Thirteen Theories of

Human Nature
Seventh Edition

!
LESLIE STEVENSON
DAVID L. HABERMAN
PETER MATTHEWS WRIGHT
CHARLOTTE WITT

New York Oxford

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Stevenson, Leslie Forster, author.
Title: Thirteen theories of human nature/Leslie Stevenson, David L.
   Haberman, Peter Matthews Wright, Charlotte Witt.
Description: Seventh Edition. | New York : Oxford University Press, 2017. |
   Previous editions include: Twelve theories of human nature / Leslie
   Stevenson (6th ed.); Ten theories of human nature / Leslie Stevenson (5th
   ed.) | Includes index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016040847 (print) | LCCN 2017007211 (ebook) | ISBN
   9780190604721 | ISBN 9780190604738
Subjects: LCSH: Philosophical anthropology. | Religions. | Philosophy.
Classification: LCC BD450 .T547 2017 (print) | LCC BD450 (ebook) | DDC
   128--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016040847

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed by LSC Communications in the United States of America
 INTRODUCTION: RIVAL THEORIES AND CRITICAL ASSESSMENTS 11

SOME BASIC PHILOSOPHICAL TOOLS

If we are in the business of serious rational evaluation of beliefs, theories,
and ideologies, we need to make distinctions between various different
kinds of statements or claims, to see what kind of consideration or justifi-
cation is appropriate to each. What follows is part of any basic philosophi-
cal tool kit.
Value Judgments
First, a statement may be a value judgment”, saying what ought (or ought
not) to happen, rather than a factual statement about what is actually the
case. Claims about human nature are especially subject to ambiguity on
this. For example, is it “natural” for human beings to drink cows’ milk,
to tunnel into the earth for minerals, or to fly about in planes? Is it “natu-
ral” for us to be selfish or compassionate, peaceful or aggressive, well
balanced or obsessive? The words “natural,” “unnatural,” and “nature”
should be regarded as danger signals here, indicating possible confusion.
If someone says “Human beings are naturally X,” we should ask them,
“Do you mean that all (or most) humans are X?” or “Human beings ought
to be X?” or “We have an innate tendency to X?” (and should that ten-
dency be encouraged or resisted?) or perhaps “Humans beings were X
before civilization?” (and what is civilization, anyway?).
To take a controversial case about which there are deeply held beliefs
and attitudes on all sides, it is often said that homosexuality is unnatu-
ral, and it is usually implied that that makes it wrong. Homosexuality has
been known in almost every human society, but the reply will be that it is
practiced only by a minority in each. Yet there are plenty of activities that
are minority pursuits without being wrong (e.g., stamp collecting, play-
ing tennis, or having your head shaved). Conversely, in ancient Greece
perhaps a majority of men engaged in homosexual as well as heterosexual
relations, but someone can still assert that that was wrong. Clearly, the so-
ciological facts about who, or how many, go in for a practice do not decide
its rightness or wrongness. Obviously, homosexual acts are unnatural in
the sense that they cannot result in conception, so two cohabiting gays or
lesbians cannot have a family to which both have contributed their genes.
But these biological facts do not decide the relevant questions of value:
whether everybody should have children, whether artificial (“unnatural?”)
means of conception by insemination are wrong, and whether the only
right way of bringing up children is in the traditional (“nuclear”) family.
And, of course, the historical fact that an authority (a sacred text, cultural
or tribal tradition, or legal statute) has outlawed homosexuality does not
make it wrong for everyone, everywhere. But we are not here trying to
12 Thirteen Theories of Human Nature
decide this emotive issue—we are merely using it as a vivid example of
the need to distinguish factual assertions from value judgments (confusion
between the two is called the naturalistic fallacy).
Another example involves the concept of person, which is crucial
for so much of our ethical thought. Who or what counts as a person?
Much of the controversy about abortion revolves around the question of
whether a human fetus is a person. Does a person come into existence
at the very moment of conception when sperm meets egg, at some stage
of pregnancy (which stage?), or perhaps not until birth? What about a
human who is brain-dead or so brain-damaged or demented as to be
permanently incapable of all communication? Is he or she still a person?
Or are there perhaps degrees of personhood: can it come into existence
in stages or fade away gradually? If intelligent and friendly aliens from
another planet get to communicate with us, would they count as per-
sons? So can there be humans who are not persons and persons who are
not human?
These questions may sound as if they are about a matter of fact, as if
there is some esoteric, hard-to-discern truth about who or what is really
a person that might be decided by further scientific research or for some
people might be resolved in a different way by the authority of a moral
or religious or legal tradition. But we suggest that the word “person” is a
value term, meaning a being that has some degree of rationality, free will,
and moral responsibility and accordingly deserves fundamental respect
and should be accorded rights and duties. “Human being” is often used
synonymously with “person,” but it helps clarity of thought to keep it as
a factual, biological term for the species Homo sapiens. If we make that
distinction, there may be radically defective members of our species (for
example, the brain-dead) who do not merit the value term “person,” and
for all we know there may be intelligent nonhuman species in the universe
who should count as persons.
The human nature we discuss in this book is the nature of our biologi-
cal species, but most, if not quite all, members of the human species have
sufficient rationality, free will, and responsibility to count as persons. It is
typical for us to manifest those distinctive mental capacities; they develop
gradually in infancy and childhood, but they are deficient in those who
are severely mentally handicapped and can fade away in mental illness or
dementia. At the edges, therefore, personhood would seem to be a matter
of degree.

Scientific Theories
Value judgments cannot be proved or disproved merely by finding out
facts in the world, though some facts about human nature may be very
 INTRODUCTION: RIVAL THEORIES AND CRITICAL ASSESSMENTS 13
relevant to them, for example, the fact that human infants and children
need long-term loving care to develop well. If a statement can be proved
or disproved by investigation of the relevant facts, involving perception
through our human senses, sometimes aided by instruments, it is called an
empirical statement.
Science depends crucially on empirical reports of observable facts,
often in experimentally controlled situations (though meteorologists
can’t control the weather and astronomers can’t perform experiments
on the stars). But science is much more than the recording of individ-
ual observations; it typically involves the search for general statements
(“laws of nature”) that hold true universally throughout space and time.
Scientific theorizing now extends to millions of years of the prehistory
of the earth and earlier forms of life on earth and to the furthest reaches
of the universe, thus to regions of space and time that we cannot directly
perceive. It also tells us about the DNA in every living cell, the chemi-
cal elements and their laws of combination, the atomic structure of the
elements themselves, and the still smaller entities that mysteriously obey
the probabilistic laws of quantum mechanics. None of this is observ-
able by our human senses; rather, these theories are evidenced by our
interpretation of what we can observe, such as the ways in which stuffs
chemically interact, the outputs of radio telescopes, X-ray crystallog-
raphy, or experiments in elaborate and expensive particle accelerators.
The testing of scientific theories typically involves assumptions about
how the relevant pieces of kit and measuring devices work. The connec-
tion with human observations is indirect but real.
The twentieth-century philosopher of science Karl Popper put the em-
phasis on falsifiability as a criterion for scientific status. He pointed out
that scientific theories can never be completely and conclusively veri-
fied, for their laws have implications for what happens anywhere and,
obviously, we can never check out the contents of the whole universe
throughout all time. However, it is an elementary truth of logic that if we
come across even a single genuine counterexample to a putative law of
nature, that decisively proves it false. Popper treated the practice of sci-
ence as a two-step process of thinking up (creatively and imaginatively)
general theories as hypotheses to try to explain the facts observed so far
and then devising crucial tests for these hypotheses (often in cunningly
designed experimental setups) to find out whether they hold true in those
conditions. There are plenty of instances in the history of science when
a previously accepted theory has been found to be false or to apply only
within a more limited class of cases than previously thought. But that
should not diminish our confidence in those fundamental theories that
have been confirmed over and over again in a huge variety of conditions,
14 Thirteen Theories of Human Nature
such as the laws of gravitation, chemical combination, and natural selec-
tion as a mechanism of biological evolution (see Chapter 12). Although
the logical possibility of finding counterexamples to these theories
always remains, they can be said to be known beyond all reasonable
doubt, for they apply without exception to everything that has been
observed so far.
Falsifiability can thus be used as a criterion to distinguish scientific
theories from metaphysical claims. But “scientific” here does not imply
true, only that the theory has the crucial empirical status that some logi-
cally possible observations could count as evidence against it. In other
words, candidates for scientific truth have to submit themselves to the test
of observation, a test that they may either fail or live on to fight another
day, perhaps passing further tests, and thereby earn the status of (at least
provisional) knowledge.

Metaphysical Theories
“Metaphysics” is a word that has had many uses, some of them hon-
orific, many of them not. Metaphysical statements or theories make
some very general and fundamental claim about the nature of everything
that exists, typically going beyond scientific evidence – hence the term
“metaphysics.” According to Popper, they are not scientific unless they
are capable, in principle, of some sort of empirical test. The eighteenth-
century German philosopher Immanuel Kant presented a famous trio of
metaphysical claims—the existence of God, the immortality of the soul,
and the freedom of the will—which he said cannot be empirically proved
or disproved, though he argued that we need to believe them on other
grounds connected with our moral lives (see Chapter 8).
A traditional metaphysical claim about human nature is dualism, the
view that we have immortal souls or, rather, that we essentially are
immaterial souls (as Plato and Descartes argued, see Chapter 4 and the
Historical Interlude between Chapters 7 and 8). Usually, a soul is under-
stood as a nonmaterial, nonobservable substance that persists through
time, carrying personal identity, so that we can continue to exist as
the same person after death. Could the existence of such souls be con-
firmed, and more crucially could it be falsified by any possible observa-
tion? In this life our states of consciousness, our thoughts and emotions
and even perhaps our spiritual states, can be expressed through what we
say and do; and human speech and actions are readily observable. But
that truism is common to both dualist and materialist metaphysics of
human nature, and cannot be deployed to the advantage of either since
materialism says that all our mental states are somehow embodied in
our brain states.
 INTRODUCTION: RIVAL THEORIES AND CRITICAL ASSESSMENTS 15
“Spiritualists” who believe that the dead can communicate with us
claim that their seances provide evidence from “the other side,” but their
alleged evidence is not usually submitted to independent scrutiny. If the
medium comes up with factual details that he or she could not have come
to know in any normal way, the hypothesis of telepathic knowledge is
simpler than the claim of communication from a deceased person. So if no
observable evidence can count for or against dualism, it is not a scientific
but a metaphysical theory. But the same is true of materialism since all
observable evidence can presumably be interpreted within a materialist
scheme and so could not falsify it.
This example strongly suggests the inadequacy of some philosophers’
attempts to dismiss metaphysical statements as meaningless. David Hume
in the eighteenth century (see the Historical Interlude), Comte in the
nineteenth, and Schlick and Ayer in the twentieth (the so-called logical
positivists) argued that any statement that is neither true by definition nor
empirical is meaningless. (They also treated value judgments as not really
statements but recommendations to action, a kind of disguised impera-
tive.) But it is now generally agreed that this was too short a way with
metaphysical theories. They are not nonsense like “The mome raths out-
grabe” (Lewis Carroll), or in a different way “Colorless green ideas sleep
furiously” (Noam Chomsky), nor are they self-contradictory like “Death
is the end of life, but people live on after death.” However, the challenge
remains that any statement that is neither a value judgment nor true by
mere definition (an analytic statement), nor testable by observation, has
a problematic status. The examples considered above suggest that some
of the most interesting and controversial claims about human nature may
not be empirically testable. This need not condemn them outright, but it is
important to establish this, for they cannot then claim the epistemological
status of being scientific truths that are justified by objective observation
plus rational, culture-neutral argument. Perhaps metaphysical statements
can have some other legitimate function, but we had better inquire care-
fully what that might be in each case.
Courses in moral philosophy, theory of knowledge (epistemology),
philosophy of science, and metaphysics consider these issues. But the aim
of this book is to examine specific theories of human nature in detail.
We begin with religious traditions that are much older than science, usu-
ally based on the inspired teachings or example of a charismatic founder
(or set of founders). The philosophies of Plato and Aristotle were based
more on rational argument, with some appeal to well-known empirical
facts (the beginnings of science can be found among the ancient Greeks).
Kant, writing a century after modern science got going, was explicit
about the difference between his philosophy and science, as was Sartre.
16 Thirteen Theories of Human Nature
Marx and Freud presented their views as scientific theories, but as we will
see, it is questionable whether they measure up to that standard. Darwin
and his successors in twentieth-century biology were certainly in the busi-
ness of the scientific study of human nature, but as we will see, especially
in Chapter 12, it is highly debatable whether science alone can support
judgments of value and social policy.

KEY TERMS
analytic statement materialism
closed system metaphysics
dualism naturalistic fallacy
empirical statement person
epistemology postmodernism
falsifiability soul
ideology value judgment