According to natural law theory, actions are right just becausethey are natural and wrong just because they are unnatural. Thetheory has a number of attractions. By grounding morality in humannature, the theory promises to explain both how morality could beobjective and why morality applies only to human beings. The theorycould also help us to understand the origins of morality and how wecan come to have moral knowledge. If, through science, we come tounderstand our nature and its origin, then according to natural lawtheory, we will know everything we need to know about morality. Ifnatural law theory is to be plausible, its defenders must specifyexactly what sense of “human nature†is supposed to be morallyrelevant. On one understanding, human nature consists of whateveris innately human. Others take human nature to be whatever all ormost humans have in common. Still others understand human nature toconsist of whatever we were “designed†by nature to do. The problemfor natural law theory is that none of these understandings ofhuman nature seems to provide a sufficient basis for morality.Whether an action or character trait is morally good does not seemto depend on whether it is innate or acquired. The percentage ofpeople who have a given trait does not seem particularly morallyrelevant, either—even if almost everyone were cruel, this wouldstill not make cruelty morally admirable. Furthermore, on either ofthe two most common ways of understanding natural purposes, whetheran action enables us to fulfill a natural purpose doesn’t seem totell us whether that act is morally permissible or not. The termhuman nature can be understood in many ways. Even if we settle onone definition of human nature, however, it is far from obviousthat everything natural is morally good, or vice versa. Given thatnatural laws merely tell us how things will behave whereas thefunction of moral laws is to tell us how we should behave, itshould come as no surprise that nature does not tell us everythingwe’d like to know about morality.
\"Suppose that 'human nature' consists of the set ofinnate characteristics that all (or most) humans share. Understoodin this way, what does human nature tell us about morality? Is italways immoral to behave contrary to human nature?\" Write 200words.
