Conceptions of human nature and rights

Human nature is biologically and culturally oriented towards respect for life, freedom and the environment. Therefore it does not possess a tendency towards the globalisation of the technocratic paradigm of society of the present time. In the human being’s nature both a universal and individual principle are present. These have been known since the Greek – Roman era (Aristotle – Cicero), they place themselves as a classical distinction which returns in the Middle Ages (St. Thomas), it has become part of everyday culture, undergoing insignificant variations in time due to the different extent of man’s nature and priviledged by the author who reintroduced it. In the end however, in the affluent society, which would have brought the biological evolution of man to a final point, the evolution of humanity could only have been cultural, so we have arrived at placing at the base of the nature of man only culture and not nature and culture together, so undermining the basis of the classical distinction between universal principles and individuatiing ones. Principles that exist in the nature of every man even if the individuating ones in a different way. One of the consequences of the distinction between universal and indivduating principles of human nature is the distinction between basic or natural rights and individual rights; these initially should characterize the single person but also reinforce the practice of fundamental rights. The first are rights of the species and as such have a universal value. Accordingly, UNESCO published the Universal declaration of Human Genome and the rights of man (1997). Its message is that individuating rights must never be set against fundamental rights. If this happens humanity is living in a decadent phase of its history. Today we are trying to go beyond the anthropological traditional-natural paradigm and to open the way to the anthropological transhuman or post human paradigm. These two anthropological paradigms gradually bring us to the return of Homo praedatorius, which historically is materialised in various forms of individualism which have contributed to the birth of the term gender. Human beings as individuals live in the secular prospective, supporter in this case, of the only culture at the foundation of the figure of man. This situation has encouraged, already for a while, the overcoming of the phase of lack of respect for the fundamental rights and a return to the respect of the principles that characterize the human being as a person, such as freedom and responsibility, unselfishness and dignity, sociality, solidarity and subsidiarity, and finally the continuity of life of mankind.