“Let us study man as he is in order to teach him what he should be”

Abstract

The eighteenth-century French philosophe Mably, in the declaration used as the title for this paper, articulated a key principle of modern “enlightened” understanding: the demand to use knowledge of the natural laws of human nature as the basis for social policy and social laws. It was the basis for utilitarian social and political thought, and it remains a commonplace of modern Western discourse. I analyse the puzzles and contradictions to which Mably’s declaration leads. I then illustrate the arguments with a case study based on Thomas Henry Huxley’s lecture, “Evolution and Ethics” (1893). In this lecture, and in other public essays, Huxley argued both for knowledge of “man’s place in nature” (i.e. for the scientific study of human conformity to the laws of nature) and the overcoming of natural conditions with moral civilisation. He made different claims in different rhetorical contexts. The paper argues this is the case for all modern Western statements about the laws of human nature detached from the conceptual roots of a belief that there are such laws in Judeo-Christian natural law theory. I emphasise this by drawing in insights from Nietzsche on the desire to “live according to nature”, that is, according to the laws of nature. The paper concludes with brief comments on the relevance of the analysis to contemporary statements about the neurosciences as the basis for human self-knowledge and moral action. I refer to statements in the “Ethics and Society” section of the European Human Brain Project.