Abstract

Not so long ago, if you wanted to start a barroom brawl at a philosophy conference all you had to do was to make the claim that a defensible ethical or political theory is necessarily constrained by some theory of human nature or other. Underlying the unease that some philosophers felt with any such claim was perhaps the belief that to allow such a claim would necessarily justify oppression or discrimination or deny human responsibility, meaning or purpose.1 Making such a claim today about a connection between theories of human nature and ethics and politics might still start a fight but the claim-maker is likely to have more allies than would have been the case even, say, ten years ago.2..