What's Left of Human Nature?

Table Of Contents

Preface xv
Acknowledgments xxxi
1 Introduction: What’s at Issue 1
1.1 Nature? 1
1.2 Human? 4
1.3 Three Different Concepts of Human Nature in Overview 7
I Three Challenges 13
2 The Dehumanization Challenge 15
2.1 The Vernacular Concept of Human Nature 16
2.2 Dehumanization Systematically Viewed 18
2.3 Social Perspectivity 28
2.4 The Challenge That Derives from Dehumanization 31
3 The Darwinian Challenge 33
3.1 What Essences Would Require 34
3.2 Challenging the Classificatory Role of Essences 41
3.3 Challenging the Explanatory Role of Essences 49
3.4 Situating the Anti-Essentialist Consensus 57
4 The Developmentalist Challenge 59
4.1 From Physis versus Nomos to Nature versus Nurture 60
4.2 Ignoring Interactions 67
4.3 The Interactionist Consensus 70
4.4 What Is the Challenge for a Concept of Human Nature? 85
Summary of Part I 87
II Three Natures: A Post-Essentialist, Pluralist, and Interactive Reply to the Three Challenges 89
5 Genealogy, the Classificatory Nature, and Channels of Inheritance 91
5.1 Five Questions Regarding a Species’ Nature 92
5.2 Genealogical Nexus as the Classificatory Nature 96
5.3 Genealogy and the Channels of Inheritance 102
5.4 The Resulting Pluralism 114
6 Toward a Descriptive Human Nature 121
6.1 Descriptive Knowledge about Humans in General 122
6.2 The Relationship to the Classificatory and the Explanatory Nature 126
6.3 Typicality Necessary? 131
6.4 Typicality Sufficient? Or What Does “Important” Mean? 139
7 The Stability of Human Nature 147
7.1 Innate or Evolved? 148
7.2 Channelism, Stability, and the Nature–Culture Divide Revived 157
7.3 A Narrow Enough Concept of Human Nature in the Descriptive Sense 164
8 An Explanatory Nature 169
8.1 Explanatory Neo-Essentialism 170
8.2 A Population-Level Solution 179
8.3 The Explanatory Nature Established 184
9 Causal Selection and How Human Nature Is Thereby Made 189
9.1 Causal Selection, Control, and Normality 190
9.2 Choosing among Actual Difference Makers and the Willingness to Control 196
9.3 How Norms Make Human Nature Visible 202
9.4 How Norms Make Human Nature Real 206
Summary of Part II 210
 III Normativity, Essential Contestedness, and the Quest for
Elimination 213
 10 Humanism and Normativity 215
 10.1 Two Sufficient Entry Conditions for Moral Standing 216
 10.2 The Ethical Importance of the Descriptive Nature 220
 10.3 A Dialectic, Essentially Contested Concept of Human Nature 225
 11 Should We Eliminate the Language of Human Nature? 231
 11.1 Elimination versus Revision 232
 11.2 Redundancy, Neutrality, and Risk of Dehumanization 233
 11.3 Elimination versus Revision as a Matter of Values 238
 Summary of Part III 241
Notes 243
References 265
Index 289