Special Workshop Abstract

While it is true that little is still known about the overall structure and organization of the human mind, perhaps we know enough to explore an alternative to the historical and functional picture of human motivation and behavior offered by evolutionary psychologies.  I suggest that with a tentative picture of the structure of the mind in hand, we can raise the issue of what a creature with a mind of this sort could reasonably be expected to have in the way of fundamental human needs, given various environments in which the human organism can survive at all.  On this ground, I argue, we can doubt that humans have a fundamental need to dominate others.