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22 J. Value Inquiry 3 (1988)

handle is hein.journals/jrnlvi22 and id is 1 raw text is: The Journal of Value Inquiry 22:3-22 (1988) ©Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, Dordrecht - Printed in the Netherlands Morality and humanity * VILHJALMUR ARNASON Department of Philosophy, University of Iceland, IS-101 Reykjavik Either explicitly or implicitly, philosophers' ideas about human nature have always been decisive in forming their conceptions of morality. This is not surprising because the idea of humanity is at bottom a moral idea in the sense the it delineates the framework in which the possibilities for human conduct and maturity can be conceived. Recently there has been a strong tendency among philosophers to reject traditional ideas about human nature as misleading and try to describe the features of humanity in con- cepts and categories that they find more appropriate to the sub- ject matter. In this paper I consider two of these recent attempts to formulate an alternative conception of human reality, and pur- sue their ethical implications. I begin by exploring the contribu- tion of (the early) Sartre's thought, representing the existentialist rejection of human nature and radical affirmation of human free- dom. I then consider the image of man that emerges from Gada- mer's hermeneutical philosophy and trace the possibilities it opens for ethical thinking. I try to show that neither of these influential attempts to correct the misguided images of man in the philo- sophical tradition can provide an adequate account of human morality. I propose that for such an account to succeed, philoso- phy must recover the notion of nature as it enters into the history of human development. * This paper was presented at The Fifth Nordic Philosophy Conference, held in Hanaholmen Culture Centre (outside Helsinki, Finland), 31 August - 2 September, 1984. The theme of the conference was Man in Nature and Nature in Man.

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