The Ideal of Nature: Debates about Biotechnology and the Environment

4 Human Nature without Theory

The feeling is by no means universal, but a decent-sized swath of the public thinks that what people might someday be able to do to modify human bodies using biotechnologies is at odds with some of their attitudes about the moral significance of human nature. Exactly how to describe these attitudes and exactly what “at odds” means lead into murky waters, however. We do not know our way around when it comes to articulating our views about the moral significance of human nature. Thoughtful people sympathetic to these attitudes describe them only gropingly. Critics have no trouble. Not infrequently, one can hear a moral concern about human nature outlined in the form of a quick and crude objection: “X is against nature, and therefore wrong.” In this rendering, the moral concern is simple, confident, forceful—and ridiculous. One of its more preposterous aspects is that “against nature” implies that we know what human nature is, when surely human nature is amorphous and slippery at best. The difficulty of pinning down human nature is one reason that attitudes about nature cannot be plausible unless they are limited and complicated. In this chapter, I argue that we may not need to know much about human nature to have moral concerns about changing it by means of biotechnology. More precisely, I maintain that we do not need to have a full theory of human nature to have moral concerns about changing it. The concept “human nature” chapter Four Human Nature without Theory Gregory E. Kaebnick, Ph.D. 50 Gregory E. Kaebnick must refer to something in the real world if we are to attach moral significance to it, but we need not (so I argue) be able to say exactly what it means to be human. The Concept of Human Nature The moral concerns people have about human nature rest on different positions on the very concept of what human nature is—different views, that is to say, of what one knows when one has an understanding of human nature. Some of these positions would require a full theory of human nature, but others do not. Essentialist versus Evolutionary Views of Species According to one long and deep philosophical tradition, to have a concept of human nature is to grasp the essence of the ontological category that (in this account ) human nature is. This would be more than a mere description; it would provide a metaphysical explanation of why things in that category belong to the category. It would set out the “what it is to be” of that thing, as Aristotle’s language is sometimes translated. Understanding the essence of human nature would amount to having a full theory of human nature. As typically understood, an “essence” is the concept that a particular thing embodies. The essence of a triangle, for example, is the definition of triangles that all particular triangles embody. The essence of gold is the molecular structure that characterizes gold. An essence explains the traits that a thing has. It is not reducible to those traits, however; it is unchanging and timeless . An essence has an existence of its own, and indeed it is, in a sense, more real than the items that partake of it. Further, essences are often held to relate things of different kinds to each other. An essence is unique; all the members of a given kind share an essence, and members of other kinds lack it. According to an ancient lineage of scholars whose work draws on Aristotle, the universe reflects God’s benevolent organization—a “great chain of being,” so to speak, of essences is often invoked to suggest that a kind is what it is by rational necessity and that the overall universe is also rationally ordered and necessary. We understand the order and necessity of the universe by grasping the essences that things in the universe embody. This is a lot to take on. Fortunately, essentialism is not the only way of understanding the concept of “human nature.” Essentialism models itself after mathematics and physics, but biology is now understood along evolutionary and stridently nonessentialist lines. The evolutionary view makes no claim for the rational necessity of human nature, or for its immutability and timelessness, or Human Nature without Theory 51 that an account of human nature will show that human nature is rationally related to the rest of the universe. There need also be no requirement that...