Introduction
Exotic Journeys: A Tourist's Guide to Philosophy
brought to you by Ron Yezzi
Emeritus Professor of Philosophy
Minnesota State University, Mankato
© Copyright 1986, 2000, 2015 by Ron Yezzi
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(Author's Note: This account is taken from Ron Yezzi, Directing Human Actions: Perspectives on Basic Ethical Issues (Lanham: University Press of America, 1986), pp. 91.)
Introduction
A conception of human nature underlies much ethical thought because our values are tied to our capabilities as human beings. For example, if a traditional Christian maintains that we ought to save our immortal souls by living according to spiritual values, we cannot take the “ought-statement” seriously unless an immortal soul is part of human nature. In significant ways, discussion of ethical ideals always turns upon whether or not the ideals are approachable, given the capabilities of human nature; and ideals that are beyond a reasonable degree of approximation do not hold anyone's allegiance for long. For another example, consider the British philosopher Jeremy Bentham's contention that judgments of right and wrong are directly traceable to the bondage of human nature to pleasure and pain. His psychological hedonism will not place any value upon an ethical exhortation to renounce the pursuit of pleasure.
In a negative sense, philosophers willingly recognize a relationship between human nature and ethical statements; that is, they grant that an accepted account of human nature has “veto power”―if it shows the utter unattainability of an ethical goal. They sometimes disagree however on the question whether or not there can be a positive relationship between human nature and ethical statements; that is, they sometimes doubt that facts about human nature can establish statements about what persons ought to do. While the negative-positive distinction may be artificial, we will not worry about this problem here. Here we will consider attempts to derive judgments of what persons ought to do from an account of human nature. For purposes of comparison and contrast, positions will be presented in pairs―namely, Plato and Sigmund Freud, Thomas Hobbes and Jean Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche, John Dewey and Edward 0. Wilson, B. F. Skinner and Gerald Dworkin. Since accounts of human nature frequently result from work in the sciences, we should not be surprised to find individuals not ordinarily labeled as “philosophers” included for discussion. Thus the list includes Freud, a psychoanalyst, Marx, a social scientist (economist, sociologist historian, political scientist), Wilson, a sociobiologist, and Skinner, a behavioristic psychologist.