human nature

human nature (uncountable)

1. The fundamental set of qualities, and the range of behaviour, shared by (or believed by many to be shared by) all humans; the probabilities about thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that are typical among most humans.

   Some philosophers argue that there is fundamentally no such thing as human nature, but many people reject this thought for practical purposes because by human nature they merely mean predictable likelihoods about how humans can often be expected to think, feel, and behave.

   • 1921, Ben Travers, chapter 5, in A Cuckoo in the Nest, Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page & Company, published 1925, →OCLC:

     The most rapid and most seductive transition in all human nature is that which attends the palliation of a ravenous appetite. There is something humiliating about it. […] Can those harmless but refined fellow-diners be the selfish cads whose gluttony and personal appearance so raised your contemptuous wrath on your arrival?

   • 2018, Steven Pinker, “Chapter 2: Entro, Evo, Info”, in Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, Penguin, →ISBN:

     So for all the flaws in human nature, it contains the seeds of its own improvement, as long as it comes up with norms and institutions that channel parochial interests into universal benefits. Among those norms are free speech, nonviolence, cooperation, cosmopolitanism, human rights, and an acknowledgment of human fallibility, and among the institutions are science, education, media, democratic government, international organizations, and markets. Not coincidentally, these were the major brainchildren of the Enlightenment.