Eco-ethica

Volume 10, 2022

Ethics, Politics, and the Idea of Nature

The Nature in Human Nature

Failures of political will underestimate a cardinal element in the basically contested notion of so-called political will, namely social egoisms. This is what the founder of Eco-ethics, To­monobu Imamichi, described by analogy with “egoism” as “nosism.” I try to elaborate here Imamichi’s analogy in terms of the elusive fundamental notion not only of human nature itself but of the nature at issue in human nature. My basic claim will be that most political talk today of “the lack of political will” makes insufficient allowance for “the nature of human nature.” That is, the nature of human nature, I argue, involves necessarily a negative, major element of social and not just individual egoism. The nature in post-essentialist human nature is neither exclusively physical nor exclusively cultural. Rather, the nature in human nature is a dynamic, interacting mixture of both material and non-material aspects, including very powerful individual and social egoisms.