Alcohol.
Lots and lots of people lean heavily on it and think that alcohol is the spice of their life. When, it contributes to so many problems than it’s so-called benefits. We tried, in America anyways, to outright ban alcohol. Problem was that the person who wanted it banned, was too extremist.
Like he didn’t think it all through and think just going for the jugular of the problem is what will work. When, it didn’t and just made people work around it until eventually the ban was dismantled.
So, since then, we’ve been putting up with drunk drivers, drunk disputes, drunk abusers and other issues. I still wish we could just slam our hands down at the desk and demand we sit to discuss in how to properly deal with this issue than people proclaiming that it’s not a problem.
Considering how little we actually know, how much we are still figuring out today, how wrong we once were, and most definitely still are on many things, about said nature, the naturalistic argument is IMHO rather weak. The argument silently assumes too many things, at least with our current knowledge - that human beings do actually have an inherent nature, that said nature is uniform enough across the whole species to make that generalization, that said nature is inevitable and can’t be evolved past or rationalized against, that it always was the case and will always be, etc.
It definitely is a big part of our nature as social creatures.
Although we can cooperate with our group and fight against another, hence the consistent wars throughout history.
I think human nature isn’t one sided.
But you’re right in that cooperation is the most effective (and desirable) way of survival.
If humans have a nature, then humans will always have that nature by definition. “We” might get beyond that nature, but it won’t be “us” after that. It will be our descendants.
And not like “sons and daughters” but rather “our evolutionary descendants”.
As for humanity, we exist in a particular set of inescapable challenges, which define what it is to be human.
Definitely true.
I think the hypothesis of a nature both in human actions and society as a whole does have enough merits to be a good starting point.
Were I think there is a lot of unpredictability is on conditions of living and technologies.
Technologies especially, evolve so much quicker than society or human nature.
I would say recently our technologies twisted some of our own nature. For instance how we reproduce in such a controlled way.
Not only this but we do now more than ever things not because of our nature. And it’s also been put into very unique situations.
A great example is social media (including Lemmy itself). We have access to communication so far from us it created very unique communities.
