Are human beings fixed individuals or dynamic relational processes?

 

The Human Being as a Dynamic and Relational Process

Human beings are dynamic, embodied, and relational processes rather than stable entities with a fixed essence.

To describe a person as a process is not to deny continuity, character, or responsibility. Relatively stable habits, commitments, memories, bodily dispositions, and relationships give a life recognizable form across time. That form can change without becoming arbitrary. Responsibility remains possible because people can interpret reasons, anticipate consequences, answer for conduct, and revise patterns of action, although the extent of that capacity is shaped by age, health, coercion, knowledge, and social conditions.

Identity develops through continuous interaction between biological predispositions, psychological experiences, social relationships, cultural meanings, and ecological conditions[1]. A coherent sense of self emerges through narratives that organize experiences and integrate contradictions. Identity is inherently multiple and remains open to revision through human reflection[2].

All people share fundamental conditions of vulnerability, embodiment, relational dependence, developmental potential, and the ability to create meaning. These shared conditions support equal human worth, regardless of achievement, rationality, cultural background, or social position. Differences between individuals and societies reflect variations in context and development, but do not justify hierarchies of human value.

Discrimination restricts more than material opportunities. Stereotypes, institutional expectations, and social categorization also influence how people understand themselves and their possibilities[3]. By limiting recognition and opportunity, discrimination can systematically reduce a person’s developmental freedom.

Biological factors influence cognition, emotion, and behavior, but they do not mechanically determine human development. Their effects depend on environmental and social conditions. Human diversity is therefore a fundamental biological and social reality rather than a deviation from a single norm[4]. The body is also culturally interpreted through practices surrounding birth, illness, care, sexuality, and mortality.

Freedom is not absolute independence but a gradually developing capacity to act and shape one’s life. Autonomy grows through relationships, education, socialization, and cultural participation. Although autonomy is relationally formed, individuals retain the right to determine their own values, beliefs, and life goals, provided they respect the equal worth of others[5].

Human beings are deeply interconnected through social, institutional, economic, technological, and ecological networks. Empathy enables cooperation, care, and social stability[6]. Morality develops through vulnerable learning processes involving empathy, justice, and responsibility[7]. Destructive behavior emerges from interactions between individual predispositions, social circumstances, and power structures, without eliminating personal agency.

People create meaning through narratives, symbols, traditions, and moral beliefs. These meanings are transmitted across generations through education, rituals, and collective memory. Concern for future generations can motivate social and ecological responsibility[8].

Human development is multilinear and co-evolutionary. Biological, cultural, technological, and ecological processes continually shape one another, producing different historical pathways rather than a universal ladder of progress. Cultural differences therefore represent variations in historical experience and social organization, not different levels of civilization or human worth[9].

 

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(PDF) Becoming Human Together: Rethinking Democracy, Power and Institutions for a Complex and Changing World

 

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[1] Bronfenbrenner and Morris, “The Bioecological Model of Human Development”; Gilbert Gottlieb, “Probabilistic Epigenesis,” Developmental Science 10, no. 1 (2007): 1–11, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7687.2007.00556.x.

[2] McAdams and McLean, “Narrative Identity”; Strawson, “Against Narrativity.” Together these sources support both the importance of narrative identity and the qualification that not every person experiences the self narratively.

[3] Brenda Major and Laurie T. O’Brien, “The Social Psychology of Stigma,” Annual Review of Psychology 56 (2005): 393–421, https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.56.091103.070137; Claude M. Steele and Joshua Aronson, “Stereotype Threat and the Intellectual Test Performance of African Americans,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 69, no. 5 (1995): 797–811, https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.69.5.797.

[4] Agustín Fuentes et al., “AAPA Statement on Race and Racism,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 169, no. 3 (2019): 400–402, https://doi.org/10.1002/ajpa.23882. This statement distinguishes continuous human biological variation from socially constructed racial hierarchies.

[5] Ryan and Deci, “Self-Determination Theory”; Mackenzie and Stoljar, Relational Autonomy.

[6] Decety and Cowell, “Friends or Foes”; Tomasello, Why We Cooperate. The text should retain its later qualification that empathy is selective and is neither identical to nor sufficient for morality.

[7] Michael Tomasello, Why We Cooperate (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009); Jean Decety and Jason M. Cowell, “Friends or Foes: Is Empathy Necessary for Moral Behavior?” Perspectives on Psychological Science 9, no. 5 (2014): 525–537, https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691614545130. Decety and Cowell show why empathy should be described as multidimensional and partial rather than as a sufficient foundation for morality.

[8] Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd, Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Jan Assmann, Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

[9] Kevin N. Laland, John Odling-Smee, and Sean Myles, “How Culture Shaped the Human Genome: Bringing Genetics and the Human Sciences Together,” Nature Reviews Genetics 11 (2010): 137–148, https://doi.org/10.1038/nrg2734; Boyd and Richerson, Not by Genes Alone.