Abstract This essay asks what it would mean for human beings to make progress once human nature is understood neither as a fixed essence nor as an empty idea. I argue that progress should be understood as the historically situated redirection of the developmental scaffolds through which human lives are formed. Human beings are world-making organisms: our lives are shaped by inherited biological, ecological, technological, symbolic, and institutional supports, but these supports are also continually reproduced and altered through praxis. The human case is distinctive because this world-making has become reflexive, norm-governed, institutionally stabilized, and now capable of producing Earth-system effects. The resulting framework rejects both biological essentialism and anti-naturalist voluntarism. Human developmental networks are materially entrenched; they cannot be remade at will. Yet they are not fixed, and their reproduction is always also a possible site of redirection. Against teleological accounts of species-life, I argue that neither human nature nor evolutionary history supplies an inherent standard of progress. The Marxian–Engelsian formula of an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all can nevertheless orient praxis. It names not a destiny but an end-in-view that finite, socially interdependent agents may adopt, deliberate about, and coordinate around. On this account, human progress consists in reorganizing the biological, social, and ecological conditions of development so that freedom and interdependence become mutually enabling without consuming the conditions for future life.
Matteo Mameli (2026) studied this question.