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ěCan anyone suggest a principled distinction between this article and nature versus nurture, as the two seem to be headed along redundant paths? -- Ryguasu 21:46 26 Jun 2003 (UTC)
The title "nature versus nurture" suggests a dichotomous framework for thinking about human behavior. The title of this article is open as to whether the proper framework is dichotomous or trichotomous or some higher number of hotomouses! I believe there's a principled distinction and this article ought to stay, but I acknowledge its development thus far hasn't been promising. I hope to work on it. -- Christofurio 12:23, Sep 22, 2004 (UTC)
As it stands, this article is pretty feeble. Without citations, the paragraphs under the "Arguments for innate behaviour" heading are merely anecdotal. I don't think there is much chance for a NPOV here, the nature versus nurture article would probably be the better place for any discussion on the subject. Shoehorn 22:28, 25 Aug 2003 (UTC)
I'm curious. Why is "the way we use our eyes" preferable to "how we use our eyes"? I have problems with the most recent editing job than that, but I'll start with that, because in this instance I didn't write the phrase that's now being changed, so it should be obvious no "agenda" of mine (except for the truth-seeking agenda) is at stake.
In the section Metaphysics and Ethics, I changed "in the image of" to "by a single", as the original definition was not inclusive of all representative belief systems.
And, okay, I accept your deletion of my heading on Austrian intellectuals, which linked together two very different schools of thought on the slender basis of a connection to Austria. Point taken. But do we need a subhead or two within our survey of what social theorists since Plato have said re: human nature?
I'm not sure what the "humanist high ground" is, or why I should want to live there. It sounds like some planet other than earth. Have you been around for the last forty years or so, during a period when one of the major developments in the sciences has been the evolution of chaos theory and fractal geometry in their broadest applications? The human species now understands that the limits to, say, weather prediction aren't at all mysterious, and aren't just a temporary problem awaiting stronger computers. So long as it remains impossible to know the location of every butterfly on the planet and how it's flapping its wings, it will remain impossible to know in detail about the path of the next tornado in Texas. -- Christofurio 14:20, Oct 11, 2004 (UTC)
The problem, though, isn't just that I believe your notion of a collective humanity that is utterly unbounded in its rationality to be lacking in realism -- to be, itself, as mystical as any view ever expressed. "Mysterious are the ways of the collective will of the species, and thou shalt not interfere with it, unless thou be a member of the vanguard," to adapt your own formulation -- if you were only fantasizing I could allow your freedom of religion unperturbed. But those who believe that they represent something truly unbounded are, quite naturally, intolerant of those of us who stand in its way -- so I must be ready to resist for the sake of pursuing my own rationality, in my bounded (humble) way looking only for self interest and not for anything as grand as the unbounded fire-river. How does one spell "fire-river" in German, by the way?
It is interesting, since I've mentioned a certain famous butterfly, that you should talk about building a "national economy" as the task for hypothetical planners. Is there such a thing as a national economy? Or is it more accurate to say that there is only one economy, and it includes the whole species over the whole globe? A "national economy" is like a national weather map -- none of the pertinent forces stop at its borders.
That isn't religion. It's science. On such issues, contemporary science supports the old Austrian insights.
Yes, people with different skills working together can build skyscrapers. They don't do so by voting on competing blueprints. They do so by co-ordinating in a manner that recognizes the value of specialization -- something markets bring about very well, and public planning does only very clumsily. Still, a skyscraper is that is child's play compared to the organization of all material and human resources all around the globe -- which is what "the economy" is, nothing less. But it isn't always in the broad interests of society that the skyscraper be built, is it? Isn't it rather Stakhanovite of you to suppose that the more skyscrapers the better? Skyscrapers can represent the conglomeration of wealth and power in a few urban centers, and public decisions that subsidize skyscrapers subsidize that centralization, although market forces might be working centrifugally. My own view is that a skyscraper that doesn't turn a profit in a free market is a misdirection of resources.
Nor is it necessarily clear how majorities would make such a decision even if we agreed they should. A majority of the neighbors of the planned skyscraper? Of the province? the nation? the world? should someone living at the planetary antipodes of the proposed skyscraper have one vote in a world referendum on it and its nearest neighbor also have just one vote?
How THAT decision is made, is the real problem. That is where the bounds of rationality become crucial. And, no -- two minds are not necessarily better than one, nor are three better than two, nor is a majority better than a minority, (there is old folk wisdom in the saying "too many cooks spoil the broth" and I see no good reason for humanism to require the denial of that possibility) nor is some appointed "vanguard" of any theorist's "progressive class" better than any other possible self-appointed elite (say, the army's Generals?) for making such decisions. Better to leave them unmade except by the forces of spontaneous order, and to turn over the world's armies to private investors too, while we're at it -- so that these frankly mercenary outfits will also be subject to those forces.
"And finally," you tell me, "there is the argument that even imperfect order would be preferable to chaos." Yes, there is that. Some good guess about what the weather is, might well be better than a shrug. But your assumption that spontaneous order, that which arises from the higgle-haggle of rational beings each looking out for his/her own interest, is "chaos" in the negative sense you require is simply your assumption. It isn't supported by the latest results of that 500 year old enterprise called science that we both respect -- because those latest results have given the word a more positive connotation.
At any rate, I'm glad I've persuaded you that this is a crucial difference in the Austrian/Marxist view of human nature. It looks like I'm spreading good cheer as usual. Check out the liberty article when you get a chance. I've made some recent additions there you might also enjoy. -- Christofurio 14:15, Oct 10, 2004 (UTC)
I am not sure where you got the "impression" that I was under the "horribly mistaken impression" that you wouldn't respond to my thoughts. From my creation of a separate subhead for them? That was an aesthetic decision, of no predictive significance whatsoever. I'm always glad to see your thoughts and had no beliefs at all about how much time it would require you to return to this page -- that is your concern, of course, not mine.
Likewise, how you label yourself is your concern and not mine, but if you don't believe that there is a need for an enlightened "vanguard" of the working class than your self-labelling as a Trotskyite may be a tad heterodox. But let me move on to concerns that are as much my concern as yours.
The comparison of human individuals with neurons in the brain strikes me as an extraordinarily dangerous one, as if leading up to the decision to treat dissidents as tumor cells, which of course have to be removed (killed) for the good of the whole organ. The humanist high ground? But if we must have such a horribly organicist image, let us acknowledge that these neurons decide how they interact. They can't decide each to live as a hermit, but they can decide to interact by buying, selling, and investing rather than by voting.
After all, that is how skyscrapers generally do get built. Some people invest by buying the stocks or bonds of a construction company. Its managers hire subcontractors, who hire employees, some of whom are architects, others of whom are brick-layers, etc. The neurons interact by buying goods and services from one another, on terms driven by supply and demand, like the purchase and sale of canvases on which painters can express themselves.
Your planned global economy with all sorts of voting-driven levels of majoritarianism down to the town council and up to the Planet Government, is an improvement upon this ... why? Because its more coercive? That's a negative, not a positive. Because it involves voting? Why is that a good thing? Because those who don't like it can leave by opting out of the social contract, as you promised on your Talk page? No sovereign yet has agreed with you in giving such an opt out an institutional reality. I would gladly endorse it -- anarcho-capitalists ask for nothing more. We would expect that the opting outs would soon reach the level that would allow for the opters to build skyscrapers (if and only if the market realities supported them). But I also suspect that as soon as that appeared likely, the opt-out "privileges" would be revoked by the planners, the addicts of sovereignty. There has to be a general withering of the myth of sovereignty for anarcho-capitalism to succeed on the global level.
As to the question whether the saving of a single life can be a misdirection of resources: yes. Of course it can! If you think through what you describe as the utilitarian elements of your own world-view you will soon reach the same conclusion. How much resource use has to be extended in the saving of one life before that becomes prohibitively expensive in terms of other opportunities lost, including the opportunities of other rescues? That is a question for any form of consequentialism, of course. Is the profit motive worse as a way of answering tht question than some alternative? Perhaps. Saying so won't make it so, though.
Do capitalists plan? Yes, of course. Does such planning prove that planning at a greater "macro-level" is required, or even rational? No. Planning within a market framework is consistent with the premise of bounded rationality, with an understanding of the impossibility of predicting the results of all the flaps of the butterfly wings. Planning in a way that would esssentially abolish the market framework requires a coterie of planners with coercive sovereign power -- capable of regarding dissidents as cancerous cells requiring removal, as your analogy indicates. It is the difference between the planning of the kulaks and the planning of those who liquidated the kulaks. Majoritarianism doesn't affect that issue at all -- since even self-appointed vanguardist dictators find it easy to "plan" the liquidation of unpopular relatively affluent minorities, to everybody's loss.
Let us consider the sentence, "too many cooks spoil the broth only if the cooks don't work together properly." Is that anything but a tautology? If the broth is spoiled than we consider that the working-together must have improper, right? The point of the folk saying, though, seems to be that the more cooks there are working on the same soup, the more likely it is that there will be some such impropriety in their working together. Better to have one cook who likes to make salty soups, and another who makes them salt-free, then to have them arguing in the kitchen while the soup boils over. In the case of two competing cooks, the market will decide what amount of saltiness eventually prevails. And that is a bad method of making that decision because...?
Ah, because letting the cooks go their own way subject to market forces leads us to Iraq, Somalia, and Afghanistan. Oh, great logician, I bow in awe at your leaps of faith. The problem in all those places arises not from the general rejection of the myth of sovereignty but from its acceptance, and the competition of different would-be governments to control the levers that this myth creates.
Your appeal to the dark ages in Europe is more interesting. Consider an average serf in France in, say, 799 AD. Compare his lot to that of a slave or other humbly born schmoe in late-imperial Gaul in, say, 299 AD. Is it obvious to you that the former had a worse life than the latter? Is it obvious that the collapse of the western Empire and its sort of planning had hurt the common folk? It isn't obvious to me, although I concede that it is possible.
If bottom-of-the-hierarchy life in France was worse in 799 than it had been in Gaul in 299 (a big "if"), then I submit the most likely explanation was the diminution in trade around the Meditteranean basin. When Rome controlled the whole basin and called it "Our Ocean," there was a lot of trade, subject always to the nuisance of piracy. After the rise of Islam, the basin was in effect split in two, and trade between the two halves became a rare and surreptitious practice. That may have hurt our hypothetical serf much more than the fall of Rome itself. And of course the rise of Islam was a lot of things, some of them positive (the creation of algebra, etc.) but it was not a test of anarcho-capitalism. What was the situation in terms of trade in between the fall of Rome and the Rise of Islam? Ah, a complicated question, see the article on Henri Pirenne, who addressed this point.
Not a bad little essay for a lazy Saturday afternoon. Reply when and if you get the notion. I am, for the most part, simply endeavoring to cure you of your reflex of letting cliches like "the dark ages" or "the humanist high ground" do your thinking for you. Those too-ready phrases, like your usage of italics in other cases, avoid thought and substance. -- Christofurio 19:03, Oct 16, 2004 (UTC)
I may have excluded some points, in that lazy Saturday way of mine, that you would expect me to cover. So here we go. Your comments about how I have refuted myself seem based on the idea that I first (a) put forward a quasi-mystical notion of human boundedness and later (b) refuted it by putting forth a naturalistic account of the same phenomenon based on chaos theory. But this isn’t self refutation at all. It isn’t even a change of emphasis. I never said that there was anything mystical about the idea, and have always been perfectly willing to take it as naturalistic.
You, on the other hand, do seem top be backing off an earlier statement. You said that the “high ground” position was that human rationality is in principle unbounded ("limitless" was your word) if understood collectively. But now you have added that this will only be true when there are an infinite number of humans – which means, I infer, that it will never be true. If you mean infinite population as a real project you must be a fun guy at conventions of the ZPG folks! There will always be an infinite gulf between infinity and any actual finite number, however large, so we’re stuck with boundedness.
Ah, yes, but we have computers! I’m not clear on why they are more important to the principles at stake here than is an abacus, though. Are the computers going to make resource allocation decisions for us, or will humans make them? If the computers make them, then we’ve abandoned the market and abandoned any notion of majority rule, too. Digitocracy is neither anarchy nor democracy. On the other hand, if humans are going to continue to make decisions, then human boundedness remains as important a fact about human nature as it has always been, and the conclusions the Austrian school deduced from it a century ago followed logically then and still follow logically now – despite the availability of abacuses and related tricks.
I deleted a fallacious statement, recently added, to the effect that debates over socialism, central planning, etc., have "little to do" with bounded rationality. The subjects could hardly have more to do with one another! Here is what Freidrich Hayek said, for example, in his lecture upon winning the Nobel Prize.
"This brings me to the crucial issue. Unlike the position that exists in the physical sciences, in economics and other disciplines that deal with essentially complex phenomena, the aspects of the events to be accounted for about which we can get quantitative data are necessarily limited and may not include the important ones. While in the physical sciences it is generally assumed, probably with good reason, that any important factor which determines the observed events will itself be directly observable and measurable, in the study of such complex phenomena as the market, which depend on the actions of many individuals, all the circumstances which will determine the outcome of a process, for reasons which I shall explain later, will hardly ever be fully known or measurable. And while in the physical sciences the investigator will be able to measure what, on the basis of a prima facie theory, he thinks important, in the social sciences often that is treated as important which happens to be accessible to measurement. This is sometimes carried to the point where it is demanded that our theories must be formulated in such terms that they refer only to measurable magnitudes."
What rationality can do, then, is the "crucial issue" for the Austrian school of which Hayek was a spokesman. It may not be crucial for other schools, but let's not sweep it under the rug in an encyclopedia.-- Christofurio 19:01, July 29, 2005 (UTC)
Just a small suggestion but shouldn't Locke be categorized under philosophers who thought human nature to be neutral?
There was something about Human Nature that has no mention here, and really should. The basic feeling of "incomplete" as well as "contradictions" within specific mental states. For example, one may desire to move forward and change, while also desiring to stay the same. Or one might feel like being or acting in one way, while doing the complete opposite. The world over people can be seen to act in this way or that, the driving force often being desire or intention, and the fuel behind that is the wish to fill something. People often express a need to fill, nd live their whole lives not happy with what they have gained. This basic pattern, I observe to be a fundamental core to human nature and worth mention. I'm just not sure what it would be called, or how to properly express it.
Another point I'd like to make is in regards to "Free will and determinism" - I think a very important view was left out. Some feel that we have free will, and that much of it flows from the depths of conciousness, or a soul, which can belie expectations based on the conditions placed on it, however it can also be seen as true that even with Free will, one can observe a number of conditions and predict an outcome. One may even be ale to step in, giving or withholding information (
Manipulation) as a means of predetermining free will. According to this view, we have Free Will, and that our choices are based on both the determined and the undertermined, that many actions may be expected given the right conditions while many others do not. It would be my understanding that large scale "end results" involving many people would be much easier to predict through determinism than individual patterns because it may leave itself open to variation. (I hope I am making sense?)
This ideal is also core behind various belief systems. For example, in one Biblical text the Future is told and so choices are made which ensures it will happen. The argument for "Divine intervention" would state that the information was given so to ensure that it would happen, operating under the assumption that the resulting actions could be predicted. However, in other texts of predition, such as
Nostradamus, it is specifically stated that the future is not determined. In this case, the future predicted may be a "most likly scenario" based on determinism, but with the understanding that Free will cannot be fully predicted. However, it may be argued just the same that information predicted may in itself cause a change in potential outcome. Because it adds a factor into the equation of expectation.
Gwaeraurond 6:03 PM EST, 3 March 2006
This article was about human nature. It is very abstract, it tells us who talks about human nature: the artist, the philosopher. However, I see very little about what human nature is. Can someone please show us what human nature include. Here is example: desire to be accepted is a human nature, afraid of dark is human nature, dreaming is human nature. I think you get my idea. Please add some more examples to this topic.
This section does not relate to human nature in any capacity, aside from the one unsourced claim that hormones can affect human instincts. Testosterone is the only hormone listed under this section, so unless others are added, so unless every other hormone known to affect human instincts is going to be included I don't think it warrants its own subheading. The section is also labelled as 'missing information' which means it does not fully encapsulate the discussion necessary for including it. The requested information on this label also does not seem particularly relevant to the topic of the article, so I would suggest writing about the way hormones affect human instincts in a different article and removing it from this one. WillNop ( talk) 19:50, 20 March 2023 (UTC)
The sentence "Rousseau's proposal that human nature is malleable became a major influence upon international revolutionary movements of various kinds, while Hume's approach has been more typical in Anglo-Saxon countries, including the United States.[citation needed]" does not seem relevant to me, further lacks specificity. Although the two philosophers have had influence on many, there is no citation that I could find that not only supports this or ties into the subject of Human Nature.
If anyone can either provide sources or work with me to make this more relevant, I would greatly appreciate it. NNoble07 ( talk) 19:56, 20 March 2023 (UTC)
The article as it currently stands informs us that
Ardent bioconservatives include Jürgen Habermas, [1] Leon Kass, [2] Francis Fukuyama, [3] and Bill McKibben. [4]
In the cases of Habermas and Fukuyama, we're given whole books as references, without page numbers. In the case of McKibben, we're given a position paper by an adversary (Bostrom). I looked up both the Habermas and the Fukuyama books on Preview and searched "biocon", both of which yielded zero results. I also looked up the Kass source, which is available as a PDF, and saw that it doesn't mention the term either. Am I missing something here? Are there neutral secondary sources which identify these figures as "ardent bioconservatives"? Or are there primary sources where each of these figures explicitly identify in this way? If the answer to these questions is "no", we're looking at some rather egregious WP:OR. Generalrelative ( talk) 02:17, 3 July 2024 (UTC) Generalrelative ( talk) 02:17, 3 July 2024 (UTC)
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ěCan anyone suggest a principled distinction between this article and nature versus nurture, as the two seem to be headed along redundant paths? -- Ryguasu 21:46 26 Jun 2003 (UTC)
The title "nature versus nurture" suggests a dichotomous framework for thinking about human behavior. The title of this article is open as to whether the proper framework is dichotomous or trichotomous or some higher number of hotomouses! I believe there's a principled distinction and this article ought to stay, but I acknowledge its development thus far hasn't been promising. I hope to work on it. -- Christofurio 12:23, Sep 22, 2004 (UTC)
As it stands, this article is pretty feeble. Without citations, the paragraphs under the "Arguments for innate behaviour" heading are merely anecdotal. I don't think there is much chance for a NPOV here, the nature versus nurture article would probably be the better place for any discussion on the subject. Shoehorn 22:28, 25 Aug 2003 (UTC)
I'm curious. Why is "the way we use our eyes" preferable to "how we use our eyes"? I have problems with the most recent editing job than that, but I'll start with that, because in this instance I didn't write the phrase that's now being changed, so it should be obvious no "agenda" of mine (except for the truth-seeking agenda) is at stake.
In the section Metaphysics and Ethics, I changed "in the image of" to "by a single", as the original definition was not inclusive of all representative belief systems.
And, okay, I accept your deletion of my heading on Austrian intellectuals, which linked together two very different schools of thought on the slender basis of a connection to Austria. Point taken. But do we need a subhead or two within our survey of what social theorists since Plato have said re: human nature?
I'm not sure what the "humanist high ground" is, or why I should want to live there. It sounds like some planet other than earth. Have you been around for the last forty years or so, during a period when one of the major developments in the sciences has been the evolution of chaos theory and fractal geometry in their broadest applications? The human species now understands that the limits to, say, weather prediction aren't at all mysterious, and aren't just a temporary problem awaiting stronger computers. So long as it remains impossible to know the location of every butterfly on the planet and how it's flapping its wings, it will remain impossible to know in detail about the path of the next tornado in Texas. -- Christofurio 14:20, Oct 11, 2004 (UTC)
The problem, though, isn't just that I believe your notion of a collective humanity that is utterly unbounded in its rationality to be lacking in realism -- to be, itself, as mystical as any view ever expressed. "Mysterious are the ways of the collective will of the species, and thou shalt not interfere with it, unless thou be a member of the vanguard," to adapt your own formulation -- if you were only fantasizing I could allow your freedom of religion unperturbed. But those who believe that they represent something truly unbounded are, quite naturally, intolerant of those of us who stand in its way -- so I must be ready to resist for the sake of pursuing my own rationality, in my bounded (humble) way looking only for self interest and not for anything as grand as the unbounded fire-river. How does one spell "fire-river" in German, by the way?
It is interesting, since I've mentioned a certain famous butterfly, that you should talk about building a "national economy" as the task for hypothetical planners. Is there such a thing as a national economy? Or is it more accurate to say that there is only one economy, and it includes the whole species over the whole globe? A "national economy" is like a national weather map -- none of the pertinent forces stop at its borders.
That isn't religion. It's science. On such issues, contemporary science supports the old Austrian insights.
Yes, people with different skills working together can build skyscrapers. They don't do so by voting on competing blueprints. They do so by co-ordinating in a manner that recognizes the value of specialization -- something markets bring about very well, and public planning does only very clumsily. Still, a skyscraper is that is child's play compared to the organization of all material and human resources all around the globe -- which is what "the economy" is, nothing less. But it isn't always in the broad interests of society that the skyscraper be built, is it? Isn't it rather Stakhanovite of you to suppose that the more skyscrapers the better? Skyscrapers can represent the conglomeration of wealth and power in a few urban centers, and public decisions that subsidize skyscrapers subsidize that centralization, although market forces might be working centrifugally. My own view is that a skyscraper that doesn't turn a profit in a free market is a misdirection of resources.
Nor is it necessarily clear how majorities would make such a decision even if we agreed they should. A majority of the neighbors of the planned skyscraper? Of the province? the nation? the world? should someone living at the planetary antipodes of the proposed skyscraper have one vote in a world referendum on it and its nearest neighbor also have just one vote?
How THAT decision is made, is the real problem. That is where the bounds of rationality become crucial. And, no -- two minds are not necessarily better than one, nor are three better than two, nor is a majority better than a minority, (there is old folk wisdom in the saying "too many cooks spoil the broth" and I see no good reason for humanism to require the denial of that possibility) nor is some appointed "vanguard" of any theorist's "progressive class" better than any other possible self-appointed elite (say, the army's Generals?) for making such decisions. Better to leave them unmade except by the forces of spontaneous order, and to turn over the world's armies to private investors too, while we're at it -- so that these frankly mercenary outfits will also be subject to those forces.
"And finally," you tell me, "there is the argument that even imperfect order would be preferable to chaos." Yes, there is that. Some good guess about what the weather is, might well be better than a shrug. But your assumption that spontaneous order, that which arises from the higgle-haggle of rational beings each looking out for his/her own interest, is "chaos" in the negative sense you require is simply your assumption. It isn't supported by the latest results of that 500 year old enterprise called science that we both respect -- because those latest results have given the word a more positive connotation.
At any rate, I'm glad I've persuaded you that this is a crucial difference in the Austrian/Marxist view of human nature. It looks like I'm spreading good cheer as usual. Check out the liberty article when you get a chance. I've made some recent additions there you might also enjoy. -- Christofurio 14:15, Oct 10, 2004 (UTC)
I am not sure where you got the "impression" that I was under the "horribly mistaken impression" that you wouldn't respond to my thoughts. From my creation of a separate subhead for them? That was an aesthetic decision, of no predictive significance whatsoever. I'm always glad to see your thoughts and had no beliefs at all about how much time it would require you to return to this page -- that is your concern, of course, not mine.
Likewise, how you label yourself is your concern and not mine, but if you don't believe that there is a need for an enlightened "vanguard" of the working class than your self-labelling as a Trotskyite may be a tad heterodox. But let me move on to concerns that are as much my concern as yours.
The comparison of human individuals with neurons in the brain strikes me as an extraordinarily dangerous one, as if leading up to the decision to treat dissidents as tumor cells, which of course have to be removed (killed) for the good of the whole organ. The humanist high ground? But if we must have such a horribly organicist image, let us acknowledge that these neurons decide how they interact. They can't decide each to live as a hermit, but they can decide to interact by buying, selling, and investing rather than by voting.
After all, that is how skyscrapers generally do get built. Some people invest by buying the stocks or bonds of a construction company. Its managers hire subcontractors, who hire employees, some of whom are architects, others of whom are brick-layers, etc. The neurons interact by buying goods and services from one another, on terms driven by supply and demand, like the purchase and sale of canvases on which painters can express themselves.
Your planned global economy with all sorts of voting-driven levels of majoritarianism down to the town council and up to the Planet Government, is an improvement upon this ... why? Because its more coercive? That's a negative, not a positive. Because it involves voting? Why is that a good thing? Because those who don't like it can leave by opting out of the social contract, as you promised on your Talk page? No sovereign yet has agreed with you in giving such an opt out an institutional reality. I would gladly endorse it -- anarcho-capitalists ask for nothing more. We would expect that the opting outs would soon reach the level that would allow for the opters to build skyscrapers (if and only if the market realities supported them). But I also suspect that as soon as that appeared likely, the opt-out "privileges" would be revoked by the planners, the addicts of sovereignty. There has to be a general withering of the myth of sovereignty for anarcho-capitalism to succeed on the global level.
As to the question whether the saving of a single life can be a misdirection of resources: yes. Of course it can! If you think through what you describe as the utilitarian elements of your own world-view you will soon reach the same conclusion. How much resource use has to be extended in the saving of one life before that becomes prohibitively expensive in terms of other opportunities lost, including the opportunities of other rescues? That is a question for any form of consequentialism, of course. Is the profit motive worse as a way of answering tht question than some alternative? Perhaps. Saying so won't make it so, though.
Do capitalists plan? Yes, of course. Does such planning prove that planning at a greater "macro-level" is required, or even rational? No. Planning within a market framework is consistent with the premise of bounded rationality, with an understanding of the impossibility of predicting the results of all the flaps of the butterfly wings. Planning in a way that would esssentially abolish the market framework requires a coterie of planners with coercive sovereign power -- capable of regarding dissidents as cancerous cells requiring removal, as your analogy indicates. It is the difference between the planning of the kulaks and the planning of those who liquidated the kulaks. Majoritarianism doesn't affect that issue at all -- since even self-appointed vanguardist dictators find it easy to "plan" the liquidation of unpopular relatively affluent minorities, to everybody's loss.
Let us consider the sentence, "too many cooks spoil the broth only if the cooks don't work together properly." Is that anything but a tautology? If the broth is spoiled than we consider that the working-together must have improper, right? The point of the folk saying, though, seems to be that the more cooks there are working on the same soup, the more likely it is that there will be some such impropriety in their working together. Better to have one cook who likes to make salty soups, and another who makes them salt-free, then to have them arguing in the kitchen while the soup boils over. In the case of two competing cooks, the market will decide what amount of saltiness eventually prevails. And that is a bad method of making that decision because...?
Ah, because letting the cooks go their own way subject to market forces leads us to Iraq, Somalia, and Afghanistan. Oh, great logician, I bow in awe at your leaps of faith. The problem in all those places arises not from the general rejection of the myth of sovereignty but from its acceptance, and the competition of different would-be governments to control the levers that this myth creates.
Your appeal to the dark ages in Europe is more interesting. Consider an average serf in France in, say, 799 AD. Compare his lot to that of a slave or other humbly born schmoe in late-imperial Gaul in, say, 299 AD. Is it obvious to you that the former had a worse life than the latter? Is it obvious that the collapse of the western Empire and its sort of planning had hurt the common folk? It isn't obvious to me, although I concede that it is possible.
If bottom-of-the-hierarchy life in France was worse in 799 than it had been in Gaul in 299 (a big "if"), then I submit the most likely explanation was the diminution in trade around the Meditteranean basin. When Rome controlled the whole basin and called it "Our Ocean," there was a lot of trade, subject always to the nuisance of piracy. After the rise of Islam, the basin was in effect split in two, and trade between the two halves became a rare and surreptitious practice. That may have hurt our hypothetical serf much more than the fall of Rome itself. And of course the rise of Islam was a lot of things, some of them positive (the creation of algebra, etc.) but it was not a test of anarcho-capitalism. What was the situation in terms of trade in between the fall of Rome and the Rise of Islam? Ah, a complicated question, see the article on Henri Pirenne, who addressed this point.
Not a bad little essay for a lazy Saturday afternoon. Reply when and if you get the notion. I am, for the most part, simply endeavoring to cure you of your reflex of letting cliches like "the dark ages" or "the humanist high ground" do your thinking for you. Those too-ready phrases, like your usage of italics in other cases, avoid thought and substance. -- Christofurio 19:03, Oct 16, 2004 (UTC)
I may have excluded some points, in that lazy Saturday way of mine, that you would expect me to cover. So here we go. Your comments about how I have refuted myself seem based on the idea that I first (a) put forward a quasi-mystical notion of human boundedness and later (b) refuted it by putting forth a naturalistic account of the same phenomenon based on chaos theory. But this isn’t self refutation at all. It isn’t even a change of emphasis. I never said that there was anything mystical about the idea, and have always been perfectly willing to take it as naturalistic.
You, on the other hand, do seem top be backing off an earlier statement. You said that the “high ground” position was that human rationality is in principle unbounded ("limitless" was your word) if understood collectively. But now you have added that this will only be true when there are an infinite number of humans – which means, I infer, that it will never be true. If you mean infinite population as a real project you must be a fun guy at conventions of the ZPG folks! There will always be an infinite gulf between infinity and any actual finite number, however large, so we’re stuck with boundedness.
Ah, yes, but we have computers! I’m not clear on why they are more important to the principles at stake here than is an abacus, though. Are the computers going to make resource allocation decisions for us, or will humans make them? If the computers make them, then we’ve abandoned the market and abandoned any notion of majority rule, too. Digitocracy is neither anarchy nor democracy. On the other hand, if humans are going to continue to make decisions, then human boundedness remains as important a fact about human nature as it has always been, and the conclusions the Austrian school deduced from it a century ago followed logically then and still follow logically now – despite the availability of abacuses and related tricks.
I deleted a fallacious statement, recently added, to the effect that debates over socialism, central planning, etc., have "little to do" with bounded rationality. The subjects could hardly have more to do with one another! Here is what Freidrich Hayek said, for example, in his lecture upon winning the Nobel Prize.
"This brings me to the crucial issue. Unlike the position that exists in the physical sciences, in economics and other disciplines that deal with essentially complex phenomena, the aspects of the events to be accounted for about which we can get quantitative data are necessarily limited and may not include the important ones. While in the physical sciences it is generally assumed, probably with good reason, that any important factor which determines the observed events will itself be directly observable and measurable, in the study of such complex phenomena as the market, which depend on the actions of many individuals, all the circumstances which will determine the outcome of a process, for reasons which I shall explain later, will hardly ever be fully known or measurable. And while in the physical sciences the investigator will be able to measure what, on the basis of a prima facie theory, he thinks important, in the social sciences often that is treated as important which happens to be accessible to measurement. This is sometimes carried to the point where it is demanded that our theories must be formulated in such terms that they refer only to measurable magnitudes."
What rationality can do, then, is the "crucial issue" for the Austrian school of which Hayek was a spokesman. It may not be crucial for other schools, but let's not sweep it under the rug in an encyclopedia.-- Christofurio 19:01, July 29, 2005 (UTC)
Just a small suggestion but shouldn't Locke be categorized under philosophers who thought human nature to be neutral?
There was something about Human Nature that has no mention here, and really should. The basic feeling of "incomplete" as well as "contradictions" within specific mental states. For example, one may desire to move forward and change, while also desiring to stay the same. Or one might feel like being or acting in one way, while doing the complete opposite. The world over people can be seen to act in this way or that, the driving force often being desire or intention, and the fuel behind that is the wish to fill something. People often express a need to fill, nd live their whole lives not happy with what they have gained. This basic pattern, I observe to be a fundamental core to human nature and worth mention. I'm just not sure what it would be called, or how to properly express it.
Another point I'd like to make is in regards to "Free will and determinism" - I think a very important view was left out. Some feel that we have free will, and that much of it flows from the depths of conciousness, or a soul, which can belie expectations based on the conditions placed on it, however it can also be seen as true that even with Free will, one can observe a number of conditions and predict an outcome. One may even be ale to step in, giving or withholding information (
Manipulation) as a means of predetermining free will. According to this view, we have Free Will, and that our choices are based on both the determined and the undertermined, that many actions may be expected given the right conditions while many others do not. It would be my understanding that large scale "end results" involving many people would be much easier to predict through determinism than individual patterns because it may leave itself open to variation. (I hope I am making sense?)
This ideal is also core behind various belief systems. For example, in one Biblical text the Future is told and so choices are made which ensures it will happen. The argument for "Divine intervention" would state that the information was given so to ensure that it would happen, operating under the assumption that the resulting actions could be predicted. However, in other texts of predition, such as
Nostradamus, it is specifically stated that the future is not determined. In this case, the future predicted may be a "most likly scenario" based on determinism, but with the understanding that Free will cannot be fully predicted. However, it may be argued just the same that information predicted may in itself cause a change in potential outcome. Because it adds a factor into the equation of expectation.
Gwaeraurond 6:03 PM EST, 3 March 2006
This article was about human nature. It is very abstract, it tells us who talks about human nature: the artist, the philosopher. However, I see very little about what human nature is. Can someone please show us what human nature include. Here is example: desire to be accepted is a human nature, afraid of dark is human nature, dreaming is human nature. I think you get my idea. Please add some more examples to this topic.
This section does not relate to human nature in any capacity, aside from the one unsourced claim that hormones can affect human instincts. Testosterone is the only hormone listed under this section, so unless others are added, so unless every other hormone known to affect human instincts is going to be included I don't think it warrants its own subheading. The section is also labelled as 'missing information' which means it does not fully encapsulate the discussion necessary for including it. The requested information on this label also does not seem particularly relevant to the topic of the article, so I would suggest writing about the way hormones affect human instincts in a different article and removing it from this one. WillNop ( talk) 19:50, 20 March 2023 (UTC)
The sentence "Rousseau's proposal that human nature is malleable became a major influence upon international revolutionary movements of various kinds, while Hume's approach has been more typical in Anglo-Saxon countries, including the United States.[citation needed]" does not seem relevant to me, further lacks specificity. Although the two philosophers have had influence on many, there is no citation that I could find that not only supports this or ties into the subject of Human Nature.
If anyone can either provide sources or work with me to make this more relevant, I would greatly appreciate it. NNoble07 ( talk) 19:56, 20 March 2023 (UTC)
The article as it currently stands informs us that
Ardent bioconservatives include Jürgen Habermas, [1] Leon Kass, [2] Francis Fukuyama, [3] and Bill McKibben. [4]
In the cases of Habermas and Fukuyama, we're given whole books as references, without page numbers. In the case of McKibben, we're given a position paper by an adversary (Bostrom). I looked up both the Habermas and the Fukuyama books on Preview and searched "biocon", both of which yielded zero results. I also looked up the Kass source, which is available as a PDF, and saw that it doesn't mention the term either. Am I missing something here? Are there neutral secondary sources which identify these figures as "ardent bioconservatives"? Or are there primary sources where each of these figures explicitly identify in this way? If the answer to these questions is "no", we're looking at some rather egregious WP:OR. Generalrelative ( talk) 02:17, 3 July 2024 (UTC) Generalrelative ( talk) 02:17, 3 July 2024 (UTC)
References