Rationally speaking is a presentation of New York City skeptics dedicated to promoting critical thinking, skeptical inquiry, and science education.

For more information, please visit us at NYC Skeptics.org.

Welcome to rationally speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and

nonsense. I'm your host, Massimo Pilucci, and with me as always is my co-host, Julia Gilev.

Julia, what are we going to talk about today?

Massimo, today's topic is the science and philosophy of human nature. So we're going to be talking about what is human nature, how do we know, and why does it

matter anyway.

That's right.

What doesn't matter?

I will just quickly get in my dig at the philosophy of human nature and say that I've read

a number of, like a lot of philosophers like talking

about human nature. It's sort of one of the standard topics up there with beauty and

aesthetic or ethics, et cetera. And the frustration that I usually have when I read philosophers

accounts of human nature is that they're so oversimplified.

Like, Hobbes will say that human nature is driven by a desire to dominate other humans,

and that's it.

That's the defining force of human nature.

And Bentham will say that human nature is all driven by a desire to seek pleasure and avoid pain,

etc. And that's not even taking into account the claims about human nature that are made

just a priori from the armchair without any particular empirical investigation into what the

actual state of nature was rather than what, say, Rousseau imagined the

state of nature to have been. So I guess my initial, like, shot over the bow is to ask you

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