ABSTRACT
There is an awkwardness about Weber’s approach to ethics (and Hume’s view of ethics) when they are applied to the social sciences. Social scientists keep getting tempted to break the rules that they seem to have agreed to follow. Social science has to appear to be ‘objective’ and ‘neutral’ while at the same time political commitment is hailed as a virtue in a social scientist. A frequent claim is that social science should be guided by ‘values’ – yet these values are said to be arbitrary and socially constructed. On the other hand, the view that I have defended so far seems equally mysterious: that social situations can be ‘good’ or ‘bad’ in fact, that all this can be tied to the archaic concept of ‘human nature’, that ‘human nature’ and ethical facts are ever present in social science writing despite the denials. What I want to do in this chapter is to actually present two different but related understandings of human nature and show how the authors base an ethics on these understandings. As you will see, the writings of Aristotle, an ancient Greek philosopher, and Marx, an acknowledged founder of social science, share some key ideas. The ‘good state’, or the utopian political condition and ‘the good’, or what is good for humans, can be defined in relation to human nature. In addition, both divide human nature into two parts, which may be called ‘drives’ and ‘capacities’ respectively. I am going to define ‘human nature’ as that which is common to all people and is also central to their behaviour. This means that, given enough information and perseverance, one can explain the large bulk of people’s actions by looking at the way a combination of human nature and the environment has produced the behaviour. Human nature consists of what philosophers have called ‘powers’. A power is a causal property which tends to make something behave in a certain way. A power is always named or defined in terms of this tendency. For instance, it is generally agreed that human beings have a drive to eat. Hunger, then, is a power that is part of human nature. Given a particular view of human nature, certain powers in people are taken as basic and others seen as derivative. For instance, a view that sees a drive to violent aggressive behaviour as basic will expect to look around the world through ethnography and across time through history and find evidence of this propensity everywhere. It would be
argued that this evidence suggests aggression as a basic drive of human nature. To further back up the argument, you would try to show that people are frustrated and stressed if they are not permitted to behave aggressively. You would not be surprised to find authoritarian institutions set up to repress aggression in any society where it is not an everyday occurrence. But, in another theory of human nature, it might be argued that the evidence is not so compelling and that aggression is better seen as a derivative aspect of human nature – at most a tool of human nature rather than a drive. It would be argued that people who do not act in a violent and aggressive way are reasonably common, and that societies differ quite markedly in the extent to which they encourage and culturally construct aggression and violence. You could say aggression is a means by which people try to meet other needs (such as for food) or takes place when society encourages aggression (and meets other needs by rewarding aggressive conduct). In this view, aggression and aggressive personality types can be understood as coming out of more basic aspects of human nature. So the mere fact that some kind of behaviour is common to a number of societies does not necessarily make it ‘human nature’ or ‘inevitable’. Human nature is theorised as a set of powers that can together explain behaviour but these powers are not just a summary of the behaviour we see around us. The ideal of such theories is to explain behaviour by postulating a number of basic factors of human nature and showing how a particular social situation has produced the behaviour we see – out of these powers. In the humanist theories developed by Marx and Aristotle, what is ‘good’ for people is defined in relation to human nature. A thing is ‘good’ if it is aimed at by one of the basic and fundamental powers which compose human nature. Put another way, it is one of the things that satisfies the drives or exercises the capacities which compose human nature. So to be fed when you are hungry is good, because being hungry is part of human nature and it has eating as its aim. I am calling this general position ‘humanism’, though the actual contents of this ethics depends on what you think human nature is actually like, as we shall see. Views like this have been used to draw conclusions about what the best type of ‘state’ or social organization would be. What is the most ‘utopian’ kind of social organization for people to live in? Given the earth as we know it, and people as they are according to human nature, how could the desires that compose human nature be best satisfied, for the greatest advantage of most people? Marx and Aristotle write within this general framework of ideas about human nature, ethics and Utopia. They share a further interesting idea about the way in which the powers composing human nature are divided up. Some powers of human nature are causally active in all people, regardless of culture or situation. Using an appropriate term from Freud, we can call such powers of human nature ‘drives’. People are always hungry when they have not eaten for some time, they feel uncomfortable when cold and so on. By contrast, other powers which make up human nature are only active in favourable social situations. They are nurtured by a society. When they are inactive, one merely says that these desires and abilities have remained undeveloped. I shall call these powers ‘capacities’.
