Moral Condition Of The Human Being

1. Human nature

• Nature

We are all different -men and women, blond hair, brown hair, dark skin or light skin-, but we share something in common: our human nature. Our human nature it's what identify us as a species and differentiates from the rest of the animal kingdom.

Nonetheless, all animals look alike to us in many respects. We need feeding and mating. As mammals we act like the rest of mammals. Humans share 99% of their genes with chimpanzes. However, we differ from them.

What we call human nature is actually a set of features and properties share by all humans. For that reason, it constitutes our biological legacy.

• Culture

Human beings are often called "the rational animal" because what differentiate us from the rest of animals is our intelligence. We speak, reason, discover, learn... Birds build their nests the same way each time, century after century, but humans have been progressed from the cave to the skyscraper.

What we called culture is actually a set of inventions made by human intelligence. This involves language, clothes, arts, ways of life, customs, science, religion, music, etc. They constitute our cultural legacy.

Human beings have a mixture of biology and culture: on one hand, the natural condition and on the other, the culture that surround us.

• Convenient and harmful

For all living forms there are good and not so goo situations, convenient and harmful. That's what happens to humans. But somehow we can reason about what is good or bad for us. Two kinds ok knowledge deal with what is good or bad for us and they offer norms and advices.

-Medicine, which is interested in the study of good or bad in health.

-Ethics, which focuses on what is good or bad concerning to human behaviour and the study of happiness and justice.

Both of them study human nature; the first one studies biological nature, and the second one the moral nature.    To human health is harmful being beneath the soil, but is not the case for the mole. Kill the weak could be good for the animals, but not for humans.

We as humans need to live accordingly with our nature. The British author and philosopher John Stuart Mill said: "Pigs may not aspire to be anything but a pig". Humans aspire towards a human happiness.

As rational creatures we reflect on good and bad, who we are, and how we should be. For that reason we are moral beings, because we can choose and we have to.