Hot-Button Issues—looking at more than the facts A version of this article was printed in Humanism Ireland , Vol. 141 (2013) Conservative theorists and right-wing economists often tell us that individual human behaviour is the product of nature, and differences in ability, skills, and intelligence can be understood as those that are rooted in biology. Liberal ideologies, on the other hand, frequently say that differences between individuals are not the product of nature, but are in some way socially constructed due to unfair social and institutional infrastructures; variations on IQ scores between different ethnic groups, they argue, can be explained as a result of one ethnic group having less access to higher education or because of the inherent cultural bias situated within IQ tests. What’s more, humans are not violent by nature. Violent behaviour, they claim, is down to the fact that modern capitalist systems create societies of vast inequality, where luckless people,
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