Trialogue: Implicit and Explicit Views of Human Nature

Whoever talks or thinks about how society could or should be organized has necessarily to deal with the question of how human beings would presumably behave under different circumstances. To the extent that one does not want to be limited to the current condition of society or to earlier or elsewhere existing relations, empirical observation will not get one far. Instead, one needs a theoretical model of human behavior that makes it possible to predict behavior that can be expected under circumstances that are not observable today. Such a model of human behavior roughly corresponds to what is commonly known as a “view of human nature”; hence, I will make use of this somewhat more concise term. In order to make statements about human behavior in a hypothetical scenario, one thus always needs a view of human nature, if one wants to say something more than “don’t know.” Two things are important here: