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Making Sense of What We Are: A Mythological Approach to Human Nature

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2009

Michael Hauskeller
Michael Hauskeller
Affiliation:
University of Exeter
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Abstract

The question what makes us human is often treated as a question of fact. However, the term ‘human’ is not primarily used to refer to a particular kind of entity, but as a ‘nomen dignitatis’ – a dignity-conferring name. It implies a particular moral status. That is what spawns endless debates about such issues as when human life begins and ends and whether human-animal chimeras are “partly human”. Definitions of the human are inevitably “persuasive”. They tell us about what is important and how we should live our lives as humans, and thus help us to make sense of what we are.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy , Volume 84 , Issue 1 , January 2009 , pp. 95 - 109
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 2009

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References

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2 Ibid., par. 12.

3 Thomas Aquinas, Scriptum super Sententiis, lib. 1, dist. 10, q. 1, a5: “Persona est nomen dignitatis.”

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12 For the purpose of the argument, I am assuming here that being human and belonging to a particular biological species is co-extensive in the sense that if you are human then you belong to that species, and if you belong to it then you are human. However, we can imagine that the species evolves in such a way that it splits into two groups whose members can no longer reproduce with members of the other group. We would then have two biological species, but there is no reason why we shouldn't regard the members of both of them as equally human.

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26 Ibid., 207.

27 That this is at best only half of the truth and rests on a certain very questionable interpretation of the theory is pointed out by various critics, for instance by Kitcher, Philip, Vaulting Ambition (Cambridge, MA, London: MIT Press, 1985)Google Scholar, or Dupre, John, Human Nature and the Limits of Science (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 Ibid., 119.

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