Sunday, May 6, 2012

Can we be Blamed for our Nature?

If a trait such as jealousy is passed on biologically, then can I be blamed for acting on my jealousy?

Maybe it's in my nature to be jealous, but is everything I do solely based off of my nature? No. There's been a long-lasting argument about nature vs. nurture, but really nature and nurture work together. Everything we do is explained by multiple things:

"1.) Natural selection operating on our ancestors over many thousands - indeed millions - of years to produce a variety of innate mental modules in the human species;
2.) The historical development of a variety of human economies and cultures over many centuries;
3.) The mixing of genes in sexual reproduction that gives every human being their own unique set of genes (except in the case of identical twins);
4.) The effects of the physical and social/cultural environment on bodily and mental development over the lifetime of each individual;
5.) The information processing involved in perception and speech recognition, the results of which ('beliefs') join with motivational factors ('desires') to be the immediate cause of particular actions" (Stevenson 232).

So can I be blamed for acting on my jealousy? Yes. Why? Because I have other traits (like kindness, respect, and sympathy) that work against it, I've been raised to be respectful to other people, society has taught me to look down upon jealousy, etc. Nature certainly doesn't dictate everything I do, and even if it did, other parts of my nature (mostly reason) would tell me to suppress my jealous tendencies.

No comments:

Post a Comment