Blackburn, Anscombe, and natural law
Simon Blackburn's recent review of Anscombe's Human Life, Action and Ethics, linked to in an earlier post by Max Goss (and also discussed here), contains several very widespread misunderstandings of the traditional approach to morality defended by Anscombe in particular and by natural law theorists in general. Since these misunderstandings are so widespread, even among intelligent and otherwise well informed philosophers like Blackburn, it is important that they not be allowed to pass without comment. So here are some comments.
First let me briefly rehearse some points I had reason to develop at length in a two-part series on natural law that I posted here a few months back (see here and here), because they are relevant to understanding the views Blackburn criticizes. Traditional natural law theory rests on the sort of classical metaphysical picture associated with Platonism and Aristotelianism, according to which a thing’s having a certain nature is in general to be understood in terms of its participating in a certain form, where “form” is to be interpreted in a realist sense (whether Platonic or Aristotelian). A thing’s having a nature also involves its having a certain natural end or purpose in the sense enshrined in Aristotle’s notion of final causation. The goodness of a thing, on this view, is a function of how perfectly it instantiates its form and how fully it realizes its natural end; and distinctively moral goodness is a function of the extent to which a free and rational being chooses and acts in accordance with its nature, defined in terms of its form and natural end. But though things have natural ends, they do not have them intrinsically, for genuine, full-blooded Aristotelian natural ends or purposes – as opposed, say, to the ersatz or “as if” purposes of mechanistic Darwinian evolutionary theory – cannot exist apart from a mind which orders things to an end. Hence (as Aquinas argues in the Fifth Way) the existence of final causes in nature entails the existence of God.
As I have said, these points are developed at much greater length in the posts linked to above. To them I want to add three other background considerations. The first is that there is a sense in traditional natural law theory in which morality does not depend on the existence of God, but also a sense in which it does depend on God. The natures of things, on the sort of view I’m describing, are discoverable by pure reason, and thus the good is also so discoverable. Hence a pagan like Aristotle was capable, through philosophical speculation, of arriving at a profound understanding of the virtues, viz. those habitual patterns of action which contribute to the realization of the good for man. Even an atheist, then, can to a very great extent know and practice morality. As long as he can grasp the natures of things, then although he does not realize that these natures derive from God, he knows enough to have a basis for moral judgment.
On the other hand, since the good is defined in terms of natural ends, and things can in fact, on the view in question, have natural ends only if directed towards them by God, it follows that to deny the existence of God is (whether the atheist realizes this or not) to deny the very preconditions for morality. Furthermore, for moral imperatives to have the force of law requires, on the traditional natural law view, that there be a lawgiver who has the authority to command that they be followed. Otherwise, though we will indeed flourish if we live in accordance with our natures and fail to flourish if we do not so live, we will not, strictly speaking, be either fulfilling or neglecting any duties. So, if there is no God, there will in fact be nothing to order things toward any natural end or purpose, and thus no objective basis for any judgment of some action as either good or bad (again, whether the atheist realizes this or not). And there will also be nothing to give moral imperatives the force of law per se, as opposed to wisdom or prudence.
The second additional background consideration I want to take note of is that since the natures of things are just the forms in which they participate, and forms are, on the classical metaphysical picture in question, eternal in the way that mathematical truths have traditionally been taken to be, there is a sense in which the moral truths entailed by our having a certain form are necessary truths. Of course, that we exist at all is not a necessary truth, but a contingent one; and of course, it is also true that there could have been creatures that were like us in some respects but not others. But given that we do in fact exist, and that we have the specific characteristics we do in fact have, that certain things are morally allowable for us and certain other things morally forbidden by virtue of our having the natures we do is true of necessity. That’s just what it means for it to be part of our nature that certain things are good for us and other things bad. (Of course, this does not mean that there aren’t some things whose moral status is contingent, only that the core of moral truths is not. The specific way in which certain necessary moral truths get applied to contingent concrete circumstances will in some cases vary from time to time and place to place, so that certain secondary moral principles, which govern how we apply the primary ones, might be changeable.)
Finally, I want to note also that there is a strand within the classical theological tradition according to which, contra Plato, the forms do not exist independently of any mind whatsoever. For while they do not depend on our minds for their existence, they do nevertheless exist eternally within the divine mind. And that means that while there is a sense in which they depend on God for their existence, they do not depend on Him in the sense in which contingent things do. For example, it is not as if they did not exist at one point in time, and then were brought into existence at some later point. Rather, they have existed always and necessarily, because they have always and necessarily been the objects of divine contemplation. And this is as true of the form that determines our nature, and the moral truths that follow from our nature, as it is of any other form. The idea behind this view, which goes back at least to Augustine, is that while the Platonist is right to hold that truths about the forms, being necessary truths, cannot depend on finite and contingent minds like ours, the anti-Platonist is also right to hold that any proposition can only exist as entertained by some mind or other. The only way to reconcile these claims is to hold that truths about the forms exist as entertained by the infinite mind of a necessary being.
Now, I do not claim that Anscombe was herself committed to all of the ideas I have just described. The point is rather that they are important components of the broad tradition of thought that informed the Catholic moral framework within which she worked, so that that framework, and by extension Anscombe’s own views, cannot properly be understood without some grasp of these ideas. Let us now move on, then, to Blackburn’s misunderstandings of that framework.
First of all, Blackburn objects to Anscombe’s insinuation that moral concepts like duty, obligation, and the like cannot meaningfully be applied in the absence of a divine lawgiver. He characterizes this as the view that morality needs a “supernatural prop” and says that philosophers ought not to take it seriously, “both because there is nothing serious to be said for it and because it was refuted by Plato.” Now, since a number of serious philosophers have in fact made serious arguments in defense of this view, one wonders how Blackburn can be so confident that “there is nothing serious to be said for it.” Certainly he makes no effort to answer any such arguments, and, indeed, gives no evidence of actually being acquainted with any of them. About the only thing he does say in support of his breezy dismissal is that we can easily imagine, say, an atheistic fellow like him criticizing a corrupt colleague for failing to meet his obligations to his university, and that pagans like Sophocles and Aeschylus seem to have had the concept of moral obligation. But none of this is to the point. First of all, Blackburn himself is a citizen of the Western world, whose moral institutions derive from the Judeo-Christian tradition; and the world of Sophocles and Aeschylus, while not Christian, was hardly atheistic. So these are not terribly impressive examples if the aim is to show that concepts like duty and obligation can arise outside a theological context.
But in any event, the question is not whether atheists or non-Christians do in fact apply concepts like duty and obligation; of course they do. The question is what the grounds are for the intelligibility of these concepts, whether or not everyone who uses them knows or understands these grounds. The thrust of Anscombe’s point, surely, is not that people who just happen not to think of morality in self-consciously theological terms cannot coherently use concepts like duty and obligation, but rather that people who consciously and explicitly reject such a theological foundation – e.g. most modern moral philosophers – cannot do so. There is nothing incoherent in the thinking of someone who has never consciously entertained modus ponens as an abstract rule of inference, but who nevertheless believes that Socrates is mortal because he knows that Socrates is a man and that all men are mortal. His thinking becomes incoherent only if he consciously entertains and rejects modus ponens while continuing to make the same inferences he always has. You don’t have to be a logician to think coherently, even if you do have to avoid explicitly denying truths of logic. Similarly, on the view Anscombe is committed to, you don’t explicitly have to affirm theism to think coherently about moral duties and obligations, but you do have to avoid explicitly affirming atheism.
Also, Blackburn’s dismissal ignores the fact that Anscombe never says that no ethical concepts can have application in a non-theistic context, but only that concepts like duty, obligation, and others that presuppose the existence of moral law per se (as opposed to moral virtue) cannot have it, since moral law, so the argument goes, has no coherent meaning if the existence of a moral lawgiver is denied. So to show that the sorts of moral judgments Blackburn wants to affirm really can coherently be affirmed within an atheistic framework, he has to show that their apparent coherence doesn’t in fact depend on an illicit transition from their defensibility in terms of concepts like virtue, flourishing, social utility, etc. (which do not require a lawgiver) to the conclusion that they have also thereby been shown to count as genuine duties or obligations. That is to say, in order to make his case, Blackburn has carefully to disentangle, and address separately, those aspects of the atheist’s moral judgments that Anscombe might admit can be rationally justified without appeal to a lawgiver, and those that she would insist cannot be so justified. It will not do merely to note that secularists can coherently apply “moral” categories, for the term “moral” is ambiguous between these two distinct elements which need to be distinguished. If Blackburn is to convince us that there is no conceptual problem with his criticism of his corrupt colleague, he has to demonstrate that his sense of the coherence of his judgment is not merely a psychological byproduct of our general agreement that corruption is harmful to us both individually and collectively together with some prescriptivist commendation to go and think likewise and a merely sentimentalized, residual post-Christian attachment to the language of duty.
Of course, as I noted earlier, there is a sense in which even concepts like virtue depend ultimately on the existence of God, according to traditional natural law theory – not because they depend on the idea of a lawgiver, but rather because they depend on the idea of natural ends, which in turn presupposes an intelligence which orders things toward their ends. This brings me to Blackburn’s allegation that the idea that morality requires a “supernatural prop” was “refuted by Plato.” He does not elaborate, but the “prop” business leaves the impression that Blackburn thinks, as so many atheists do, that the religious view of morality amounts to nothing more sophisticated than an argumentum ad baculum, the suggestion that God has issued some arbitrary commands which we’d better obey if we want to avoid Hell. That this is a travesty should be obvious from what I’ve said already.
It should also be obvious that Plato’s Euthyphro in fact does nothing whatsoever to refute the conception of the relationship between God and morality developed within traditional natural law theory. As usually interpreted, Plato’s argument (rehearsed by Blackburn, incidentally, in his book Being Good: A Short Introduction to Ethics) puts the divine command moral theorist in a dilemma: if he says that something is good simply because God commands it, then morality comes to seem arbitrary, since this would seem to entail that God could just as well have commanded us to torture babies for fun (or whatever); but if he says that God commands something only because it is already good, then this would seem to make morality independent of God, which undermines the very point of divine command theory.
The problem with this argument, understood as a purported refutation of the natural law view described above, is that it ignores the distinction between something’s being good for us, which follows from our nature, and its being obligatory, which follows from God’s having commanded it. When we keep the distinction in kind, the argument clearly fails. God does indeed command the things He does because they are good for us, not because He just feels like it. And that they are good for us is, in general, a matter of necessity. Just as, on the traditional conception, God could not have made it true that 2 + 2 = 5 – not because of any limitation on His power, but rather because the very suggestion is incoherent – so too He could not have made it true that torturing babies for fun is morally good, because this is simply incoherent given our nature. At the same time, none of this entails that morality is independent of God, because morality still rests on necessary truths about our nature that, like all necessary truths – about mathematics, say, or logic – exist eternally only as thoughts in the divine mind. Moreover, its obligatory character, if not its content, does rest on divine command.
Of course, Blackburn would reject the various theological presuppositions of this view, but that is beside the point, which is that the view does not in fact amount to the suggestion that morality rests on nothing more than an arbitrary command backed up by the threat of punishment. In any event, his rejection of such presuppositions would not seem to be based on any deep understanding of them. Judging from the chapter on God in his book Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy, Blackburn appears to be the sort of philosopher who, as an undergraduate, read a few excerpts from Anselm and Aquinas in some textbook, along with the standard potted “refutations” deriving from Hume and Kant, and never looked back – assuming ever since that no one could seriously believe that the existence of God could be demonstrated philosophically. He shows no awareness of the extent to which many of these standard objections are based on caricatures or oversimplifications of the traditional theistic arguments, nor any appreciation of the work done in defense of them by contemporary philosophers of religion like Plantinga and Swinburne, much less by analytical Thomists like John Haldane, whose work is most relevant to the matters presently at issue. In particular, he shows no awareness of the crucial differences between Paley’s design argument and Aquinas’s Fifth Way. It is the latter, and not the former, which is crucial to the traditional natural law view of the dependence of natural ends, and thus the virtues, on the existence of God; and it is the former, and not the latter, which is damaged by the usual Humean and god-of-the-gaps objections. To be sure (and as I have discussed elsewhere) these are very common foibles among secularist philosophers, whose confidence that traditional religious beliefs are indefensible is matched only by their ignorance of the variety and sophistication of the arguments by which those beliefs have been and can be defended. But they are hardly excusable foibles for that.
Blackburn also manifests a classic misunderstanding of what traditional natural law theorists have in mind when appealing to natural ends and natural functions, when he writes that such an appeal would seem to entail that we should “forbid looking backwards while travelling forwards (and hence ban driving mirrors) on the grounds that they are both contrary to natural law (or else why are our eyes in the front of our heads?) … [and that there can be] no good reason why cycling should not equally be prohibited, as failing to respect walking as the ‘means of locomotion belonging to our life as the kind of life we are.’” I have addressed such misunderstandings at length in the posts on natural law linked to above. Suffice it for now to note that no one has, to my knowledge, ever claimed that it is wrong to use a bodily organ or capacity other than for its natural function. So there is, of course, nothing wrong with riding a bicycle or looking backwards, any more than there is anything wrong with using your nose to hold up your eyeglasses or bouncing a baby on your knee. What has been objected to is using an organ or capacity in a way that is contrary to its natural function, either in the sense that it is intentionally disabled so as to keep it from doing the job it was intended to do (as in a vasectomy) or in the sense that a natural process is interfered with in such a way that one part of it is allowed to proceed while another part, for which the first part exists in the first place, is prevented from occurring (as in vomiting up a meal so as to avoid gaining weight, or as in coitus interruptus).
Of course, there are qualifications. Yes, coitus interruptus is OK if a burglar suddenly enters the room; you needn’t ask him to please wait so you can finish up the marital act before fighting him off. And yes, throwing up your food is OK if you’ve just been told that it contains poison, as is the removal of a diseased body part. The reason is that the various natural functions so interfered with ultimately only exist to serve more fundamental ends such as keeping us alive, allowing us to reproduce, etc. In the contexts in question, refraining from interfering with the relevant processes and capacities would not contribute to realizing these more ultimate ends, but would instead frustrate them. What this shows, however, is that the appeal to natural ends is a much more complicated and subtle affair than is usually realized by its critics.
One would hope that those critics would think twice about rejecting such views as glibly as they do, when they consider that many of them were held by a woman generally acknowledged to be one of the most formidable philosophers of the twentieth century. As it happens, the standard practice seems instead to be to dismiss Anscombe’s more unfashionable opinions as eccentric prejudices, a mere artifact of her Roman Catholicism, easily carved off from the rest of her work – as if there were anything “mere” about the two thousand year old Roman Catholic intellectual tradition of which she was a part, and as if it were simply unimaginable that her critics might in fact be the ones with the prejudices. In any event, whether or not Anscombe’s opinions were prejudices, they were certainly not unexamined ones. In this, as in her philosophical achievements generally, she puts her critics to shame.
Comments
Dr. Feser,
You never did adequately address some of the objections made to your first Natural Law post, so I was hoping I might be able to encourage you to do so now.
The core problem is how to demarcate the distinction between using an organ for something "other than" vs. "contrary to" its natural purpose or function.
For example, you hold that non-procreative sex (e.g. sodomy, etc) are somehow 'contrary to' the natural purpose of the genitals, whereas tapping out a tune on your teeth is merely "other than" the purpose of teeth. But there is no relevant difference here -- in either case, you are merely taking an organ temporarily out of action, and it can continue to be used for it's "natural" function at some later date.
This objection was put most succinctly by Cole in the previous comments. He wrote:
'I now realize that the a helpful way of jargonizing this discussion is: pro-purpose use, anti-purpose use, non-purpose use. E.g., "Feser, et al. think that masturbation counts as anti-purpose use of the penis, but we think masturbation is simply non-purpose use. After all, masturbation doesn't disable the penis for future pro-purpose use."'
So, could you clarify how to distinguish anti-purpose from non-purpose uses?
There are some other serious objections mentioned in an otherwise satirical post here. You might find the tone off-putting, however, so I'll repeat the argument here:
Suppose humans had a scorpion-like tail, the (evolved or God-given) purpose of which was to kill our enemies. Further suppose that modern scientists could remove the tail and extract useful medical substances from it. Natural law theory implies that it would be wrong to use the tail to save lives in such a way, for that would be contrary to its "true purpose" of killing!
Clearly, such externally imposed "purposes" have no intrinsic bearing on morality. They're morally arbitrary. What little plausibility this theory has arises because evolution has tended to provide us with organs whose natural functions promote our wellbeing. And of course it's our wellbeing that really matters.
Posted by: Richard | October 26, 2005 9:02 PM
Blackstone might be misunderstanding Plato as well as Christian ethics. The Euthyphro was by no means Plato's last word on divine ethics, though Blackstone seems to be treating it as such here. Here's a few lines from Frederick Copleston's chapter on Platonic ethics:
This bears some similarity to the Christian concept of theosis, especially prominent in Eastern Christianity, and the Christian devotionals encouraging the imitation of Christ.
Posted by: Kevin Jones | October 27, 2005 4:02 AM
Ed:
Thank you for your clear critique of Blackburn's assessment of Anscombe.
Frank
Posted by: Francis J. Beckwith | October 27, 2005 9:49 AM
Adding to what Richard says on natural law theory, how would you handle this counterexample to the "anti-purpose is wrong" position? It is likely that the natural function of the capacity to speak is to communicate with others. Therefore it would follow that to use it when one is alone (e.g. to sing in the shower) is morally wrong. I find this absurd. But isn't it a perfect analogy to what masturbation is for the natural function of sex organs? If masturbation is anti-purpose (in Richard's terminology), then talking or singing alone is also for the same reasons, as it involves using our natural capacity for a function that is "contrary" to its naturally designed one.
Posted by: Alejandro | October 27, 2005 12:13 PM
Hello, Richard. To reply to some of your comments:
"You never did adequately address some of the objections made to your first Natural Law post..."
Well, I did reply to the first round of objections in some detail, but after a while the comments started to get so obnoxious and unserious that I tuned out. So I'm sorry if I failed to reply to some serious objection that was made later on in the discussion. Anyway, hopefully that won't happen this time.
"In either case, you are merely taking an organ temporarily out of action, and it can continue to be used for it's 'natural' function at some later date."
Not so. With the sexual organs, you are not taking them out of action, but rather putting them into action in a way that involves (as I put it in the current post) "interfer[ing] with [their functioning] in such a way that one part of it is allowed to proceed while another part, for which the first part exists in the first place, is prevented from occurring." Arousal and ejaculation occur, but the reason for which arousal and ejaculation exist in the first place, their natural end -- part of which is getting semen into the vagina -- is intentionally frustrated.
By analogy, using a rifle as a piece of art to hang on your wall, or as a paperweight, is "other than," but not "contrary to," its function. But smashing the barrel against the ground while trying to kill a cockroach with it in such a way that you bend it is one way to use it "contrary to" its natural function. And another way to do so would be, say, to attach some device to the rifle that catches the bullets as you're firing it before they can leave the barrel, or dissolves them right after the gunpowder has been ignited so they can't travel down the barrel in the first place. This wouldn't damage the rifle, but it would still clearly be using it in a way that is contrary to its function of getting a bullet out of the barrel and traveling toward a target. (To forestall some irrelevant objections, no, that doesn't mean it's wrong to use a rifle this way, because a rifle isn't a bodily organ or capacity.)
In re: your "scorpion" example, the answer is just that yes, if we did indeed naturally have the sorts of organs you describe, then of course it would be contrary to their natural function to remove them, etc. So what? We don't in fact have any such organs, so what's the problem?
Presumably your objection here is that it seems counterintuitive to say that it might be right for us to kill each other as part of our ordinary everyday lives, etc. Well, it is counterintuitive, because given human nature as it actually is, murder is wrong. But what you're describing in your hypothetical example are not human beings -- not beings with human nature -- but merely creatures that are similar to us in some ways but also have scorpion-like features whose natural function is (I guess) to kill other creatures of the same sort (so that they can eat them, or whatever). So the example just isn't relevant to the discussion at issue, no more so than the example of real scorpions would be.
Alejandro: the analogy does not hold up, because masturbation involves, as the "singing" example does not, "interfer[ing] with [a natural process] in such a way that one part of it is allowed to proceed while another part, for which the first part exists in the first place, is prevented from occurring."
Posted by: Edward Feser | October 27, 2005 1:08 PM
>>the analogy does not hold up, because masturbation involves, as the "singing" example does not, "interfer[ing] with [a natural process] in such a way that one part of it is allowed to proceed while another part, for which the first part exists in the first place, is prevented from occurring."
Could you explain better this? In the case of singing, we have a natural process (singing, or more generally emitting meaningful noises through the mouth) and I allow one part of it (the actual singing) to proceed, while another part for which the first part exist in first place (communicating with others) is prevented from ocurring (because nobody can hear me singing at the moment; perhaps I intentionally choose the moment I am in the shower for singing as to not disturb others). Sorry, but I really can't see where the analogy breaks.
Posted by: Alejandro | October 27, 2005 3:03 PM
Alejandro,
The premise of your objection is false, because while the natural functions of the voice include communication, they are not limited to communication. They also include, to take a very simple and obvious example, yelping or groaning in pain when one is injured. Of course, this might happen on occasion to alert others to the fact of the injury -- just as others might be so alerted by seeing you nurse the damaged part of the body -- but that doesn't mean that the function of the yelp or groan is to communicate anything, any more than nursing of the injured body part has that function. We are obviously just built to yelp and groan when in pain, whether or not anyone else is around. Similarly, we might involuntarily yell for joy just as we might leap for joy; these are both just instinctive human reactions. So, sometimes the voice's function is merely expressive rather than communicative.
In the same way, we might sing simply for pleasure. But there is no analogy to masturbation here, because the singing doesn't involve using something inherently purely communicative in a non-communicative way. Singing might just be expressive of a mood, as a groan or yell for joy is. And one might also use one's voice to do lots of other things. For example, repeating something to yourself verbally can help you to memorize it. Or you might read something into a tape recorder so you can play it back later, just like you might write something down so you can read it later. That is to say, in addition to its communicative and expressive functions, the voice seems to have a function of aiding us in exercising our rationality. But it is only the first of these which is directed outward toward others in the way your argument requires.
By contrast, the sexual impulse is never merely expressive, but always also inherently other-directed. Even the masturbator fantasizes about someone else; the very nature of the process, its "intentionality" as we might say, points beyond itself to another human being. And of course at the brute level of the organs we just obviously have something that, if it was designed at all (as natural law theory says it was), was designed to go into, or receive, the organ of another human being. There just is nothing analogous to all this in the case of the voice.
Another way to think about it is this: if God had only ever created one human being, would there have been a reason to give him a voice? Sure -- it might have helped him to think more clearly, to remember things better, to express his emotions, and so forth; and of course, it would have enabled him to pray out loud too. But would He have had a reason to give this solitary human being either a penis or vagina? Of course not: those things are only needed if there is someone else around with whom one might reproduce sexually and who has the complementary organs. Sexual organs and impulses are inherently "other-directed" in a way the voice, and the desire to verbalize, is not. So your analogy fails.
Posted by: Edward Feser | October 28, 2005 1:19 AM
"In re: your "scorpion" example, the answer is just that yes, if we did indeed naturally have the sorts of organs you describe, then of course it would be contrary to their natural function to remove them, etc. So what?"
But it seems quite obvious that it would be immoral for the scorpionic agents to go around killing each other, no matter what the natural purpose of their tail was. It's a straightforward counterexample to natural law theory, as it shows the theory to have utterly ludicrous consequences -- it fetishizes facts that have no moral significance.
Recall, these agents are just like humans in all other respects but for the killer tails. They are rational, moral agents -- persons -- just like us (and unlike real scorpions). As such, they morally ought not to cause gratuitous harm to others. They ought to be beneficent, and convert their killer tails into medicine. I take these to be obvious moral facts, and any moral theory which contradicts them is thereby shown to be mistaken.
What the example is shows is that natural law theory isn't recognizably about morality at all. It amounts to some relativistic and parochial form of evaluation. Whatever it is, it clearly isn't ethics.
(It also seems to involve the most blatant sort of 'naturalistic fallacy'. To say that everything evolved [or created] must thereby be 'good'? I dunno, maybe I'm missing something, because the whole approach just seems so transparently misguided to me. Why would anybody believe this stuff?)
Or, if you don't like that fantastic example, let's go sci-fi instead. To adopt an example from my post on 'externally-imposed purposes' (linked above): "Imagine that I created an army of intelligent, self-aware robots, for the purpose of taking over the world. Now consider one of those metallic free agents. Is it this individual's purpose in life to help me take over the world? Not necessarily. It may be my purpose for him, but thinking agents can rebuke the 'purposes' of their creators. They must, in the end, decide their own purpose in life for themselves."
Not only do the creator's purposes not transfer to the free agents, but the former are also strictly irrelevant to morality. It would clearly be wrong for these AI agents to go around killing people and conquering the world on my behalf. That may be the purpose I made them for, but morality is not subserviant to my whims -- nor God's, nor those we might read into natural selection.
Again, I'm simply baffled by why anyone would think for a moment that these "purposes" or "functions" had even the faintest moral significance.
Posted by: Richard | October 28, 2005 4:37 AM
Richard,
The problem with your example is that you are not thinking about it very carefully. It is one thing to say the words "these agents are just like humans in all other respects but for the killer tails," but quite another to make this intelligible. Such a difference in their nature would necessarily entail many other radical differences. They would surely not have the same sorts of social and political stuctures as we do, for example, if they are just built in such a way that they need to use these tails to kill others to keep themselves alive. They would have very differnt moral sensibilities from ours. And so forth. As Wittgenstein would put it, such agents would have a radically different "form of life" from our own. At any rate, if you are going to claim otherwise, you need to make your claim plausible by giving a detailed description of exactly what the natural function of such tails would be, how this would be consistent with ongoing moral, social, and political institutions that are exactly like ours, etc.
It does not seem to me that you actually read, or if you did that you remember, my original posts on natural law, otherwise you would not evince such bafflement over why anyone might think natural function is relevant to morality. It is crucial that you keep in mind that "natural" here does not mean the same thing as "having a genetic tendency," "having been seleted for by evolution," or any other such thing. Its meaning can only properly be understood in terms of a classical realist (Platonic or Aristotelian) conception of form and an Aristotelian conception of final causes. When understood in that light, it is clear that no "naturalistic fallacy" is committed; the very idea of the so-called "naturalistic fallacy" is an artifact of the tendency in modern (i.e. post-Cartesian) philosophy to abandon the classical understanding of "good," "natural," etc. It also becomes obvious why natural function would be relevant to ethics, since on the view in question what is good for us is, as a matter of conceptual necessity, what allows us to fulfill our natures. Again, this will sound odd only if you are thinking of "nature" in a materialistic, or naturalistic, or purely Darwinian sense, where the natural world is conceived of in entirely mechanistic and purposeless terms. But if you read my original two-part post, where I discuss all this in great detail, you should know that to read it that way would just be completely to fail to grasp the fundamentals of the theory.
In any event, if you cannot even so much as understand "why anybody would believe this stuff" or really think that "whatever it is, it clearly isn't ethics," then the problem is with your grasp of the ideas, not with the ideas themselves. The sort of view I'm decribing, whether it is true or not, was the mainstream view in the West for centuries if not millennia, and was thought through in great detail and with great rigor. No one who simply dismisses it glibly on the basis of a single poorly thought out example, and who otherwise manifests a failure to grasp the basic philosophical assumptions of the theory, can be said to have tried to grapple with it very seriously.
Posted by: Edward Feser | October 28, 2005 1:04 PM
Thanks for the reply, though I don't think any of my comments depended on an equivocation between mechanistic vs realist conceptions of the 'natural'. Either way, it seems to me, these "natural forms" aren't the sort of thing that could have any intrinsic moral significance. It sounds like the West was confused about morality for a very long time. (Though perhaps this isn't entirely baffling, in light of the previously mentioned correlation between evolved function and individual well-being.)
I think the scorpionic example could be made to work, but probably isn't worth the effort in light of the more straightforward example of the AI agents I also described (and that you seem to have overlooked). Don't you agree that the latter sort of example shows pretty plainly that the 'purposes' imposed by a creator do not determine what the agent ought to do?
Posted by: Richard | October 28, 2005 6:14 PM
I guess this is the core issue:
"on the view in question what is good for us is, as a matter of conceptual necessity, what allows us to fulfill our natures."
So perhaps you don't really disagree with me that ethics is properly concerned with well-being. You just have a really weird view of what well-being consists in. In particular, I take it, you think that intentionally non-procreative sex is not merely immoral but also bad for you. Gays, or people who use birth control, just don't know what's good for them?
Posted by: Richard | October 28, 2005 6:30 PM
Richard,
Sorry, yes, I did forget to address the AI example. The main problem with it is that I don't think there can even in principle be such a thing as an "intelligent, self-aware robot" if that means a robot that literally thinks and is conscious by virtue of running a certain kind of AI program. The whole idea is conceptually confused. (The reasons are standard philosophy of mind reasons and if you're curious you can check out my book Philosophy of Mind: A Short Introduction for the details.) So the things you're describing would not in fact be persons but mere objects, weapons or tools that human beings have created for their own use. And a weapon or tool, even if it looks and acts superficially like a human being, is not the sort of thing that morality applies to, and more than it applies to a knife or a hammer. So the analogy with human beings fails.
If instead you wanted to re-work the example so that it involved, say, human beings cloning themselves but genetically altering the clones so that they had a disposition for violence, or some such thing, then this still wouldn't work. The reason in this case is that what you would be describing would still be just human beings, for whom, by virtue of their human nature, murder is wrong. Murder just does not conform to the objective human good, as defined by the form participation in which gives something human nature. The fact that these creatures' genetic structure has been tampered with doesn't change this at all. All it means is that they now fail perfectly to instantiate the form and want to do things that are in fact bad for them and immoral. It might not be their fault that they have these murderous desires, and they might find it frustrating not to act on them, but that is irrelevant. They still shouldn't act on them, because it is just an objective fact that their desires are desires for something -- to commit murder -- that is intrinsically immoral because intrinsically at odds with the natural ends that define human nature.
By the same token, according to the traditional natural law view, the existence of even a genetic basis for a desire to drink excessively, or to be violent, or to indulge in inherently non-procreative sexual acts, or what have you, would not by itself have any tendency to show that these various behaviors are really good for us. What matters is what follows from our having a certain form -- the form of a human being -- however imperfectly we instantiate it. Seeing is still good for us even if sometimes people are, due to a genetic defect, born blind. And it would remain good for us, objectively, even if some people started to develop, for whatever reason (ideology, or even some odd genetic mutation) a desire not to see. Just as a chair is still a chair even if you break a leg off of it so that it can't fulfill its "chair-ness" as well as it ordinarily would, a human being is still a human being even if his ability to live in accordance with his nature becomes impaired, due to upbringing, habituation, genetic anomaly, or anything else.
So yes, of course the view would entail that we don't always know what's good for us. But then, ANY moral view says that anyway, because any moral view -- utilitarianism, Kantianism, contractarianism, etc. no less than natural law theory -- is bound to entail certain conclusions that lots of people find repugnant. So this is hardly a unique problem for natural law theory.
In re: your remark that this amounts to a "really weird view of what well-being consists in," the view I'm describing would not have seemed at all weird to Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, or countless other ancient and medieval philosophers, or countless ancient and medieval people generally. Indeed, it would not have sounded weird even to most modern people until very recently. The idea that there is such a thing as an objective and unchanging human nature that defines what is good for us even when we have, for whatever reason, strong desires to go against it was always the traditional understanding of things, not only in the West but everywhere, whether or not people always spelled it out in specifically Platonic or Aristotelian terms. It is only in the last three or four decades, in fact, and only in the Western world to any very large degree, that this view has come to be widely disputed even among non-intellectuals. To take one of your examples, even as late as the 1930s it was widely accepted that birth control was morally problematic, and you could find editorials in secular papers like the Washington Post criticizing the Anglicans for deciding to start allowing it (and even then, they only allowed it for married people and only under certain circumstances). And it was only in the 1960s that the view that birth control posed no moral problem at all became widespread.
In short, what you claim is a "weird" view of morality only sounds weird to a small minority of all human beings who have ever lived, namely the average citizen of the contemporary secular Western world (and even then, probably mostly in "blue state"-type areas). That is not to say that most of the human beings who have ever lived would agree with every point of natural law ethics, but only that they would at least understand the basic approach and see nothing unreasonable about it. Of course, this might mean that most of the human beings who have ever existed have lived in moral darkness, and we are only now entering into the light. But then, it might also mean that they were in the light and we moderns have descended into darkness. Which view is right? Obviously, consulting contemporary intuitions about what is "weird" and what isn't is not an objective way to decide.
Posted by: Edward Feser | October 28, 2005 7:58 PM
Things cannot be different than they are, i.e. humans with scorpion tails, robots that are self-aware. Yet the whole consequence of natural law is that we are to conform to an idealized version of who we currently are.
Posted by: Step2 | October 29, 2005 3:52 PM
Step2: I assume you were presenting an objection. If so, then, if I understand it correctly, it is based on a confusion. I didn't say anything that amounts to "Things cannot be different than they are, yet we ought to be different than we are." I said that human beings participate in a certain specific form that defines the good for them, but that Richard's hypothetical scorpion-beings and robots do not participate in that same specific form. Apples and oranges.
Posted by: Edward Feser | October 29, 2005 5:49 PM
Edward,
I was going to answer to your reply saying that the natural function of the voice is communication, in exactly the same sense that the natural function of sex organs is procreation: that is the function it was selected for in evolutionary history, and the capacity of singing alone to express feelings is a "spandrel" just as the capacity of obtaining pleasure by masturbation is.
But then I saw in your answers to Richard that you don't think at all of "natural functions" in evolutionary terms, but as those functions that are the ones intended for the "ideal form" of human beings. and you explicitly say that this is intrinsically connected to a realist metaphysics about forms and final causes.
What puzzles me now are two related things. First, how do you reconcile this metaphysics with modern biological science, which seems to leave no room at all for it? For example, exactly back to which point in the gradual evolutionary transition between apes and humans are the creatures participants of the "ideal form of humanity"? And second, by which rational procedure do you discover these "natural forms" which are invisible to the methods of science? for example, if anyone said that in their opinion the natural function of sex organs is as much the capacity for sexual pleasure as the facilitating of procreation (instead of the first one being parasitic on the second as you say) how could you refute that? It seems to me that you must rely on evolutionary considerations, or else in handwaiving and appeal to "intuitions".
You reply to Richard's bafflement at anyone taking seriously natural law morality, that countless of ancient and medieval philosphers, as well as many contemporary conservative ones, have embraced it, so it is the "secular West" that is really weird and atypical in rejecting it. To which I reply that this has happened not by a corruption of morals in the secular West, but by a powerful intellectual reason (among many other sociological causes, to be sure) which is that it is impossible to reconciliate with scientific discoveries. I will then rephrase Richard's bafflement as "I can't see why people living one century after Darwin would take natural law morality seriously, if it is dependent on a realistic metaphysics of biological kinds".
Posted by: Alejandro | October 30, 2005 5:10 AM
Alejandro,
As I made clear in my original post, my reply to Blackburn merely summarized briefly some points I had developed at much greater length in two posts about natural ends and natural law from a few months ago, which I had provided links to (see above). If you had read those earlier posts, and especially the second one, you would know that I have already addressed the questions you raise here. The issues we’re discussing cannot be settled by appealing to “biological science” because they hinge on deeper philosophical questions, controversial answers to which are inevitably presupposed in any interpretation of the results of such science. In particular, the sorts of objections you and Richard are raising simply assume that a completely materialistic and mechanistic conception of nature is plausible. To be sure, this is a very widespread assumption. The point, however, is that it is a philosophical assumption rather than a scientific result, and a problematic assumption at that. Again, I elaborate on this in the posts referred to above.
Posted by: Edward Feser | October 30, 2005 4:17 PM
Dr. Feser:
My comment was an objection, essentially that the examples offered are only slightly less plausible to me than an idealized human form. Even Aristotle attacked the duality of Plato's forms, opting for a synthesis of material individuality with abstract types. Aristotle also established the concepts of actuality and potentiality, setting the stage for developmental changes from one form to another. Perhaps his desire for complete knowledge caused him to ascribe to a teleological worldview, but his philosophy includes the dynamic complexity that undermines all unilateral perspectives.
Similarly, natural law relies heavily, if not completely, on the basis of one perspective being paramount over a comprehensive system in motion. That is not to say all perspectives must be equal, just that perspectives do evolve based on knowledge and context, as your earlier post indicated.
Even in the world of religious thought, there is a minor conflict between the passive contemplation of Aquinas and Augustine's active will redeemed by love. Both saw the good as static, but they advocated different approaches to reach it, based partly on current events happening around them.
Posted by: Step2 | October 30, 2005 8:37 PM
"I don't think there can even in principle be such a thing as an intelligent, self-aware robot"
Okay, it isn't hard to extend the example though, once you see my general point about 'externally imposed purposes'. Suppose some evil deity created an army of self-aware agents instead. (Surely that's logically possible.) Does it follow that these beings ought to do his evil bidding?
Also, do creators get to decide the nature of their creation's form? Suppose the creator is omnipotent but rather stupid in various respects. So he created humans in their present form, but intending that various body parts be used for ridiculous things that they're actually quite unsuited to. Perhaps he intended for us to walk on our hands, for example. Would it follow that our hands really are for walking? Or does their physical nature override the creator's intentions?
Posted by: Richard | October 31, 2005 5:50 AM
Edward,
I have read your previous posts, and I don't see on them any answer to my specific questions. I do not need to presupose a completely mechanistic worldview for my argument, just the empirical fact of biological evolution. Species evolve into other species, and the boundaries of species cannot be delimitated except by conventional and pragmatical criteria. Therefore it makes little sense to postulate a "form" of squirrelhood or manhood, be it in a Platonic or in an Aristotelian way.
To realize how implausible is your metaphysics, imagine this evolutionary scenario, which I will describe in the level of description of "mechanistic science": There is a population of animals of species A hunt for food. These animals cannot survive on carrion; eating animals deceased by other causes is “not in their nature”. There are, however, a few mutants that can eat carrion and survive. Prey becomes scarce in the area where this population lives, and the mutants start to have selective advantage. Eventually all the non-mutants die. The species has evolved into a different species, B, a carrion-eating one.
Now, how would you retell this story at your prefered level of description, adding all the “natural forms” and “intrinsic purposes” you want? If eating carrion is “unnatural” for species A and “natural” for species B, is it natural or unnatural for the first mutants that did it? At what point did the “natural form” change? If these animals were capable of moral decisions, at what point would you stop telling them “Eating dead corpses is unnatural, and morally wrong! Better try harder to hunt than do that!”?
Posted by: Alejandro | October 31, 2005 5:06 PM
Edward,
I am in agreement with Richard's two arguments, that masturbation is a non-purpose use rather than an anti-purpose use (as are other non-reproductive sexual activities) and that the various hypotheticals show that natural law theory is not a good basis for morality. Richard has been continuing the line of questioning with the hypothetical examples, so I'd like to go back to the question of distinguishing anti-purpose ("contrary to") uses from non-purpose ("other than") uses. If I understand you correctly, a use is anti-pupose if it interferes with pro-purpose uses in either of two ways:
1) It prevents future pro-purpose uses
or
2) It follows the same path as a pro-purpose use, but then somehow blocks or avoids the end of that path
If neither of these two criteria are met then it would merely be non-purpose.
Smashing things with a gun in a way that bends the barrel would be anti-purpose for the first reason, and firing the bullets but having them dissolve as they left the gun would be anti-purpose for the second reason (even if the gun remained perfectly capable of being fired normally in the future). It is this second kind of anti-purpose use that masturbation (and other non-reproductive sexual activities) qualify as, as they (roughly) follow the course of reproductive intercourse, except the ejaculate does not end up in the vagina. Have I understand you correctly up to this point?
From my point of view, the immorality of the first kind of anti-purpose use has some degree of plausibility, but it seems highly implausible to consider the second kind immoral. Here's one example: chewing gum. The mouth is engaging in a process very similar to eating, chewing what seem to be tasty foodstuffs, but then the process is not allowed to come to its completion, as the gum is spit out instead of being swallowed. So do you claim that this is anti-purpose and hence immoral?
Another example is female masturbation. In this case there is no misdirected ejaculation, so it is not clear if this would qualify as anti-purpose according to the second criterion.
What do you think of these examples?
Posted by: Blar | November 1, 2005 12:52 AM
Alejandro,
You say: “I do not need to presuppose a completely mechanistic worldview for my argument, just the empirical fact of biological evolution.” But you do need to presuppose mechanism, because you are challenging the existence of forms and natural ends in the realist sense I have been describing and in particular assuming that biological phenomena can be understood without these notions; and to do all that just is to endorse a mechanistic conception of nature.
In any event, the point I keep trying to make but which you are, it seems to me, not addressing, is that there is no such thing as just reading off the truth or falsity of the sort of view I’m describing from the “empirical facts,” of biological evolution or of anything else. For the issues we’re debating are philosophical and conceptual, not empirical, and how one interprets the empirical evidence itself depends on conceptual and philosophical issues. In particular, there is no such thing as just reading off from the “empirical evidence” the existence or otherwise of forms, in either the Platonic or Aristotelian sense of the term. Rather, the biological evidence gets interpreted in the light of the philosophical assumptions – realist or nominalist – one brings to bear on it. This is true even given evolution. We could in principle interpret any given series of evolutionary transitions as either a smooth gradation with no clear objective boundaries, or instead as a series of at least slight jumps from one objective form to another, with the rough edges interpreted as just the sort of imperfections classical realists have always recognized as inherent in material instantiations of form. I am well aware that the former sort of interpretation is the standard one, but the point is that to endorse this interpretation is to take a particular philosophical or metaphysical stance; it is not merely to take note of an empirical “result” of biological research.
Of course, this just kicks the dispute up to the level of philosophy – which metaphysical picture is the right one? We all know which one is the currently fashionable one, but that’s irrelevant. What matters is what the actual arguments are in defense of the alternatives, and what problems each of them face. And that’s where the points I made in my original posts come in. The whole mechanistic world picture only seems as overwhelmingly successful as it does, I suggested, because its method has been to push everything that mechanism can’t account for (sensory qualities, teleology, forms) into the mind, treating them as mere projections. All this did was to create the mind-body problem and make it in principle impossible to solve in materialistic and mechanistic terms. Sensory qualities just reappear as qualia, natural ends as intentionality, and so forth, and in principle there is no way to apply to the explanation of mind the same move of moving the recalcitrant phenomena safely into a place they can be ignored, since that place – the mind – is now precisely what needs to be accounted for. The mechanistic worldview is, in short, a kind of shell-game.
The early modern philosophers who inaugurated this move had a better grasp of this problem than their descendents have. Part of the reason Descartes was a dualist was precisely because he realized that mental properties in the very nature of the case couldn’t be assimilated to the mechanistic world picture. He recognized that mechanism couldn’t possibly be the whole story. Part of the reason Locke was an agnostic about the mind-body problem was that although he rejected Descartes’ dualism, he also recognized the inassimilability of mental properties to the mechanistic model. Contemporary writers like Dennett, by contrast, seem totally clueless about the difficulty, and ignore the serious problems raised for their approach by the sorts of considerations mentioned (even though they’ve been raised even by naturalists like Nagel and Putnam, and hardly only by dualists and Thomists) in favor of cheap rhetorical moves like dismissing dualism as on a par with astrology, appealing to “science” as if it were a talisman that magically dissolved difficulties that are really conceptual and philosophical rather than scientific, etc.
There is also, as I pointed out in my original posts, the fact that Platonic and Aristotelian realism can be and are still defended by many serious philosophers, as is theism. So the ingredients are already independently available for a defense of a broadly realist picture of form and final ends that might in turn be applied to a (re)interpretation of biology, including evolutionary biology. Indeed, something along these lines has been suggested by analytical Thomists like John Haldane. (And no, to forestall some irrelevant objections, this has nothing to do with “Intelligent Design” theory, of which Thomists tend to be critical.) Obviously this sort of program is ambitious and bound to be highly controversial, but then so is natural law theory itself, so it’s not like I’ve been claiming all along to be appealing to nothing but the conventional wisdom. In any event, the approach in question is not the sort of thing that I can be expected to defend to the satisfaction of a critic in a blog post or two – any more than it could be refuted by a critic in a post or two in the comments section of a blog. For a critic to refute it would require seriously engaging with the many difficult metaphysical issues that it raises, rather than assuming that it will suffice glibly to appeal to fashionable but challengeable assumptions about what modern biological science has shown (as opposed to how it’s been interpreted).
Posted by: Edward Feser | November 1, 2005 2:58 AM
Richard,
If you're talking about human creators, fallen angels, etc. then what it is morally permissible for them to do with respect to designing their own creatures, etc. is itself determined by the form and natural ends associated with being human, the form and natural ends associated with being an angel, etc. So of course these creators cannot, morally speaking, just create beings with any natures they wish to; they are morally permitted only to create in a way consistent with their own natures and moral obligations. The problem with your examples, then, is that they are implicitly question-begging: they assume that you can specify what the creators you're talking about morally may and may not do with their creations without considering the forms and natural ends of those creators themselves; but whether you can legitimately do this is, of course, precisely what's in question.
Posted by: Edward Feser | November 1, 2005 3:13 AM
Blar wrote:
"Have I understand you correctly up to this point?"
I think so, though it is 1:17am and I've been drinking some Scotch...
Anyway, in re: the rest of your comments, the chewing gum example fails because, for one thing, moving your jaws isn't only "for" chewing and eating food. It's also for biting, talking, etc. And just as we are clearly built to enjoy, to some extent anyway, using our muscles in general (as in exercise), so too do we sometimes like using our jaws just for the fun of it. Hence (part of) the appeal of chewing gum. We're just exercising, not interfering with a natural process in either of the relevant senses.
Of course, another part of the appeal is the sweetness of the gum. And that brings us to the point that eating something doesn't naturally always involve eating every part of the thing. You eat the sunflower seeds and spit out the shells. You eat the crab meat and toss aside the claws. Similarly, you consume the sugar and toss out the gum. What's the problem?
I should add, though, the important point that traditional natural law theory does not imply that every use of an organ or capacity contrary to nature rises to the level of serious moral fault. Abuse of sexual organs and capacities certainly would, because human life itself, the stability of marriage, the formation of proper attitudes toward sex, and so much else rides on the proper use of these things. But having, say, an odd desire to paint pictures on your teeth rather than eat with them (to borrow an example from Michael Levin) would seem less a moral failing than a kind of madness.
The point is that uses contrary to nature are all deficient in some way, according to traditional natural law theory, but not all to the same extent or with the same moral culpability. Some will be mortal sins and some will be merely venial (to use the language of Catholic moral theology), while others might be better classified as mental disorders that we ought to try to get rid of to the extent we can but for which we are not necessarily morally culpable. All of this needs to be kept in mind when evaluating the theory. Even if it were true (which it isn't) that the theory implied that there was something wrong with chewing gum (or whatever) this would not entail that the theory implies that gum-chewers are evil (!)
In re: female masturbation, this involves, as does male masturbation even short of climax, the deliberate initiation of a process that is intrinsically other-directed (as I put it earlier), that is the first stage in the procreative act, etc., without the natural payoff, in the sense of "natural" appealed to in traditional natural law theory. So it fits the second anti-purpose criterion.
Posted by: Edward Feser | November 1, 2005 3:42 AM
"All this did was to create the mind-body problem and make it in principle impossible to solve in materialistic and mechanistic terms."
According to my favorite book about cognitive science "Godel, Escher, Bach", the problem is that the emergence of meaning from nested threshold cascades is based on an isomorphism between levels of the brain hierarchy. A symbol can be reduced to its components, but it loses its coherence in the process. The context of the entire system is what shapes its meaning. A simple example is that basic letters carry no meaning, only the context of an alphabet and language empower them.
Posted by: Step2 | November 1, 2005 3:52 PM
Step2 wrote: "A simple example is that basic letters carry no meaning, only the context of an alphabet and language empower them."
Yes, but that's only because the language itself already embodies meaning, which just pushes the problem back a stage: what gives such a system of physical symbols any meaning at all? Similarly with the larger neurological context within which any particular neural event has (on the view you're describing) its meaning: what makes that larger system itself something that embodies meaning, rather than being like other complex systems such as (say) a city's electrical grid or a cluster of galaxies, which do not embody anything more than brute causation?
The problem here is that authors like Hofstadter confuse the question of what gives an individual thought or unit of language the _specific_ meaning it has with the different and more fundamental question of what gives them _any_ meaning at all. You first have to show that a material system is capable all on its own of having any meaning at all before you can go on to claim that a specific material element has the particualr meaning it has because of its place in the network of material elements. Again, see my philosophy of mind book (especially chapters 6 and 7) for a more detailed discussion of this issue.
Posted by: Edward Feser | November 1, 2005 4:09 PM
Edward, I was starting to write a point-by-point response explaining why I think that chewing gum does count as an anti-purpose use of the mouth according to the second criterion, and I was even thinking of bringing in other examples of perfectly benign activities that seem to count as anti-purpose by that criterion, but it occurs to me that this is probably not the most productive way to proceed. You could easily disagree with every example that I offer, even after we've debated the minutiae of gum chewing, etc. Instead, would you be able to provide at least one example of a use of an organ that is anti-purpose by the second criterion, outside of the realm of sexual organs and sexual activities? I am sure that there must be non-sexual examples where we can agree that a use of an organ "follows the same path as a pro-purpose use, but then somehow blocks or avoids the end of that path" without preventing future pro-purpose uses. Having some of those examples on the table would make it easier to understand and assess your claim that all such activities are anti-purpose and therefore wrong (with varying degrees of wrongness).
It would also help if you could give some account of why this type of use should be considered anti-purpose and therefore wrong, in general or at least in the specific non-sexual cases you present. As I said before, I do not see the motivation for condemning an action just because it imitates a pro-purpose use while intentionally not satisfying that purpose. To me, this just seems to describe a set of non-purpose activities that are more similar than most to the natural (pro-purpose) activity. They do not interfere with our capacity to engage in pro-purposes uses at other times or keep us from realizing our natural ends just as we would without them. So, even from a natural law perspective, I do not see what is wrong with them.
Posted by: Blar | November 1, 2005 5:45 PM
Dr. Feser, I believe Hofstadter does address your question when he demonstrates the different levels of heirarchy by analogy of an ant colony. Although the individual ants follow only a simple mode of brute causation, their distributive actions upon the whole colony allows a complex, meaningful response at that level. There is a construct of partially autonomous agents that must also have the ability to activate or repress other areas of the system that creates a dimension of meaning at a holistic level.
"You first have to show that a material system is capable all on its own of having any meaning at all..." Why? The causes of things can have a different nature than their effects. Water is composed of two gases joined together, the sun is a giant fusion reactor that fuels most life on the planet. If meaning is a secondary effect of a narrow subset of all material systems, that does not imply that material systems must have a primary capacity for meaning.
Posted by: Step2 | November 1, 2005 5:58 PM
Hello Blar,
You wrote: "Instead, would you be able to provide at least one example of a use of an organ that is anti-purpose by the second criterion, outside of the realm of sexual organs and sexual activities."
Sure, in fact I've given one already: eating food and then deliberately getting yourself to vomit it up so as to avoid gaining weight, or so that you can indulge in further gluttony ASAP instead of having to wait to pass the food naturally and thereby free up stomach space. Indeed, I think this is a particularly good example where the question of the link to morality is concerned, since even today, when many people pretend they can't understand what "natural" means, there is a widespread acknowledgement that there is something wrong with this sort of practice. To be sure, people these days prefer to analyze it in terms of psychobabble rather than the traditional moral language of virtue and vice, but they still recognize it to be something contrary to human flourishing. Even the crudest reductionist doesn't try to justify it by saying "Oh come on, what's the big deal, it's at bottom only a matter of moving a little food from inside the stomach to outside! What can be wrong with that? If that's what floats your boat then no one should criticize you for it..." etc. etc. (Though you never can tell, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if there's someone somewhere who would say this; in a world where there are people who deliberately have body parts removed, not for health reasons but just to make some sort of bizarre "statement" or to "express themselves," anything is possible.)
Now, to be sure, it might be claimed that the only thing wrong with such vomiting is that it might have some untoward effects on health, or some such thing, and that the only thing beyond this that is involved in our negative reaction is some subjective "yuck factor" that has no rational foundation, so that if you could ensure that the serial vomiter was getting all his nutrients then there'd be nothing wrong with continuing the practice, if that's how he gets his kicks.
But from the traditional natural law point of view, this has things totally turned around. There is a form of the human being (understood, again, in a Platonic or Aristotelian realist sense) encompassing certain natural ends that defines what is good for us, and what is good for us is therefore something completely objective; it is therefore conceptually impossible, given the philosophical framework within which natural law theory is spelled out, for something contrary to those natural ends to be good for us, even if someone thinks otherwise. From the point of view of the theory, to think otherwise is simply to be in thrall to a kind of irrationality, after the manner of the drug addict who insists that his addiction is really good for him and that other people cannot presume to tell him otherwise.
So the "yuck factor" involved in our reaction to deliberate vomiting of the sort described is, on this analysis, not an irrational subjective reaction to something objectively morally neutral. It is rather a mark of moral rationality, an expression of our tacit knowledge of what is natural, and therefore good, and of what is unnatural and therefore bad. It is the person who has lost the "yuck" reaction -- due to the inculcation of some ideology or whatever -- who is irrational and fallen into moral blindness.
For the same reason, the health factors involved are secondary. Sure, if some practice is contrary to our nature, in the sense of "nature" operative in traditional natural law theory, then it is hardly surprising if some health risks might be associated with it. But the reason it is immoral, on the analysis in question, is because it is contrary to the good for us as defined by our form and natural ends. (Again, this just follows from the whole classical Platonic-Aristotelian analysis of the concept of the good.) So even if the risks to bodily health were eliminated, it would still be bad for us, and necessarily so.
Obviously, this sort of analysis is bound to be controversial (though, as I have said before, we should not forget that it reflects a style of thinking about moral questions that most people who have ever lived would have found quite intuitive; we should not glibly assume that the intuitions of the contemporary secular Westerner are the touchstone of moral understanding). But that just underlines something that I've stressed over and over again: the dispute between traditional natural law theory and its critics goes very very deep, and unavoidably touches on the most fundamental issues in metaphysics. It isn't a disagreement over mere details between people who share the same fundamental metaphysical assumptions about the world. So there's just no point in trying to settle it in the way I suspect many of the people who've responded to my post here are trying to do, i.e. by asking whether this or that behavior is really unnatural from a modern biological point of view, or is likely to result in some consequence that we can all agree would be immoral or at least unhealthy. For what we should mean by "unnatural," whether or not we should accept the standard mechanistic interpretation of biology, what counts as a proper analysis of the meaning of terms like "good" or "immoral," what counts as "unhealthy" and how important that is relative to other factors, whether "consequences" are what we should primarily be concerned about in the first place, and so on and on are all precisely part of what is at issue.
Posted by: Edward Feser | November 2, 2005 1:25 AM
Hello Step2,
In re: the ant colony example, where "their distributive actions upon the whole colony allows a complex, meaningful response at that level" etc.:
The key word is "meaningful." What do you mean by it? Since what we're talking about are ants, it obviously can't be cultural artifacts and practices of the sort human beings have (language, arts and literature, etc.), which are our paradigms of meaningful social phenomena. Nor, I presume from our entire discussion, can you mean Aristotelian final ends. What, then? My guess is that in writers like Hofstadter, Dennett et al., it means nothing more than this: "patterns that are in some way analogous to the meaningful patterns we see in human social interaction." But if that's all it is, then since it doesn't really involve the paradigmatically meaningful phenomena familiar from human social interaction which I mentioned above, it isn't genuine meaning but only what Searle would call "as-if" intentionality or meaning. It's just very complex mechanical (i.e. inherently meaningless and non-purposive) behavior which in some ways, but not others, mimics genuinely meaningful human interaction.
Of course, there is still a temptation to say that there must be more to the ant colony than this; but that just means that there is still a temptation to think of the ant colony in terms of Aristotelian final ends, in which case the example indirectly supports traditional natural law theory rather than undermines it.
Re: your comparison of the higher-level properties of water and the like to meaning, the trouble is that there is a logical entailment from the lower level properties of water to the higher-level properties (and similarly for the other examples you mention) that doesn't hold in the case of brain processes vis-a-vis meaning. Indeed, this is a familiar point in contemporary philosophy of mind. Again, see my book for discussion.
Posted by: Edward Feser | November 2, 2005 1:49 AM
Thank you for the reply, Dr. Feser. I think the important part of my previous comment is "at that level". Meaning cannot be dissected all the way down to its roots. To attempt an answer, my definition of meaningful is twofold: A convergent response to an external change in environment. An action that compensates for an internal instability within the structure of the holistic organism.
As for language and arts, that is yet another dimension added on top of the "as-if" intentionality of simpler systems. Making the evolutionary leap from dyadic to triadic paradigms requires many additional factors of information processing and communication structure. As they say, Rome was not built in a day. Similarly, the organizational structure needed to self-reference at a high level is not so easy to construct.
Posted by: Step2 | November 2, 2005 8:25 AM