Eco-ethica

published on April 20, 2023

The Nature in Human Nature

One persisting problem in political philosophy today is explaining clearly enough for effective remedies the problematic notion of “the lack of political will.” 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 of individual egoism and social “nosism” in terms of the still 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 what we might call tentatively “the nature of human nature.” That is, the nature of human nature, I argue, involves necessarily an always present, and largely 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.