What changes when we stop treating human beings as isolated and self-sufficient individuals?
Humanity as an Embodied,
Relational, and Developing Process
Every society, legal system, and moral tradition
is shaped by assumptions about human nature[1].
A conception of humanity becomes politically consequential when it is
translated into ordinary rules. A social-security system that assumes stable
income, abundant time, and effortless administrative competence will treat many
predictable difficulties as personal failure. A system designed around
vulnerability, bounded attention, and unequal access to support will instead
make information usable, preserve routes to correction, and distinguish
unwillingness from inability. The same contrast appears in education,
healthcare, employment, and justice. Assumptions about human beings therefore
become distributions of opportunity, responsibility, and power. These
assumptions influence understandings of freedom, responsibility, justice,
inequality, dependence, and power. Although asymmetries of power may be
necessary in education, care, professional expertise, and institutional life,
they become problematic when they produce structural domination, exploitation,
or exclusion.
Religious, rationalist, economic,
expressive-individualist, social-constructivist, evolutionary, and humanist
perspectives each reveal important dimensions of human existence, but none
offers a complete explanation. A comprehensive understanding requires an
interdisciplinary approach that also considers bounded rationality, social
inequality, epistemic power, and humanity’s dependence on ecological systems.
Human beings are best understood not as
possessing a fixed essence, but as embodied, relational, and developable
processes of becoming[2].
Identity emerges through continuous interaction among biological
predispositions, psychological development, social relationships, cultural
meanings, institutions, and ecological conditions. The self is not an
unchanging core, but a temporarily stabilized pattern of experience,
interpretation, recognition, and adaptation[3].
Describing persons as processes does not deny
continuity, character, or responsibility. Habits, memories, commitments, bodily
dispositions, and relationships give a life recognizable form across time.
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.
Freedom is not complete independence, but a
capacity for action that develops within relational, social, and institutional
contexts. Identity remains dynamic, morality develops through vulnerable
learning processes, and dignity and equal worth do not depend on achievement,
rational ability, or cultural status[4].
They are grounded in shared conditions of embodiment, vulnerability,
meaning-making, and developmental potential.
The process-based conception of humanity
describes human beings as relational and developing. Relational-processual
anthropology provides the broader theoretical and methodological framework for
examining this conception. Its normative orientations include equal worth,
developmental opportunity, relational responsibility, pluralism, and ecological
limits. These principles are not logically inevitable conclusions, but
reflectively justified responses to shared human conditions.
This approach is an open and revisable research
program rather than a definitive theory of human nature. It seeks to combine an
empirically plausible understanding of human functioning with critical
reflection on equality, institutional justice, pluralism, and ecological
sustainability[5].
Because human beings continually develop within changing contexts, any
responsible conception of humanity must remain open to new evidence, historical
experience, and criticism.
Would you like to explore how a relational
understanding of humanity can transform democracy, law, the economy, and public
institutions? Click the link below to read the full book, Becoming Human
Together, and discover a new framework for building a more humane,
democratic, and correctable society within ecological limits.
[1] Taylor, Sources of the Self; North, Institutions, Institutional
Change and Economic Performance. The note should make clear that the chapter
offers a synthetic claim about the institutional consequences of conceptions of
the person.
[2] Daniel J. Nicholson and John Dupré, eds., Everything Flows: Towards
a Processual Philosophy of Biology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018),
https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198779636.001.0001; Francisco J. Varela, Evan
Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human
Experience (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991).
[3] Dan P. McAdams and Kate C. McLean, “Narrative Identity,” Current
Directions in Psychological Science 22, no. 3 (2013): 233–238, https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721413475622;
Galen Strawson, “Against Narrativity,” Ratio 17, no. 4 (2004): 428–452, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9329.2004.00264.x.
[4] United Nations, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, General
Assembly Resolution 217 A (III), 10 December 1948; Jürgen Habermas, “The
Concept of Human Dignity and the Realistic Utopia of Human Rights,”
Metaphilosophy 41, no. 4 (2010): 464–480, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9973.2010.01648.x..
[5] Steffen et al., “Planetary Boundaries”; IPCC, Climate Change 2023:
Synthesis Report. These sources support ecological dependence; they do not by
themselves establish the chapter’s normative conclusions.
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