PHIL 1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 22: Human Nature
15 Sep 2020
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Throughout history, human beings have been motivated by the same things (jealousy, ambition, pride) If someone told us that they found a society that lacked those motives, we wouldn"t believe them. We take them to be constant features of human nature. Historians wouldn"t be able to study history if they did not assume that their motives stayed the same throughout time. If human beings have a fixed nature, then they do not have freedom of will in the sense of the capacity to act against this nature entirely. If human beings had this capacity, we would see a greater variety of randomness in human behavior. But the study of history teaches us that human beings act in regular ways. While it is true that each individual is a little bit different from the next, this is true in nature, too. Each dog behaves a little bit differently. We can get to know someone through experience.
