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Originally Posted by roachboy
the question seems to want to head somewhere else, but it isnt coherently framed: something about "human nature"----whatever that is---inclinines people to do x or y and law somehow runs counter to it.
whatever there is of interest in this turns on what you see this abstraction called "human nature" as entailing.
personally, i think the only constant that seems usable for defining "human nature" is aversion to pain. that's it----everything else is a function of socialization, everything else is a variable.
so the category "human nature" seems to me arbitrary, an aesthetic matter...so what you might prefer to move into the category of a constant is a function of larger-scale views of human beings which i think are mostly aesthetic (what you like, what you dont)--which is maybe psychologically interesting, if the idea is to work out how the person who defines attribute x or y as part of "human nature" sees the world--and maybe from there can be seen as an index of the psychological/aesthetic views that underpin a politics (which is the logical extension of this kind of evaluation).
but i dont understand questions that lean on an unstated conception of "human nature" to be coherent.
to move the debate, i guess the underlying issue is what you imagine the contents might be of this notion of "human nature"....
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I agree that simply attributing something to human nature is not a valid explanation. What is "human nature"? How do we determine if something is due to "human nature"? However, I don't see how "human nature" is arbitrary any more than the nature of other animals. Perhaps the way in which the concept is used is arbitrary?
Evidently socialization is independent of human nature or at least only interacts with the human aversion to pain? The concept of "socialization" (or at least it's use) is just as incoherent as "human nature". What is "socialization", specifically? What specific environmental input is acting on the individual resulting in the pattern of behavior we see? What specific psychological mechanisms, sensitive to that input are able to transform the input and generate a coherent response? I have never found explanations of human behavior that invoke socialization, genes, human nature, "our big brains", or "the way you were raised" to be at all satisfying.
Back to the OP: I think that law encourages people to behave in ways they would not in absence of law. If that means that law acts as a restraint of human nature, I don't see the problem. I don't see how laws "prepare us to fall under the weight of our own humanity". You might as easily make the opposite argument: Laws prevent us from falling under the weight of our own humanity.