The peculiar idea that human nature is immutable

post by Bill Gardner

Attention conservation notice: The following is, so far as I can tell, without evident policy significance.

I had a twitter discussion yesterday with Avik Roy, who was kind enough to respond to my post here. Avik (@aviksaroy) is someone you should follow if you want to be informed about conservative views on health policy. He tweeted to me that

@Bill_Gardner Human nature is immutable: Core of conservative (small c) philosophy. Also accounts for unintended consequences of lib reforms

and this struck me as a peculiar thing to say.

A bit of googling suggests that the immutability of human nature is an important belief for many conservatives. They get it, I suppose, from the Catholic moral philosophy of natural law. For some (not necessarily thinking of Avik here), it seems to ground a conviction that the Answers are Known and Have Been So for a Long Time.

By 'peculiar', I don't mean to say that this is absurd in some evident way. Rather, I mean that my primary intuition about nature (including human nature) is that it is mutable. 'Human nature' is a stack of dynamic processes: evolution | epigenesis | social institutions | culture. There are principles of explanation that are widely relevant (e.g., physics, some principles of evolutionary theory and microeconomics, etc.). But phenomena -- that is, the circumstances we actually face -- are complex, changing, and shaped by the local historical paths of events that brought them into being. Humanity is just such a phenomenon. There aren't many Known Answers to human questions that can be applied without caution and empirical test.

I think you can get to either a liberal or conservative political view from this intuition. Where you can't get to is a radical position on either wing.

 

Comments

[Brendan Saloner]

It's peculiar in another sense -- we know that human nature is neither wholly altruistic nor wholly selfish, but responds to the social norms and incentives that are provided by institutions. In countless field experiments, the degree to which people cheat depends upon their perception that doing so is widespread and some degree of self-deception that cheating is "harmless." This kind of tendency is what leads to fraudulent behavior, including investors manipulating rates (as in Britain recently) or creating phony financial products. Far from being pollyanish about human nature, liberals are often the ones who call for stronger regulation in order to curb the natural tendency to engage in self-serving fraud. If conservatives are the ones that "get" that humans are inherently prone to certain corrupting behaviors, they should be much quicker to embrace some of the remedies that liberals support.

[Bill Gardner (@Bill_Gardner)]

Excellent point, Brendan.

[Paul Kelleher]

To show that human nature is immutable, all we need to do is point to the absolute failure of abolitionists.

[Bill Gardner (@Bill_Gardner)]

Not to mention how constant marriage and gender roles have been across ages

[Paul Kelleher]

Indeed.