[thinktwice]

There is a scene in Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged describing what I think your view on "Man's nature" is. That scene, describing a train wreck, is posted on Free Republic at http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3a84bd4613e0.htm.

For those not visiting that link, one excerpt reads ...

The man in Drawing Room B, Car No. 4, was a newspaper publisher who believed that men are evil by nature and unfit for freedom, that their basic interests, if left unchecked, are to lie, to rob and to murder one another.

For those interested, there are some uniquely interesting Freeper reviews of Atlas Shrugged at click here.

[eastsider]

We seem to be talking past each other. All I’m trying to do is to defend Aristotle’s “Man is a rational animal” from the hideous construction that “irrational behavior is non-human behavior” (see post #149, above).

Aristotle classifies all living things according to a hierarchy of faculties. the faculty of nutrition (which Aristotle relates to reproduction); the faculty of sensation; and the faculty of reason. All living things have the faculty of nutrition/reproduction; some have the faculty of sensation; and only one has the faculty of reason. Plants have the sole faculty of nutrition/reproduction; animals have the additional faculty of sensation; and only man has the additional faculty of reason. So, when Aristotle defines man as a rational animal, he is classifying man as a living thing according to this hierarchy of faculties.

Concerning the faculties, we can distinguish between faculty as capacity and faculty as the exercise of that capacity. All men, by definition, have the capacity to reason, but not all men exercise that capacity. When a man exercises the capacity to reason, he is acting rationally; when he doesn’t, he is acting irrationally. Either way, the behavior is human because the agent is human.