Human nature, reason and morality

Abstract

What role should moral philosophy give to considerations about human nature and the character of human life? And what part should such considerations play in moral education? This paper explores these questions by contrasting the ‘new intuitionist’ position I defend in ‘Practice, sensibility and moral education’ (Bakhurst, 2018) with Philippa Foot's neo-Aristotelian naturalism, which holds that natural-historic description of the human life-form can furnish us with norms by reference to which failure to act morally can be understood as a kind of natural defect. Following John McDowell, I question whether a being that is rational, and therefore free, can allow such natural-historical description to decide norms of behaviour for it. Indeed, the new intuitionist should question whether natural-historical description, as Foot construes it, is even meaningful in the human case. For all that, however, I argue there is one natural-historical fact of momentous importance in understanding the human: that human beings become what they are through Bildung or education in the broadest sense. To develop this point, I turn to an unlikely ally, Immanuel Kant, who offers a robust account of Bildung designed to show how people acquire the Denkungsart (cast of mind) demanded by morality. Kant's view, I argue, presupposes knowledge of the human—as entering into both (i) the theoretical knowledge necessary to characterise the Denkungsart and the manner of its cultivation, and (ii) the practical knowledge involved in exercising it, for to be skilled at moral thinking requires understanding human life in its diversity, complexity and essential contestability. To offer such understanding is the task of moral education—indeed, it is the task of education as such—and one which falls largely to the humanities to discharge.