DfMoore asks a variant of a question I started to address in a previous post about the phenomenon known as "natural law." He asks:
If nature has purpose (like a telos), but not consciousness or intelligence, then what are ethical ways of treating nature and interacting with it.Aside from what I wrote before, I had a few things to add, which I will reprint for your reading satisfaction. For the uninitiated, a telos is like an innate plan.
The first issue that comes to my mind is how are we sure we know what the telos is? Even in something widely accepted like evolution theory, which does fundamentally guarantee the existence of a telos in living nature, the "purpose" or adaptivity of a given element of nature is subject to different interpretations. There are a few cases in which we can be pretty absolutely certain of what the telos is. One instance would be the instinct, in conscious or unconscious terms, possessed by a living thing to survive. You don't even have to buy into evolutionary theory to be pretty sure that living nature is set up in such a way that one of its main ends is survival. Then you can ask: well, how do we take into account this basic truth in our interactions with nature? I think it's safe to say there's a pretty universal ethic among humans cultures to not kill something if it's for no good reason. Where does this come from? Are we identifying with a telos we innately sense, or are we are we merely projecting our own personal aversion to death? The issue of our regard for life may offer hints into how we do unconsciously respond to a telos in nature.Indeed, I would have to agree.
But practically, I would argue that there are few things of which we can reasonably be sure we even know the telos. However, this doesn't mean that people don't construct normative systems based on some kind of supposed grand plan in nature. Social darwinism and eugenics are a great example of people trying to facilitate nature, and coming up with ethically monstrous policies in the process. The ethical profile of these things is bleak at best. But my objection to this kind of ethical stance is that for every positive normative argument for facilitating the "purpose" or "function" of nature, I can give a negative normative argument for why we shouldn't do the very same thing, because humans are higher beings and the raw workings of nature are often brutish or inhumane. Which argument wins? It seems pretty subjective.
Originally published 7/4/12
1 comment:
Adam, I posted up a response - really enjoyed your thoughts on it...
Adam's general thought (correct me if I'm wrong) is that it would be very difficult to ascertain what exactly that telos is. And, indeed, that's the trouble that I'm running into when I thinking about - for different types of purposes, we should interact with nature in different ways. For an extreme example, if nature had a telos to destroy mankind then we would react radically different to it than if its telos was to assist us in all our endeavors.
But still, we can extract some interesting relationship between man and nature due to (and this might be a little presumptuous of me) man's duality of being both in nature and outside of it (in some sense). If nature is thought of as permeating all of creation in some sense, then how we (as outside of nature) relate to nature speaks volumes as to how we relate to our nature (the part of nature that is in man or the part of man that is in nature - two different things that also lead to different analysis). Adam has some more interesting thoughts:
But practically, I would argue that there are few things of which we can reasonably be sure we even know the telos. However, this doesn't mean that people don't construct normative systems based on some kind of supposed grand plan in nature. Social darwinism and eugenics are a great example of people trying to facilitate nature, and coming up with ethically monstrous policies in the process. The ethical profile of these things is bleak at best. But my objection to this kind of ethical stance is that for every positive normative argument for facilitating the "purpose" or "function" of nature, I can give a negative normative argument for why we shouldn't do the very same thing, because humans are higher beings and the raw workings of nature are often brutish or inhumane. Which argument wins? It seems pretty subjective.
Yeah, but which side we come down on, especially in a world with a purposeful nature, has a huge impact on what type of people we are.
As for the other question, Adam also correctly guesses that I've related it to the question of the ethics regarding man enslaving unequal beings such as animals but we have to add on the idea of speech and/or intelligence. Also, we have to look into whether the two (or more) species were always aware of each other (that is, evolved together) or if they have been thrust upon each other (like, what if when Columbus came to the New World there was a completely different species of sentient species that was equally developed? but I'm not looking for the view that Columbus or his contemporaries would have, that's too easy). Whether or not these species can communicate with each other also matters a lot. Do they require the same resources (is there competition between them)?
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