruistic, and in any event this would not involve anything properly described as moral self-cultivation.

But let's now consider what Mengzi (Mencius) says about moral self-cultivation.6Mengzi thinks human nature is fundamentally good, but also holds that even if we are to some extent already good, we can become much better. Yet even if we are innately good in the sense of having inborn benevolent impulses, it doesn't automatically follow that we will desire to become better people and deliberately take (effective) steps to do so, and Mengzi's picture of moral self-improvement is, therefore, radically incomplete. Nor does it really help to bring in the idea of (deliberately) extending our benevolence beyond a narrower circle to ever larger ones. Mengzi mentions this possibility or opportunity.7 And the idea of such extension is often relied on in later Confucian (and neo-Confucian, etc.) discussions of moral self-cultivation. But a plausible account of why one would want to extend one's benevolence is never really offered, and, in addition, we are never really told how, in understandable psychological terms, the process of (deliberate) extension actually occurs. (Other people can get us to be more morally consistent in our emotional concerns, but it is a mistake to view this as involving moral self-cultivation.8)

Now later Confucianism often regarded the knowledge of the Confucian classics as a basis for moral (self-)improvement, but from everything I have read, those who have recommended such a course of study as a means to moral self-improvement don't tell us how the improvement actually, psychologically, occurs. And, frankly, I don't believe that this can at all easily be done. Reading certain works of literature that immerse the reader in the sorrows of certain other people ( Uncle Tom's Cabin is a good example) can make and, we know, has made a great difference to how sensitive those readers are to other people's sufferings. And if the idea is that the Confucian classics can do this sort of thing for us, well, then, what is being said makes a lot of sense to me (though I don't know enough to judge whether those classics contain anything like the intense empathic moral lessons of Uncle Tom's Cabin). But even if we can assume that the Chinese classics contain stories and examples that can help sensitize us morally, what is the motive for actually reading them? If the idea is that one is assigned these books in school or university, then there is an element of power assertion that can make one wonder just how much the student really will learn. And in any case even if one assumes that the student can learn moral lessons in such cases, the learning will certainly not count as an instance of moral self-cultivation or self-education. But perhaps the idea is that everyone wants to improve morally, so that if one realizes that the classics can improve one in that way, one has an obvious motive to immerse oneself in them.

However, for reasons explained earlier, I just don't get this. After one has hurt someone and had that fact placed very vividly before one, one may well feel bad and want to be better in certain specific ways (having to do with the hurt or harm one has brought about). But the general desire to be a morally better person: where is that supposed to come from? The desire for moral improvement and/or self-improvement can't simply be taken for granted. It needs to be psychologically explained in clear and convincing terms.

Now in fact the Confucian tradition seems to have such an explanation. It can say and has said that the desire for moral self-improvement may come from our admiration for certain traits and for certain individuals who seem to us to exemplify those traits (e.g., Analects 4.17, 7.22, and 7.24). So let's explore this new and final way in which one might try to defend Confucian ideas about moral self-cultivation.

First, admirable exemplars (or the admirable traits they exemplify) have to be brought to our attention, and it doesn't make sense to suppose that people go around looking for exemplars to emulate. If they did, and if they then proceeded to emulate those exemplars, that would be a process of self-cultivation in the fullest sense. But as I indicated, this is not how actual people learn whatever they learn from exemplars. I think, therefore, that the real question is whether, once one encounters or is shown an exemplar, a process of deliberate emulation can understandably take place along lines that can be reasonably described as moral self-cultivation. If acquaintance with the model or exemplar influences someone via the kind of unconscious or non-deliberate osmosis (of empathic concern) I described earlier, then the process isn't sufficiently deliberate or self-initiated to count as self-cultivation or self-shaping, so the Confucian who thinks the emulation of a moral model can be pursued in a deliberate and self-conscious way has to come up with a psychologically realistic way to explain how this latter can (frequently) happen.

Nor is it good enough, in this connection, simply to say that one's admiration for the exemplar is what gets one to emulate them in a deliberate way. We need to understand better how admiration can lead to emulation. After all, I may morally admire the person who gives one of their kidneys to a total stranger, but if I am as much attached (sorry!) to my own kidneys as most people are, I wouldn't want to be or become such a person. My present prudential self-concern would undercut any desire to be like such a person. More generally, why should someone who is, say, already fairly altruistic (and empathic) want to embody the greater altruism (and empathic tendency) of some highly admirable exemplar? (Richard McCarty first brought this question to my attention many years ago.)

It is not enough to say that we will naturally want to become more like the highly moral exemplar because we realize that we will be better off, have a better life, if we do that. There are many reasons for doubting whether the person who is morally better than others will usually have a better life than those others (though see Chap. 6). But one also needs to ask how a desire to become morally better as a means to having a better life can actually lead to being morally better. If one's primary motive is and continues to be the ostensibly egoistic desire for a better life for oneself, then how can that represent, embody, or launch a morally improved state of personal character? It is just not clear how the primary desire for a better life for oneself will eventually yield to (or turn into?) the kind of intrinsic desire to help people and treat them fairly that we almost all think is essential to being a moral person.

But all right, then. Let's assume that admiration in itself gives one some motive to emulate a moral exemplar, a motive that needn't be egoistic, but that may be counteracted in cases like that of the kidney donation where the prudential risks of moral improvement can be considered too great. One will still have to ask how such a motive can initiate a process of moral self-improvement, and it is not easy to see how to answer this question. Wanting to be more like an admired moral model, do I simply perform actions like those I know the model has performed, actions presumably motivated by a desire to emulate that the model himself or herself wasn't motivated by? And how does this process lead me-and what reason do I really have to think it will lead me-to eventually develop the admired motives that the admired model originally acted from? Perhaps, then, I reason that if I read the Confucian classics that the model himself read, that will make me more like him-but I will also have to recognize that many people have read those classics without becoming like the model, and surely that should make me wonder whether reading those classics is the best way to go about improving myself morally. Similar thoughts are applicable to any attempt to improve oneself via rituals.

Up till now, I believe Confucian views about moral self-cultivation or overall self-shaping have been left pretty much without a realistic psychological foothold within the overall enterprise of (better) understanding how moral education and moral development more generally can and actually do occur. Influential contemporary Confucians or Confucian scholars seem to believe in the promise and possibilities of moral self-cultivation just as much as the early Confucians did.9 But my conclusions from everything that has been said here are, first, that present-day Confucian and other ethicists should stop being so preoccupied with moral self-cultivation and focus more of their attention on moral education in general; and, second, that discussions of moral self-cultivation from a Confucian perspective ought to be more skeptical than they have been.

But this still leaves the door open to Western ideas about self-cultivation and self-shaping that, as I have suggested, don't find any parallel within the Confucian or (as far as I know) within any other Eastern philosophical/ethical tradition. (Note that I am not and shall not be assuming that deliberate and radical moral self-improvement cannot involve substantial help from others.) So I think we now need to turn our attention to the somewhat different considerations and factors that Aristotle, Kant, and others in the West have emphasized as the basis for shaping ourselves overall into morally virtuous individuals.

4

Let me begin with Aristotle. Our previous discussion focused mainly on Aristotle's views about how children morally learn from their parents, and we didn't discuss the further issue of whether someone acting on their own can make themselves into an ethically better or worse person and thereby be or become responsible for their own moral character. But the latter topic has at least this much in common with the former: what Aristotle says about the moral training of children and what he says about our responsibility for our own eventual moral character both depend crucially on the idea of the repetition of desirable actions, on habituation.

In Book III (especially Chap. 5) of the Nicomachean Ethics (NE), Aristotle directly discusses the question of (moral) responsibility for states of virtue and vice and for actions arising out of such states of character. He says that when we make voluntary choices, we are responsible for what we have done, can be praised or blamed for the actions we have chosen to perform, and he goes on to claim that the repeated choice, say, of unjust actions will turn someone into an unjust person, someone with a settled disposition or habit of acting unjustly. He adds that ignorance of this last fact is the mark of a "thoroughly senseless person." In other words, every intelligent person knows that if they act in a certain way all the time (or on many occasions and without ever acting in a contrary fashion), they will develop into a person with the habit of acting that way. So Aristotle holds that when someone has made themselves unjust in this kind of way and with this kind of antecedent knowledge, their resultant unjustness is voluntary and can therefore be blamed.

Now I argued earlier that if someone's parents use power assertion to make them, say, attend church every Sunday, this may well not result in a settled habit that will survive once they no longer are under their parents' control. (In fact, they may itch to stop going to church as soon as they can get away with it.) But one could claim that what one does under parental control or supervision is not really or entirely voluntary, and it would be possible then to claim, on behalf of what Aristotle says in Book III, Chap. 5, of the NE, that what is true of involuntary choices needn't at all hold for voluntary ones. Even if choices made under strict parental supervision arguably don't lay down a settled habit, that may be because the choices aren't voluntary, and in that case, since the choices Aristotle in Book III speaks of as laying down or causing a habit are entirely voluntary, they may establish a habit even if less voluntary choices do not.

But is Aristotleright to say this sort of thing? He says that every sensible person knows that their voluntary choices will eventually turn into something settled and perhaps even unchangeable, but does every such person really know this? I tend to doubt it. In The Methods of Ethics Henry Sidgwick says that someone who believes they are free, will sometimes rationalize themselves into yielding to a certain kind of temptation (that they wish to be no longer subject to) on the grounds that they can just as easily start acting differently the next time they are tempted.10 Now you can say with Aristotle that such people aren't sensible or intelligent, but so many of us fall under this description that I think one should hesitate to agree with Aristotle about the obviousness of his claim that free choices lay down firm habits.

That claim, moreover, is not only not obvious but actually, and from a certain social-scientific standpoint, quite questionable. In the twentieth century, psychology as a field worked very hard on and with what is standardly called the "law of effect," according to which behavior that is rewarded in a given circumstance is more likely to repeat itself in similar circumstances in the future than it was likely to occur before it had ever been rewarded. The behaviorists relied on this idea (of course, it is vague because of the vagueness attaching to the notion of similarity and also, perhaps, to the idea of a reward). But the law of effect can certainly make sense apart from the (other) assumptions of behaviorism, and it is in any event clear that Aristotle's argument about the results of voluntary actions doesn't appeal to this law. He doesn't say that certain voluntary actions become more likely to repeat themselves if they are rewarded. Rather, and in a more blanket fashion, he says that they are more likely to occur and become a strong habit once enough of that kind of voluntary action (on the part of the given agent) has occurred.

This idea corresponds, not to the law of effect, but to another "law" that behaviorists and others have spoken and written about, the so-called law of exercise. According to this law, behavior that wasn't particularly likely to occur in a given kind of circumstance c becomes more likely to occur in similar circumstances in the future (simply) as a result of having occurred once (or perhaps several times) in c. This is very close to what Aristotle is saying and what he says every sensible person knows, but in fact psychologists have never plumped firmly in favor of the law of exercise in the way they pretty much have done in regard to the law of effect. The fact is that it is very difficult to be sure, either on experimental grounds or on commonsense grounds, that voluntary (or involuntary) choices tend to propel themselves forward into the future as habits or dispositions to act and to do so independently of being rewarded.

This has three theoretical consequences. One doesn't, to begin with, have to be silly or unintelligent to doubt the law of exercise or to doubt what Aristotle says about sheer action tending to become habit. Aristotle says you do, but he seems mistaken about this. But then second, and more significantly for present purposes, even if (unrewarded) voluntary actions do tend to yield habits, the habit thus arrived at won't have to count as voluntary on Aristotelian grounds to the extent the person who develops that habit had no idea, no clear notion, that his voluntary actions were going to yield a habit. Then, third and finally, there is reason to doubt that the voluntary actions will yield a habit unbeknownst to those to perform those actions (or even when they think that what they are doing will cause a habit to form). So Aristotle's argument for the voluntariness and consequent blameworthiness or praiseworthiness, respectively, of habits of or tendencies toward injustice or toward justice just won't fly. He has given us no good reason to think that we ever do substantially shape or make our own overall moral character in this way.

Nor can one help Aristotle out here, as some present-day Aristotelians have sought to do, by comparing the acquisition of moral virtue with the acquisition of a skill.11 When I practice the piano and become more adept at playing, my nervous system cooperates, but no change of motivation need occur; however, if I copy the actions of some moral exemplar, I can become like them only if some motivational change occurs within me as a result of such "practice." And it is difficult in psychological terms to see how the practice or repetition can serve to implement this kind of change. But now on to Kant.

5

Kant deals with the issue of self-shaping in ways that are, well, distinctively Kant-like. For example, he is very interested in strength of will as a path to the overcoming of temptations, and Aristotle emphasizes this aspect of the moral life much less than Kant does. Also there is no assumption in Aristotle that we have a duty to shape ourselves into better people, whereas for Kant this is one of our most important (imperfect) duties. Now I don't want to dwell on this last issue because it isn't essential to the present argument. The question we need to address is whether we are capable of shaping ourselves into better people, not whether we have a duty to do so-though if we find that we cannot shape ourselves morally in any overall substantial way, then on Kantian assumptions we don't have any duty to do so and Kant will have been mistaken to think we do.

According to Kant, each time we exercise willpower to repress or inhibit impulses or desires that run contrary to our moral duty, we weaken the future force of those impulses/desires and make it easier for ourselves to resist them in the future.12 So someone who understands this and who seeks (to fulfill his duty) to improve himself morally can do so by resisting given temptations (Kant is thinking especially of appetitive temptations). But can someone deliberately and effectively go about shaping themselves in this way?

It all depends on the empirical assumption that resisting temptation on a given occasion makes it easier to do so subsequently, an assumption that Kant may have believed plausible, but that recent psychology casts a great deal of doubt on. Recent studies of willpower tend to show that it is vulnerable to all sorts of negative influences (fatigue and low blood sugar can decrease willpower) and that one's willpower can be depleted, at least in the short term, by one's having exercised it on a particular occasion. This last point works to some degree against Kant's assumptions about the consequences of exerting willpower, but of course the Kantian can reply that even if exercising willpower depletes it in the short term, it strengthens it in the long term or at least attenuates the desires against which the willpower has been exercised, in the longer run. But unfortunately there seems to be little or no empirical evidence even for this weaker assumption.

I was recently in email correspondence with Roy Baumeister, the co-author, with John Tierney, of a book called Willpower: Rediscovering the greatest human strength, that deals in more specific psychological terms with the phenomenon of willpower than Kant, Aristotle, or any other philosopher ever has.13 And I asked him directly whether he thought willpower could be increased over time and the strength of tempting desires/impulses diminished over time by resisting temptations. His answer was that immediate temptations don't seem to lose their power as a result of earlier exercises of willpower, but that we can diminish our tendencies to give in to temptations by keeping them at a distance, that is, finding ways to avoid "occasions of sin" where a given temptation can exert an immediate influence over us.

In addition to talking of the ways in which the exercise of willpower can diminish our reserves of willpower in the short term and of the physical effects of fatigue, anger, and what have you on the efficacy or strength of our willpower, the book Willpower spends a great deal of time talking about how one can avoid tempting situations-e.g., staying away from streets with candy or ice cream shops whose allure one's sweet tooth finds hard to resist. And the book is far from alone in making this kind of point. David Watson and Roland Tharp's Self-directed Behavior: Self-modification for Personal Adjustment goes in great and admirable detail into the ways, for example, in which someone fighting the temptations of drugs, alcohol, gambling, overeating, or betting can "externalize" their problem in order to deal with it.14 If I tell everyone I know that I intend to lose weight, I have a motive to stay away from tempting shops or aisles in the supermarket that is additional to the reasons I initially had to try to lose weight: namely, the desire not to lose face with my friends and family. That motive can help tip the scale toward resisting temptations, even immediate temptations, but that doesn't mean that the (felt) strength of those immediate temptations has been in any way diminished by one's previous or recent good behavior. Rather, another factor or item has been put in the scales weighing against one's strong temptation toward overeating.

Similarly, someone who wants to stop taking a certain drug can sign up with a company dedicated to helping people overcome their drug habits in a way that also puts a strong factor or item in the scales against continued drug use. They can give the company a large sum of money and sign a contract with them that allows the company to confiscate that money if they test positive (or refuse to take a drug test) at the end of six or twelve months. The psychology literature in this area is full of excellent suggestions about how a person who wishes to change bad habits can do so. But none of that literature subscribes to the thesis Kant assumed to be true, the thesis that we can weaken the future strength of temptations/impulses by refusing to act on them.

However, the Kantian might then reply "So what? If we can learn to indirectly avoid giving in to the impulses that lead us morally astray, isn't that good enough, and doesn't that count as a form of self-shaping for the morally better?" Well, not so fast. Let's carefully examine what these indirect techniques for dealing with tempting impulses actually imply for the possibility of moral self-cultivation or self-shaping. It will help us to do this if we choose an illustrative (probably not entirely fictional) example of someone who wants and wants badly to change his habit, say, of gambling. Imagine that he has gambled in the past and, because he has lost money in doing so, has deprived his family of some of what they need for their comfort and safety. He has felt bad about this, but not bad enough to make him resolve to change his ways (he'd rather fight with his wife about the way he spends money than actually try to change the way he does).

Let us imagine, however, that at a certain point he loses a great sum of money, enough to actually impoverish his family, and seeing in particular what this means for his children, he feels much guiltier than he has ever previously felt: guilty enough, disgusted enough with himself, that he now and finally resolves to take steps to prevent himself from gambling in the future. Announcements to his friends might not be very effective here, but imagine that he thinks of a way in which he can ensure that his paycheck goes entirely to his wife and that all the places where he has bet or could bet have been put on notice that he is not to be given any credit for gambling purposes. Even if all this might not, as a matter of fact, be enough to prevent him from gambling again, let's just assume, in order to illustrate the relevant philosophical point, that it is enough or that he takes other measures that can effectively prevent him from ever gambling (e.g., making it impossible for himself to ever again possess a credit card). The potential dire results of his gambling are now painfully clear to him in a way that was never true or obvious before, and the shock and pain (to him) turn out to be enough to make him do things that render it impossible for him ever to gamble.

So the first question to ask is: has this man improved morally? And the answer is, at least on the surface, far from obvious. Isn't the only difference between the present situation and what had been the case previously the fact that he hadn't earlier done anything so terrible to his family? And how can a difference in consequences make a difference to his moral character, given especially that he presumably all along had the capacity for guilt that he is displaying as a result of what he has now done to his family?

Well, we have to be careful. His general capacity to feel guilt may well have been something he was born with, but guilt or guilty feeling can accumulate over time, and when it does or has, a given person may be primed to feel guilty for later misdeeds in a way he or she wasn't primed previously. In our example, it was assumed that the man had felt bad earlier for the (say) inconveniences his gambling had caused his family. And arguably (and plausibly) the earlier guilt primed him to feel even more guilty when he subsequently impoverishes his family (the family home has to be forfeited) than he would have felt if he hadn't earlier done things that made him feel somewhat guilty. Guilt can accumulate over time and as a result of a string of misdeeds, so we shouldn't assume, as we did above, that his capacity for guilt has always been the same. True, his basic capacity for guilt, his capacity, therefore, in one sense, hasn't changed; but if by capacity for guilt one means the man's actual(ized) tendency to feel guilt, then in that respect he has changed. The man will have a stronger tendency to feel guilt for gambling than he had originally and/or he will have a tendency to feel stronger guilt for a given act of gambling than he had before his gambling started having dire effects on his family. All this is in fact relevant to the question whether he changes morally for the better.

To show you why, however, I need to bring in a simpler or more primitive case of inductive discipline to illustrate the same basic point. Martin Hoffman says that a single use of induction may not make a child resist all future (unprovoked) aggression against other children, but that if induction is used a few times, the child will eventually stop himself from aggressing against other children before the aggression can actually occur. Rather than just feel bad after the fact for aggressing, the accumulation of such bad feeling over a number and variety of instances can inhibit aggression before it occurs. In other words, the repeated instances of induction cause a build-up or increase of motivational resistance to aggressive action, and the child who goes through this process therefore emerges as less aggressive than they were previously. To that extent the child is a morally better individual than they were beforehand-induction is, after all, a form of moral education. And we can apply what has just been said about the moral education of children to the case of the man whose gambling has impoverished his family.

The man's earlier guilt in relation to the less harmful effects of his gambling paves the way toward the strong reaction he has when his gambling finally impoverishes his family. In parallel with cases of inductive discipline, the earlier bad feeling or guilt may not cause him to change his ways, stop gambling, but there may be a build-up of guilt nonetheless as a result of the earlier misdeeds, an increased resistance in the man to acts of gambling that reaches its full fruition when he impoverishes his family. The earlier bouts of guilt may well have softened him up for the incredibly strong guilt reaction he has when his gambling finally has utterly dire consequences. In other words and to reemphasize something I said earlier, there may have been an accumulated sense of guilt, a build-up of guilt, that causes the guilt reaction he has when he impoverishes his family to be much stronger than it would have been if this had been the first and only time he had gambled to ill effect, and we are supposing that that greater strength is what leads him, finally, to institute the changes in how he lives his life that make it impossible for him to gamble again. As in the case of the child who learns or comes to inhibit aggression through inductive discipline working on her or his natural empathic tendencies, the man who institutes such changes is plausibly regarded as a changed man, a better man than he was previously.

But doesn't he bring about this moral change himself-by bringing about the changes in himself and his environment that will prevent him from gambling again? If that is so, then we have an example of moral self-shaping, though its character will be quite different from what Kant imagined. The man won't have shaped himself into a person whose aberrant desires are less strong than they were: that would be moral self-improvement, but we have seen no reason to believe that he has improved himself in this way. Rather, and as we are now imagining things, he has, in reaction to the enormous guilt he felt (and continued to feel) when his gambling impoverished his family, shaped himself into a morally better person by deliberately making changes in the world and his power to affect the world that will prevent him from ever again gambling away his family's wealth and welfare. But is this the right way to view things? Does it make moral and conceptual sense? I think not.

Again, consider the case of induction. The child builds up more and more resistance to hurting or harming other children (or others more generally) till they reach the point where they no longer do aggressive things to other children. But when, we may ask, does the moral improvement occur? At the moment where, tempted as he might have been previously to hit another child, he inhibits that sort of action. Does that action make him into a better child or is it rather the sign of his moral improvement? Surely it must be the latter. The moral improvement occurs in stages as his resistance to hitting, say, builds up in response to repeated use by one parent or adult or another of inductive discipline that occurs on occasions when he actually has hurt someone and that focuses the child on the pain or harm he has (deliberately or thoughtlessly) caused to the other child/person. The actual inhibitory act is just a sign, is it not?, is just a sign or evidence that the process of changing the child's motivation vis-à-vis others has been (relatively and in one respect) successful. You don't have to be a virtue ethicist to see that the moral change occurs before the child acts, that is, refrains from acting aggressively. (Kantians might well agree.)

But then when we transpose these ideas back to the case of the gambler, we see that it is far from clear that the man we are imagining makes himself into a better person by (deliberately) instituting changes in the world and in his own power to affect the world that make it impossible for him to gamble. The motivational change, in parallel with the case of a child subjected to inductive discipline, occurs before the man actually initiated the changes necessary to undercut his possibilities of gambling. Indeed, it is the motivational change in him that causes him to institute those changes. And it seems much more plausible to imagine that the motivational change constitutes, in his case, the moral change for the better that occurs in or for him, than to say, as we originally put it, that the moral change occurs through the actions that he initiates as a result of that motivational change.

Of course, the actions he initiates are under his control, and if the moral change occurs through those actions, it occurs as a result of his own choosing and counts as an instance of self-shaping. But if the moral change occurs through the accumulated strengthening of inhibitory guilt, then it is not something he deliberately caused, and he can't be said to have shaped himself morally into a better person. The guilt, rather, shaped him. And in that case we have still not found a plausible Kantian-type example of someone's deliberately or even non-deliberately shaping or making themselves into a morally better, much less a morally good, person. The idea of overall moral-self cultivation is less psychologically realistic and, consequently, less morally useful or relevant than the historic traditions of Eastern and Western thought have largely believed. Our moral development mainly depends on the intervention of others and on external factors that are largely beyond our own control. Philosophers East and West ought to start recognizing that.

Here too, then, we have another example of how difficult it is to think of our psychology in a realistic (or sober) way. The present chapter shows the unrealism and wishfully thinking quality of much that has been said about the human capacity for large-scale or overall moral self-cultivation. But in Chap. 2 we saw that Western philosophers, unlike the philosophers of China, have misunderstood how any psychology has to work. With Kant and Aristotle as prime examples, they have thought that it is possible for us to think or reason in the absence of all emotion and this is a ground-floor mistake about our psychology or any psychology and about what it is in most general terms to be an intelligent being, human or otherwise. And it is worth mentioning Kant and Aristotle in this connection because, as we saw in the present chapter, they also have inflated ideas about the human capacity for moral self-education and self-transformation. Whether the two errors are related is a very interesting question, one that invites further consideration on my own part and, I hope, yours. (I don't now see any easy way to answer it.) But I should also mention what Chap. 2 says about the error psychologists make when they underestimate the strength of the connection between empathy and altruism, which contrasts, of course, with the way so many philosophers have overestimated our capacity for moral self-transformation. I don't think psychologists have been particularly prone to the same error. The most famous recent psychologist of moral education, Lawrence Kohlberg, speaks of stages of moral development but never suggests that the developing individual can take control of this process. And the same is also true of Martin Hoffman, who pioneered work in psychology on empathy and moral development.

So we have seen quite a sampling of errors of psychological unrealism or conceptual confusion in regard to the topics we have explored in our last two chapters here. In our next chapter, I shall be talking about various kinds of weaknesses or deficiencies in philosophical thought, and again some of these, perhaps even most of these, will involve problems having to do with psychology, though in most cases the intellectual fault will not lie with psychology or psychologists but with the way philosophers have shied away from and/or shown insensitivity to issues about human psychology that bear directly on the questions they address and seek to answer as philosophers.

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Philosophy Department, University of Miami, Coral Gables, FL, USA

Michael Slote

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Slote, M. (2020). Moral Self-Cultivation East and West: A Critique. In: Between Psychology and Philosophy. Palgrave Studies in Comparative East-West Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22503-2_3

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Moral Self-Cultivation East and West: A Critique

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Chinese thought places great emphasis on moral self-cultivation, but offers no clear view of why people should want to become more virtuous and of how they can do so largely through their own efforts. Chinese philosophers like Mencius talk of extending our...

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It deeply explored the nature of morality and human nature, considering the innate goodness of humans and the importance of moral cultivation.

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1. "Humans", Slogans and the Traditional Package

1.1 "Humans"

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.

1.2 Unpacking the Traditional Package

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 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:

1.3 Essentialisms

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).

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:

Type of essentialism

Relationship to the traditional package

purely classificatory

equivalent to TP5

purely explanatory

unspecific version of TP2

explanatory-classificatory

combines TP5 with an unspecific version of TP2

explanatorily teleological

equivalent to TP3

normatively teleological

equivalent to TP4

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).

1.4 On the Status of the Traditional Slogan

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.

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.

2.1 The Nature of the Species Taxon

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.

2.2 The Nature of Species Specimens as Species Specimens

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.

2.3 Responding to the Evolutionary Verdict on Classificatory Essences

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

3.1 Privileging 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 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.

3.2 Statistical Normality or Robust Causality

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).

4.1 Genetically Based Psychological Adaptations?

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.

4.2 Abandoning Intrinsicality

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.

4.3 Secondary Altriciality as a Game-Changer

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

5.1. Human Nature from a Participant Perspective

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.

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.

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.).

5.2.1. Sidestepping the Darwinian Challenge?

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.

5.2.2. Human Flourishing

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.

5.3. Reason as the Unique Structural Property

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

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

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

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

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

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# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
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.

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Traditional Confucianism focused more on practical ethical and social teachings. In contrast, Neo-Confucianism added a metaphysical dimension, discussing the nature of reality and the universe.

# data[].attributes.body
Neo-Confucianism arose partly as a response to the dominance of Buddhism and Daoism, seeking to reaffirm Confucian values while also addressing the spiritual and metaphysical questions raised by these religions.

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Confucianism vs Buddhism vs Taoism - Realpolitik of the Three Teachings of Ancient China

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While both emphasize moral cultivation, Neo-Confucianism places a greater emphasis on internal spiritual development, combining philosophical inquiry with personal ethics.

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Confucianism (3): Self Cultivation (haoxue)

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Neo-Confucianism introduced the idea of universal principles governing nature and human affairs, while traditional Confucianism was more concerned with social order and harmony based on hierarchical relationships.

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The 7 Universal Principles Of Manifestation! (Law Of Attraction)