in the very long term there is no fixed nature but in the short term (by short term i mean all of human civilization) there is
for example, toddlers will recoil when seeing a rope in the grass. this type of behavior is ingrained within us. some humans overcome this and end up owning snakes, but most people don't like snakes. some have argued that the reason we see well is to spot those things so ingrained in our DNA to fear. it's also why we all point at the damn snake when we see it. or anything else we fear. we are mostly monkey, but part bee in our nature in that we are partly collectivized. so pointing out the danger is for everyone else, an alarm and a call for help at once
our rational mind is there to speak for our intuition that decides for us what is right before we even open out mouths. it's why we're arguing on here. we are all like this.
so what is human nature? i think it's just generalized things that if you were to bet someone would do you'd bet on that because more often than not you'd be right. most of it that we're talking about here has to do with our monkey ancestry: we're groupish individuals that will war against other groups to make sure our group gets its needs. some of us are more highly independent than others, but i'll bet a chill went up your spine if you were an american and saw President Bush speak in the aftermath of Sept. 11th. everyone was behind him, everyone was together. yeah a couple weren't. but our nature was to bind us against a common enemy who we wanted to see dead.
we all have the same taste receptors but we like different foods. in the end, the human nature (common human morality) that you're looking for has had cultural history overlapped on it that changes the perspective, but there are common threads. now it's true that people like jeremy bentham (founder of utilitarianism) have things like autism (he likely had assburgers, and john stuart mill said bentham's mind was "incomplete" and thus incapable of being a philosopher) that prevent them from acting like a "normal" human would, but they are outliers.
getting back to something else i was talking about with uber, when humans were coming out of monkey stage we had a challenge to avoid contaminants. going back to taste receptors, some people are open to new foods and others like what they like and no thank you they will just have the thing that they always get. this was adaptive behavior to poisons. if you would eat anything you'd probably die from it, but if you didn't eat enough you'd die from starvation. and since we're groupish it helps to have someone risk it all for the group. but this in turn led to our views on getting away from our waste, and from disease. we then made it religious. it's why things are taboo, its why we have feelings of disgust, its why we feel better after we use hand santitizer. yes, this is a thing
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21421934in this study above here, people were asked questions on purity and moral judgement while standing near or not near hand sanitizer. subjects near hand sanitizer called themselves more conservative and were more judgmental when asked questions on sexual purity. from standing. next to. hand. sanitizer.
Americans learn only from catastrophe and not from experience. -- Theodore Roosevelt
My life has become a single, ongoing revelation that I haven’t been cynical enough.