Cultivating human nature

Evolutionary psychology claims to offer a unified perspective on human nature and culture, which can serve to further the integration of psychology and the social sciences. I describe four approaches to evolutionary psychology, and note increasing attention to the agency of the individual in constructing the biological and cultural environment. These approaches, however, share a problematic conception of culture as information. I explore the possibility of using Latour's concept of mediation to analyse the relation between human nature and culture without restricting the latter to information, and collect a number of recent studies and essays that illustrate the way individuals mediate nature and culture.     

The nature of humor in human nature: Cross-cultural commonalities

It is contended that humor is a universal, pan-cultural phenomenon. Humor theory is examined on superiority, psychoanalytic, and incongruity-resolution dimensions. Cross-cultural humor commonalities are derived from the literature; and genetic, biological, and social dynamics of humor are explored. Intercultural differences in the content domain of humor are noted. It is concluded that humor is an appropriate intervention for ethnically diverse clients, when used sensitively in the counselling process.     

Ethical pluralism and the appeal to human nature

Ethical pluralists hold that moral values and systems are irreducibly diverse and incommensurable according to a common scale. One criticism of the view is that accepting such incommensurability renders them unable to criticize values, practices, institutions, and so forth that are genuinely bad. This paper considers two ways that pluralists have appealed to human nature to answer this criticism. One way appeals to nature to ground a positive conception of human flourishing, whereas the other appeals to nature as a source of constraints. I argue that both views fail to meet the criticism in a satisfactory way and then advance a view that improves upon the existing options. Specifically, I argue that human nature is the standard by which it is possible to assess humaneness, which is a kind of beauty that represents the elevation or refinement of human nature. Accordingly, pluralists can deploy judgments of humaneness to criticize practices, institutions, and so forth that are not worth tolerating without violating the spirit of pluralism.     

What is basic in human nature

Pastoral Psychology -