I have recently read a lot about human nature because I find it coming up as an excuse all to often. For example on a dating forum one might say I cheated on my partner because it’s human nature to not be monogamist and to only sleep with one partner. Or when trying to justify a snap decision you made about someone on a date.

“But there’s a larger point here: that judging people on shallow stuff is human nature; one person’s Magic is another person’s fingernail biting, or sports obsession, or verbal tic.”

To start I think you may need to know what is considered human nature; here is a brief excerpt from Wikipedia:

Human nature refers to the distinguishing characteristics, including ways of thinking, feeling and acting, that humans tend to have naturally.

The questions of what these characteristics are, what causes them and how this causation works, and how fixed human nature is amongst the oldest and most important questions in western philosophy. These questions have particularly important implications in ethics, politics and theology. This is partly because human nature can be regarded as both a source of norms of conduct or ways of life, as well as presenting obstacles or constraints on living a good life.

To clarify if you still may be confused; these are basic instincts that humans have that causes them to seemingly act in a certain way. No one knows what exactly constitutes human nature, there just seems to be some ways that humans conduct themselves which have been observed throughout time thus making it considering part of human nature.

Clearly using that definition of human nature it would be awfully hard to justify any action as being part of it. But for the sake of argument let’s allow shallowness and aversion to monogamy be part of human nature. Do these actions being part of human nature give enough of a reason to justify you doing them?

If your answer to this question would be yes, I have something for you to think about. Have you heard about free will; well if you can’t make conscious decisions by yourself you don’t have free will. We are conscious beings; we have the ultimate say in our actions, even if something is part of human nature we make the choice to take part in this activity. To reiterate it was not human nature that cheating on your spouse it was YOU, it was not human nature that made a snap judgment about a person which was shallow and ugly it was YOU.

YOU make the executive decisions in your life and not human nature. So stop using it as an excuse, it just shows that you are clearly weak minded and you are easily drawn into temptation.