Recent philosophical work on the concept of human nature disagrees on how to respond to the Darwinian challenge, according to which biological species do not have traditional essences. Three broad kinds of reactions can be distinguished: (1) conservative intrinsic essentialism, which defends essences in the traditional sense, (2) eliminativism, which suggests dropping the concept of human nature altogether, and (3) constructive approaches, which argue that revisions can generate sensible concepts of human nature beyond traditional essences. The different constructive approaches pick out one or two of the three epistemic roles that are fused in traditional essentialist conceptions of human nature: descriptive (descriptivism), explanatory (explanativism), definitional (taxonomic relationalism), or explanatory and definitional (property cluster essentialism). These turns towards diverging epistemic roles are best interpreted pluralistically: there is a plurality of concepts of human nature that have to be clearly distinguished, each with a legitimate role in respective scientific contexts.

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This chapter summarises the contributions to the volume The Normative Animal? On the Anthropological Significance of Social, Moral and Linguistic Norms. The contributions are divided into three sections in line with the tripartite division of the types of norms discussed in the volume. The key claims of the individual chapters are presented and set into relation to one another, and a number of issues raised by competition between the claims are highlighted. This prepares the ground for an assessment of the normative animal thesis in the light of the varying accounts both of specific deontic phenomena and of normativity in general. Central issues concern the concepts of social norms and conventions, the relative importance of coordination and cooperation, the nature and role of collective intentionality, the place of norms in evolutionary explanations, and the structure of normative action guidance. Decisive for the normative animal thesis are the questions as to whether moral principles and linguistic rules are correctly characterised as both real and deontic in the same senses in which these characterisations apply to social norms.

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