Tangled lines

Over the last several years, I have operatively adopted an historicist account of human nature (ala Hegel, Gadamer, Sartre, Ortega). For many (Sartre and Ortega included, I think) that account is opposed to view of natural law in which the goals and basic structures of human nature are given not by human decisions or by human history but by something more grand in which humans participate. I think Hegel and Gadamer would have a more nuanced position here than Sartre or Ortega allow – that is, while remaining basically historicist, they can incorporate an account of “nature” into that account rather than leaving it as a contradictory opposite.

So, now I’m rethinking my thoughts from the standpoint of primitivism, which completely reconfigures the relation between nature and history On the primitivist account, human nature is a product of millions of years of evolution (so evolution provides a broadly historicist framework, but not in the sense of history used by the thinkers above). “History” (in the narrow sense of the word used by historicists) began only about 10,000 BC, and that is not enough time for any real biological change in humans. So we are all basically what we were in the Paleolithic age; our bodies, our minds -- our nature – is best suited to the environment and life “we” had then. So, the primitivist essentially makes a natural law case for human ethics.

Questions: In what senses is the primitivist case different from a natural law account of human nature? What are the advantages of an historicist account of human nature that we would lose and need to rethink if the primitivist case seems convincing? Has anyone written a critical review comparing the theoretical frameworks of Alasdair MacIntyre’s Dependent Rational Animals with the more historicist framework assumed in most of his other writings?