ABSTRACT
Arguments over Human Nature Criminology is a discipline concerned with issues relating to people who have violated
the rules of civilized society by committing acts society has called criminal. The issues
we are most concerned with are at bottom moral issues relating to why some people
commit crimes or why most of us do not, and what should be done with those who do
after arrest and conviction. We tend to ask these questions without bothering to ask
about the fundamental nature of our subject matter-that is, about the nature of the
human material with which we work. The only criminology work premised on an
articulated human nature that I have seen is Wilson and Herrnstein’s Crime and
Human Nature (1985). Wilson and Herrnstein argue that any serious social inquiry
must issue from an understanding of human nature, and they write that they could
have explored it by studying things such as sexuality or politics but chose to do it in
the context of crime because crime “more dramatically than other forms of behavior,
exposes the connection between individual dispositions and the social order”
(1985:20).
