The Ethics of Nature and the Nature of Ethics 1498544355, 9781498544351

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The Ethics of Nature and the Nature of Ethics

The Ethics of Nature and the Nature of Ethics Edited by Gary Keogh

LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB, United Kingdom Chapter 8 was originally published as “Atmosfear: Communicating the Effects of Climate Change on Extreme Weather.” Weather, Climate, and Society 9 (2017): 27–37, doi: 10.1175/WCAS-D-16-0030.1. © American Meteorological Society. Used with permission. Copyright © 2017 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Keogh, Gary, 1987- editor. Title: The ethics of nature and the nature of ethics / edited by Gary Keogh. Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017029261 (print) | LCCN 2017032383 (ebook) | ISBN 9781498544351 (Electronic) | ISBN 9781498544344 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Philosophy of nature. | Ethics. | Human ecology. | Environmental ethics. Classification: LCC BD581 (ebook) | LCC BD581 .E828 2017 (print) | DDC 170--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017029261

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Contents

Introduction: The Cross-Pollinating Discourses of Ethics and Nature Gary Keogh I: The Nature of Ethics 1 Aristotelian Virtue and the Freudian Challenge to Second Nature Isabel Kaeslin 2 The Moral Tragedy of the Biological Imperative: What Nietzsche Can and Cannot Teach Us about the Evolution of Morality Scott M. James and Matthew C. Eshleman 3 On the Relevance of Evolutionary Biology to Ethical Naturalism Parisa Moosavi 4 A Gift or a Given?: On the Role of Life in Løgstrup’s Ethics Robert Stern 5 Varieties of Naturalism: From Foot’s “Natural Goodness” to Murdoch’s Non-Dogmatic Naturalism Maria Silvia Vaccarezza II: The Ethics of Nature 6 Un/natural Creation(s): Posthumanism, Biotechnology, and Exploring the (Place in) Nature of Humans and Artificial Life Scott Midson 7 An Ethics of Fidelity: Luther, Hauerwas, and Environmental Activism Benjamin J. Wood v

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Contents

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The Ethics of Atmosfear: Communicating the Effects of Climate Change on Extreme Weather Vladimir Jankovic and David M. Schultz Hegel, Nature, and Ethics Alison Stone

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Index

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About the Editor

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List of Contributors

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Introduction The Cross-Pollinating Discourses of Ethics and Nature Gary Keogh

Western civilizations have had and continue to have a fractious relationship with the ill-defined and nebulous notion of “nature.” Nature is excruciatingly difficult as a concept to grasp with any sense of clarity, but it is largely understood in two types of ways: as the physical, existent world, and as a synonym for the essence of something. Both of these understandings of nature have been subjected to human manipulation, sometimes for better, and sometimes for worse. Our own human nature is often suppressed, sometimes quite rightly for ethical purposes; we often try to avoid the physical conflicts and sexual promiscuity that our animalistic tendencies (our nature) drive us toward. Nevertheless, our compulsions for compassion and charity are lauded aspects of our human nature that are too suppressed to allow economic greed, inequalities, and wars to proceed unabated. In terms of nature-as-the-environment, we have a reputation of having a very negative impact, causing the extinction of countless species that would otherwise have flourished. Indeed, we are our own worst enemies in this regard too, as our industrial and technological societies exponentially develop at the expense of the climate, ultimately resulting in wilder weather which may lead eventually to our own ironic demise. Sometimes the fractious relationship with nature is the result of ignorance; the beginnings of our conquering and irrevocable altering of the Earth’s physical landscape was pursued with good intentions without the realization that the industrial revolution would eventually do untold damage. Other times, it is the result of shortsightedness, favoring economic growth via agriculture and construction over vii

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the next few years rather than looking at the long-term repercussions of cutting down rainforests. Often, it is simply laziness; separating waste and remembering to bring a reusable bag to the supermarket is an arduous task for many twenty-first-century Westerners in a world of wi-fi and giant coffee chains on every street corner. With the exception of a few powerful voices in right-wing politics, particularly in the United States, the Western world has largely acknowledged that there is a problem. Suggested courses of action vary from person to person and government to government, but the environment is at least on the global agenda. As a theologian, I have long been intrigued not just by the practical causes of environmental degradation, but by what I am certain are influential ideological backgrounds which underpin attitudes toward the environment. Despite the rise of secularism in many Western countries, the deeply embedded cultural heritages of Christianity and other philosophies are difficult to break free from; these are the ideas which have given people hope for millennia and are thus difficult to reform in any meaningful way. The Catholic Church, whose historical power and influence is unmatched in the West, has recently put this issue to the forefront of their agenda with the publication of Pope Francis’s sharp and cutting critique of modern society in Laudato Si. The relationship humanity has had with nature, which many eco-liberation theologians have deemed oppressive, is manifest in central themes in Christianity as God decreed humanity to have dominion over the fish of the sea and birds of the sky (Genesis 1:26). It is of course not the case that the industrial revolution was premised on the fact that humanity has a God-given right to destroy the Earth, but the (perhaps) subconscious, underpinning idea of humanity’s special relationship with the Creator of nature has undoubtedly led to a sense of entitlement; a sense which continues to be exercised with the belief that we can do no wrong here. Pope Francis made the significant move to call for reinterpretations of such an idea in line with the growth of our scientific knowledge regarding humanity’s actual miniscule position in the universe (of course, theologians, philosophers, and scientists have been making similar pleas for decades). Pope Francis put our nature-as-essence under the microscope in Laudato Si too, challenging the way in which we seek power and govern ourselves. This raises the notion of ethics; our ethical frameworks and our ethical nature. A key question growing particularly out of evolutionary theory has been whether our ethics come from nature, whether they come from God, or somewhere else. It was the question central to my second book, The Evolution of Hope, and one which for theologians is often still an uncomfortable one. Yet an additional question emerged for me after the publication of the Evolution of Hope which had started to gnaw at me: is there a relationship between the question of the naturalness (or not) of ethics, and our ethical

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obligations to nature itself? I feel that the answer is certainly yes, but there is some way to go before elaborating on how. The two sides to this question (the ethics of nature and the nature of ethics) have been discussed at length in many different disciplines, but to bring them together into a coherent realm of discourse necessitates a fundamentally interdisciplinary approach. Luckily and happily, in 2014 I found myself working at the Lincoln Theological Institute based at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom; a group of academics working in the department of religions and theology at Manchester who have a long history of working on themes pertaining to the environment and producing texts such as Future Ethics (Continuum, 2012) and A Systematic Theology of Climate Change (Routledge, 2014). Through various discussions, it was decided that we would extend an invitation to various departments and scholars working in various disciplines to come together for a conference titled “The Ethics of Nature—The Nature of Ethics” which took place in May 2015 at the University of Manchester. Leading the organization of this conference, I envisioned that it would be a call to arms for not just theologians but also philosophers, scientists, environmental planners, lawyers, and others who had interests in the questions and problems discussed above. I wanted to build bridges between theology and other disciplines that could share insights and produce a mutually beneficial sharing of ideas. The papers that were accepted to the conference (some of which make up this volume) became a melting pot of diverse perspectives from diverse disciplines on human ethical nature, and how we employ our ethical nature to treat the environment. We explored how we envisage our relationship to nature, and how ancient and modern philosophers and theologians view our ethical development as a worldly or metaphysical phenomenon. The fruits of this discussion are published here, and I hope they will provide a blueprint for future collaboration between disciplines. In such pressing times regarding the environment, interreligious conflict, culture clashes, and educational crises, there is no room to be territorial. We need to work together in a scholarly and practical fashion. THE NATURE OF ETHICS In our first chapter, Isabel Kaeslin threads an interesting line between philosophy and psychology by taking two of the respective disciplines’ most foremost thinkers, weaving them into dialogue and taking the best of both whilst leaving behind the extremities of each. She does this to produce an insightful account of ethics which emerges from pitting Aristotle’s rationalism and Freud’s understandings of the social psyche and our desires into dialogue. A perfect way to open this volume, given its multidisciplinary approach, this chapter offers the reader insight into what will come in later chapters and

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what the book tries to do as a whole—dismantle the artificial partisans that keep human wisdom from interbreeding. Scott M. James and Matthew C. Eshleman continue this tradition effectively in their unique analysis of Nietzsche and Neo-Darwinism. Again, crossing an admittedly well-traveled bridge between biology and philosophy, and even Nietzsche and Darwin more specifically, our second chapter moves beyond usual discussions which try to unravel Nietzsche’s complicated relationship with Darwinism. What we are left with here is an insightful evaluation of Nietzsche’s moral philosophy, and which aspects are substantiated by later developments in disciplines emerging from evolutionary theory. Close to my own heart and work in the field, I was delighted to include this chapter because of its unique angle and the light it sheds on Nietzsche in the context of what came later. We continue with the theme of evolutionary theory in our third chapter (that so many different scholars wished to write on evolutionary theory testifies to its importance in moral philosophy—something which, depending on where you are and whom you ask, seems often underrepresented). Parisa Moosavi explores a modern evaluation of Aristotelian ethics but firmly within the context of ethical naturalism as illustrated from within evolutionary theory. Chapter 4 takes a slightly different turn as Robert Stern focuses more sharply on the Danish philosopher K. E. Løgstrup. Relatively underrepresented in moral philosophy, his unique blend of theology and philosophy deserves to be studied much more in-depth, and Stern’s chapter provides us with this opportunity. Threading between philosophy and theology, K. E. Løgstrup also straddles both camps of ethics from nature and ethics from God, to put it bluntly—Stern of course provides us with a more thought-out articulation of that question that carefully and clearly appreciates the nuances at play in Løgstrup’s thinking. The closing chapter of the first section of this book returns again to the topic of naturalism. In the fifth chapter, Maria Silvia Vaccarezza explores the important and perennial questions of whether good is an intrinsic feature of nature, and whether there is any such thing as a human nature. She does so through exploring a debate between Philippa Foot and Iris Murdoch. The result is a thought-provoking depiction of what we understand by ethical naturalism and how multifaced that idea can actually be. THE ETHICS OF NATURE Opening the second section of this volume, Scott Midson challenges some core concepts that underpin the wider discussions by exploring what we mean by nature, natural, and human in his chapter on posthumanism. In this

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timely piece, in a world where electronic devices such as smart phones have become appendages, Midson takes theoretical and already-realized ideas of robots and human development, and asks questions around artificiality, naturalness, and ethics in creation. He does so in the context of contemporary theology and philosophy. From here, in chapter 7, Ben Wood takes seemingly the unlikely dialogue partners of Stanley Hauerwas and Martin Luther and draws wisdom on environmental activism. This thoughtful blending of contemporary and middleage thinking firmly centered on the Christian crucifixion provides us with a number of valuable nuggets of wisdom concerning the Christian imperative of environmentalism—a theme explored so thoroughly in Laudato Si. Wood argues for a firm theological basis for environmental activism even in the face of futility. Vladimir Jankovic and David M. Schultz offer us some insights into the vital issue of the communication of the effects of climate change. This particular issue is of great concern ethically—not just our actions regarding the environment, but how certain trends are commentated on, and how they inform political debate. A very timely issue politically in 2017, this chapter challenges ethical obligations and pitfalls that climate scientists are challenged with on a daily basis—avoiding mass-panic while being truthful to ever-increasing prevalence of extreme weather as the waters slowly creep over Florida’s coast. The volume closes with Alison Stone’s chapter on Hegel. Hegel’s works are notoriously complex, particularly those on his metaphysics. With Stone as our guide, we explore how Hegel can successfully merge his metaphysics of nature with his understanding of empirical science. Hegel’s ideas on the development of nature have been influential in philosophy, and we can look to process thinking and even contemporary scientific philosophies of consciousness to see this. Stone thus provides us with a necessary and in-depth account as to how to go about making sense of Hegel, in particular his ideas on the human-nature relationship. For the publication of this book, I am deeply indebted to my colleagues at the Lincoln Theological Institute (LTI), particularly Dr. Ben Wood (whose chapter on Martin Luther appears later) and professor Peter Scott for getting this wild idea of a multidisciplinary conference, to be hosted by a religions/ theology department, off the ground. The trustees of the LTI graciously provided the initial funding necessary, while the vibrant research culture among the staff and students at Manchester helped to ensure the perfect environment. I hoped to show philosophers, scientists, theologians, lawyers, and scholars in other areas that we do not work in isolation and have much to learn from each other. Perhaps we may find answers to scientific questions in philosophy, and philosophical questions in theology. The nature of ethics, and the ethics of nature, is a topic common to us all, and we need to remem-

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ber that as we seek to halt the march toward a warmer Earth. Hopefully, this text will demonstrate the potential for cross-pollination of discourses on nature and ethics.

I

The Nature of Ethics

Chapter One

Aristotelian Virtue and the Freudian Challenge to Second Nature Isabel Kaeslin

INTRODUCTION: ARISTOTELIAN ETHICS AND RATIONALISM ABOUT SECOND NATURE In Aristotelian ethics, the concept of second nature 1 is traditionally considered to refer to human beings’ “higher” or “better” nature: that which accounts for what makes human beings human, such as culture, normativity, language, meaning, and freedom. It is what enables us to be fully human, and it distinguishes us from mere brutes or animals. I do not want to deny these aspects of second nature in this chapter. Instead, I want to turn the spotlight on a temptation that might arise from this standard interpretation of Aristotle: the temptation to posit an overly rationalist understanding of how human beings acquire and maintain a second nature. By questioning this overly rationalist account of second nature, I hope to be able to sharpen our view on what second nature can be and what it cannot be, and what that means for the notion of virtue. The overly rationalist account of second nature, as I understand it, accepts the following two assumptions (cf. McDowell, 2001). 2 Both of these two assumptions rely on the idea that human beings’ desires and emotions can be habituated into a second nature according to the demands with which life presents them: 1. It is possible for human beings to acquire full happiness, eudaimonia, such that eudaimonia is compatible with social and other demands of life, without any remaining contrary desires of the individual.

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2. The acquisition of second nature, that is, the training of one’s desires that makes them completely harmonious with the demands of life, is not a violent imposition onto one’s desires, but something which is good for us as human beings (and also as individual human beings), all things considered. What I want to argue in this chapter is that Sigmund Freud’s work on the human psyche poses a considerable challenge to this optimistic account of second nature. 3 If we take Freudian moral psychology seriously, it seems that we have to reject both assumptions, that is, the claim that the habituation of the virtuous subject genuinely and fully integrates both the social and other demands of life with her desires, and that this is, all things considered, also in the individual self-interest of any human being. With Freud, we will have to say that because second nature is only acquired through a violent imposition of the demands of life onto the infant’s desires, there will always be traces of the memory of immediate satisfactions of one’s desires, acquired at the beginning of every human’s life. This memory trace will always continue to produce disruptive desires in adult life again, even in the healthiest human beings. The standard account, then, appears overly rationalist: it makes nonrational desires “disappear,” as if they were fully integrated and made harmonious with rational desires. Not only is this a very optimistic account of second nature, but it also ignores the possible benefits of desires that do not fully fit into one’s current demands of life and social constraints. I will argue that such desires can be a stronghold against dogmatisms and ideologies, and that they have the potential to move a human being to strive toward, and achieve, greater autonomy. In the first section of this chapter, I will explain how Freud’s proposals lead to this view, and will spell out the Freudian challenge in more detail. 4 In the second section, I will ask to what degree the Freudian challenge has to be incorporated in our understanding of second nature. In light of the Freudian challenge, we will have to understand virtue as an ongoing process of reestablishing the unity of first and second nature. Instead of having achieved a virtuous disposition merely by training one’s emotions the right way once and for all, the virtuous disposition will consist in the ability to react in the right way to the disruptiveness of persistent desires, desires that can neither be ignored nor appeased. That is, first nature retains the power to disrupt the virtuous life of the subject. Accordingly, for her life to be virtuous, virtue needs to be understood in a more active way: as an achievement that the agent must continue to strive for. In putting forward this proposal, I take myself to respond, on the one hand, to the Freudian challenge. On the other hand, however, I also aim to make an interpretive move. The active account of virtue I aim to carve out makes sense, I argue, of the Aristotelian idea that virtue consists in an activity as opposed to a static state of the soul (Aristotle,

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2002, 1102a5). 5 This will conclude the description of my account of second nature as a revision according to a Freudian-Aristotelian framework. In order to make this notion of an active conception of second nature more sharply circumscribed, I will in the conclusion compare it to two positions that I take to be similar in kind to mine, but which err on either side of two extremes. On the extreme of rationalism I will consider a contemporary Kantian approach to virtue by Christine Korsgaard, and Anne Baxley’s interpretation of Kant. On the extreme of antirationalism I will compare my account to a more radical Freudian approach by Jonathan Lear. Roughly speaking, Korsgaard’s Kantian approach shares with my approach that there is indeed something about human beings’ rational capacity that is ‘higher’ and makes them into the beings they are, but her Kantian approach at the same time seems to subscribe to an extreme position of voluntarism that is opposed to my account. Lear’s more radical Freudian approach, on the other hand, shares with mine the claim that one needs to take the limitations that first nature puts on rationality more seriously, but his account in turn seems to fall prey to an antirationalism that is opposed to my account. In order to see how my account can carve out the space between these positions, we will now first have to have a closer look at the Freudian challenge to the notion of second nature, which is the basis on which my revised, more active notion of virtue lies. THE PRIMACY OF FIRST NATURE IN FREUDIAN MORAL PSYCHOLOGY Sigmund Freud conceived of his insights into moral psychology as a “third major blow against the naïve self-love of men at the hands of science,” after the Copernican Revolution and Darwin’s insights into the animal origins of human beings (Freud, 1917, 284–85). 6 Freud thought that, after his insights, certain formerly held beliefs about human psychology could not be defensible anymore. He proposed an account according to which what he calls the reality principle only comes into existence because the child’s desires are frustrated. Hence on his account, second nature comes into being solely because of the experience of frustration and loss. The child starts out in a state of primary narcissism where it experiences itself as one with the world. It experiences itself as the world, and as Freud puts it, literally as everything. The world seems formed completely according to its desires and needs. In this sense, the child perceives itself as omnipotent. This primary narcissism is necessarily frustrated later in the infant’s life, when its caregivers stop being able to fulfill all its desires with the immediacy which Freud takes to be typical in the earliest stages. Caregivers become independent objects in the world for the infant, separated from it, and they are no longer perceived

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to be “under its control.” This frustration eventually forces the infant to start forming its desires according to the reality principle, that is, according to the realization that certain facts in the world are outside of its control. The world is not being formed according to its desires anymore, but its desires must be formed according to the demands of life—the development of second nature begins. It is only at this point, after the phase of primary narcissism, where a phase like Aristotle’s training of the emotions could begin. According to Freud, this experience of frustration is thus the basis on which the infant forms an ego, and, as we might put this in Aristotelian terms, a second nature. This Freudian account, then, disagrees quite fundamentally with the common Aristotelian account I sketched above. It claims that, if it were not for the frustrations and brute force imposed by the world onto the infant, the child would never leave its stage of primary narcissism and perceived omnipotence. There is nothing in the infant itself that would motivate the move toward the reality principle and second nature. Such an account of a violent imposition of the world onto the desires of the human being raises questions about the sense in which second nature is our “higher” nature, and that is, in what sense it is a good thing that we as human beings have to develop a second nature. If this is how second nature is acquired, then it would be at least suspicious to claim that second nature is what makes us “really human” and somehow “better.” To put this in Nietzschean terms, one might say that the rationalist account of second nature originates in a “ressentiment”: because the lambs are weak, they desperately try to justify their account of good and evil, in order to keep the stronger and freer “birds of prey” under their (social) control (Nietzsche, 2009). They define “good” as the restraint on any expression of strength, whereas this definition of good is merely there to cover up their own weakness. Call the challenge to such a covert social control the Primacy of First Nature account. Though Freud does not use Nietzsche’s vocabulary, his account of psychological development suggests precisely this. We should ask whether the Primacy of First Nature account is getting something right: whether it captures some truths that we need to preserve, even if we want to reject it in its most extreme, Nietzschean form. 7 Freud describes and discusses the stage of primary narcissism and the development away from it in at least three different works of his, in more or less explicit terms: in his On Narcissism (1914), Mourning and Melancholia (1917), and The Ego and the Id (1923). In this chapter I will only refer to some passages from On Narcissism as well as to the following secondary source. In his paper Freud on Identification Bernard Reginster offers a helpful synoptic description of the phase of primary narcissism from which, according to Freud, any human being starts out in its psychological life:

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Freud’s observations (primarily on the phenomenon of adult regression) led him to believe that, at the earliest stages of his psychological development, the infant does not differentiate between himself and his environment, particularly his caregivers. . . . At the earliest stages of the infant’s psychological development, the caregivers are typically particularly attentive to his needs and wishes, and quick in meeting them. He is consequently induced to take himself, particularly his own mere wishes for it, to be the self-sufficient source of their gratification, and to regard his caregiver as dependent upon him, subject to his omnipotent control. (Reginster, unpublished)

Hence in this phase the child takes itself to be everything there is—it does not perceive a separation from the world and from its caregivers. Its desires are constantly and immediately satisfied by the world, and thus it conceives of itself as omnipotent. There is no experience of lack or frustration at all. When Freud discusses narcissism in adult human beings in his On Narcissism, he makes clear that this phenomenon is not something new in adult life, but rather a regression to the earliest stage in human development, a regression to primary narcissism. Here we learn more about the mechanisms that go on in an infant’s psyche during this developmental stage as Freud conceives of it (he alleges to take this from observations of the mental life of children and “primitive peoples,” and starts out with the “primitive peoples”). The mechanisms of the mind during the earliest developmental stage are: an over-estimation of the power of their wishes and mental acts, the “omnipotence of thoughts,” a belief in the thaumaturgic force of words, and a technique for dealing with the external world—“magic”—which appears to be a logical application of these grandiose premisses. In the children of today, whose development is much more obscure to us, we expect to find an exactly analogous attitude toward the external world. Thus we form the idea of there being an original libidinal cathexis of the ego, from which some is later given off to objects, but which fundamentally persists and is related to the object-cathexes (Freud, 1914, 75).

Here Freud describes the process of coming to object-relations (that is, the process away from primary narcissism toward relations to the world) as a secondary way of forming attachments, a superimposition upon primary narcissism. This secondary way of forming attachments is dependent on the existence of the previous attachment, the attachment on itself (while the infant still conceives of itself as a unity with the world). So: whichever attachments form later in the infant’s development, they are dependent on this first kind of attachment on itself during the omnipotent phase. Further, in the above quotation Freud expresses the thought that something of this first attachment fundamentally persists throughout the human being’s psychological life, even after it leaves the phase of primary narcissism.

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Only a few lines later Freud adds: “We see also, broadly speaking, an antithesis between ego-libido and object-libido. The more of the one is employed, the more the other becomes depleted” (Freud, 1914, 75). Hence we see that according to Freud the process away from primary narcissism, toward a creation of a second nature, is not a process of just adding something new (the second nature) to something already existing (first nature). Instead, the creation of second nature takes something away from first nature—the more one is employed, the more the other becomes depleted. They are antithetical to each other. In other words: second nature is not an addition to first nature, but a (partial) 8 transformation of it. So the function of the creation of the ego (the second nature) is to transform and replace the loss experienced by the infant when its omnipotent phase, and that is, its unadulterated desires are frustrated. 9 Consider the sequence of steps Freud envisages. Once the infant experiences its caregivers as independent objects, it experiences frustration, or nonsatisfaction, of its desires. In order to compensate for this loss, it creates its second nature as another object toward which it can direct its attachment. It can do this because its original attachment was directed at itself too, though at that stage the infant and its caregivers appeared to the infant as an undifferentiated unity. Now that there is a differentiation between itself and the world (the caregivers), but the world is disappointing, it compensates for that disappointment by forming an ego that is modeled according to its caregivers (identification). Hence, it models its desires according to the world and not according to its original needs anymore. That is how the infant can maintain partial satisfaction of its desires and (partially) replace the experienced loss through a process of identification. This is the first instance in a human being’s life of internalizing something of the world in order to maintain itself—it is a form of sublimation of its desires. For the first time, the desires are not satisfied immediately by the world anymore. The infant has to make changes in its internal structure, rearrange its desires, and through this be satisfied with a mediated satisfaction of its desires: mediated through an ego that is modeled according to the lost object. It is a solution of compromise, a compensation for the lost “real thing.” So this rearrangement of its own desires according to the demands of life is the process by which the second nature develops. This is how human beings acquire a second nature according to Freud. Second nature is acquired because of the experience of frustration of one’s desires and because of the experience of loss, and as a compensatory, but not fully satisfactory reaction to that experience of loss. This account thus assumes that despite the (partial) compensation for the loss the infant achieves through the creation of second nature, there will always be a memory trace of the experience of immediate satisfaction, which expresses itself later in life in inappeasable desires which cannot be ignored. 10 These inappeasable desires create a wish for satisfaction of unsublimated, “untrained” desires.

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SAVING SECOND NATURE THROUGH A REVISED ACCOUNT OF VIRTUE How then can the Aristotelian idea that second nature is our higher, better nature, be defended? If Freud’s arguments are compelling, there is always an experience of loss involved in acquiring it. As remnants of this loss, inappeasable desires persist. The existence of these desires cannot be disputed. These desires simply are not compatible with the demands of life (Corcilius and Gregoric, 2010). 11 Does this mean that all we can hope for is enkrateia, self-control? Is genuine virtue in the Aristotelian sense ultimately not attainable for human beings (Aristotle, 2002)? 12 If we can show that genuine virtue is attainable despite having a less rationalist account of second nature, which is compatible with Freud’s claims about the human psyche, then we have shown, I think, that second nature can be our higher nature, despite acknowledging that we never fully get rid of some aspects of our first nature. 13 But this will require us to revisit the nature of virtue. In short, a revised account of virtue would necessarily have to conceptualize second nature and its unity with first nature as something that has to be reachieved and maintained throughout a human being’s life, rather than being achieved through good habituation once and for all after childhood is over. This is so because there will always be nonnegligible and inappeasable desires—which we may call first nature desires—that are not compatible with the demands of life even in the healthiest and most virtuous human beings. In other words, we would need to spell out a more active conception of virtue, where virtue always has to be reachieved. In the active conception of virtue, the unity of second nature through virtue must consist in the ongoing right reaction to newly resurfacing inappeasable desires. Hence, virtue will have to be understood as a permanent, open-ended process, which seems to be very much at the heart of an Aristotelian ethics that emphasizes activity as an integral part of virtue. We could sketch out this active kind of virtue along the following lines: each time a disruptive moment appears in a human being’s life, due to the eruption of first-nature desires and clashing with the demands of life, the subject has the ability to reintegrate these desires into her life in a new and creative way, which might require a character-change. It is this special ability (an ability for change and synthesis) 14 that distinguishes her from the selfcontrolled individual, who only has an ability to repress her desires. The virtuous reaction to a disruptive desire, in this account, would be to fully recognize the desire and to accept that it will not disappear by trying to repress it. In other words: the virtuous subject acknowledges the omnipotent character of this desire. What makes her virtuous as opposed to the merely self-controlled individual is that she gives full recognition to the desire, and is willing to change something in her current life and character in order to

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live out the desire in a nondisruptive way. Thus she is never the victim of ongoing tensions between her first and second nature—the tensions only arise temporarily in order for first and second nature to be integrated anew, in a more complex and more autonomous second nature than before the disruption. This active conception of virtue has the structure of a dialectical movement between states of unity, which are interrupted by phases of tension, and the activity of reunification. The respective states of unity are interrupted by the remainder of first nature resurfacing, in the form of inappeasable desires. The new unity at each stage resulting from the reunification after the disruption every time includes more aspects of first nature explicitly in itself. It is in this sense that it is a more complex and more autonomous second nature than before the disruption. This is where the creative and productive side of the first-nature desires becomes apparent: these desires constitute the drive that pushes a human being to always aim for a yet more autonomous unification between the desires of the individual on the one hand and the demands of life and the social constraints on the other. These inappeasable desires thus seem to be an internal activity of human beings to always aim for more autonomy. Related to this is the thought I already mentioned, namely, that one benefit of taking the disruptive desires seriously is that they have the potential to resist pressures of heteronomous social constraints on the individual’s desires, and thus are a stronghold against ideologies and collective dogmatisms. This is so because if one takes these inherently disruptive desires seriously, one cannot “theorize away” the existence of continuing tensions between the individual’s desires on the one hand and the heteronomous social demands on the other, and I take my suggestion of a more active notion of Aristotelian virtue to achieve such a resistance against heteronomous social pressures on the individual’s desires. However, one could argue that my account of a more active notion of virtue invites a form of pressure of heteronomous constraints in the following way, and thus does not allow for greater autonomy after all: if a static form of virtue is unachievable, as I argue, and thus it is a never-ending task to aspire to virtue, virtue might become an unachievable ideal, which in turn ensures that a human being is never fully “happy” in the sense of eudaimonia. In other words, my account of virtue might invite a form of perfectionism that lends itself to some kind of heteronomous social constraints or ideologies too. This would be a misunderstanding of my suggested account. My account does not suggest that it is virtuous to constantly change again, to “always be in flux,” as it were, and that one is never done in becoming better. Instead, it suggests that whenever the individual experiences, as a matter of fact, a disruptive desire, it should not be repressed. It should be taken into full consideration despite of its utter unsuitability with the demands of life and with heteronomous social demands. It would be overly rationalist and thus

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dogmatic to not take it into consideration. If there really are no such disruptive desires for a while, then there is no need for change in my account either, and it would be right to say that for the time being, one has achieved a virtuous state. It is not in principle impossible to achieve a state in which there will never be disruptive desires anymore—but what I claim is that as human beings we could never count on being in such a state and thus it is the most virtuous disposition to always be ready again for changes. This, I would argue, is the best way to avoid dogmatisms, ideologies, or other heteronomous social constraints, and it is something for which the more common, static account of Aristotelian virtue could not allow. 15 To return to Aristotle, I would like to point out at the end of my description of this active notion of virtue that it has another advantage over the more common interpretation: it makes sense of Aristotle’s distinction between human and superhuman virtue. The active conception of virtue that I have suggested proposes a dialectical movement toward human virtue. This is in contrast to an immediate way of resolving situations of change, because the dialectical movement entails a necessary phase of tension. Thus, we can think of the concept of superhuman virtue, which is not available for human beings, as an immediate (and hence in some way more static) way to deal with new situations, where no tensions arise at all. In other words, the ideal of a static, immediate disposition to do the right thing, which is suggested by the more common interpretation of Aristotle, and which is unachievable for human beings according to my suggestion, is what Aristotle would call superhuman virtue. It is a kind of virtue that we can imagine but not achieve qua human beings. According to Aristotle, human virtue has to be achievable in principle for all human beings, and by contrast superhuman virtue is conceivable, but “beyond us”—“hyper hēmas” (Aristotle, 2002, 1145a19). This seems to be a distinction that cannot be made with the more common static conception of human virtue, which is achieved once and for all. In the static conception of virtue, there seems to be no space for any kind of tension between desires and demands already for the human virtuous subject, because according to this account, the virtuous human subject always immediately applies her once and for all virtuously formed disposition to any new situation. In other words, if we conceived of human virtue in the more common static way of interpreting Aristotle, it would collapse into and be identical with superhuman virtue. So I am arguing against the claim of the more common interpretation of Aristotle that tensions never appear at all for the virtuous subject. But I still maintain that the virtuous subject does not need to rely on self-control (repression) in order to deal with these tensions. As mentioned before, if we look at this revised account of virtue as a whole, it is marked by the activity of unification in between states of unity. It is not implausible to think that this is how Aristotle wanted virtue to be understood, as he emphasized that

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virtue is an activity and not a static state of the soul. Freudian moral psychology can help us bring out this aspect of Aristotle’s notion of virtue more clearly. CONCLUSION: BETWEEN RATIONALISM AND ANTIRATIONALISM In order to make the notion of an active conception of virtue in this Aristotelian-Freudian sense more sharply circumscribed, in concluding I want to compare it to two positions that I take to be similar in kind to mine, but which err on either side of two extremes: a Kantian approach to virtue by Christine Korsgaard and Anne Baxley’s interpretation of Kant, on the one hand, and a more radical Freudian approach by Jonathan Lear, on the other. Roughly speaking, Korsgaard’s Kantian approach shares with my approach the idea that there is indeed something about human beings’ rational capacity that is “higher” and makes them into the beings they are, but her Kantian approach at the same time seems to subscribe to an extreme position of voluntarism that I oppose. Lear’s more radical Freudian approach, on the other hand, shares with mine the claim that one needs to take the limitations that first nature (the never fully controlled inappeasable desires) puts on rationality more seriously, but seems to fall prey to an antirationalism that I oppose. In other words: I want to defend my approach as one that lies between an extreme rationalist and an extreme antirationalist conception of virtue. To dissociate my view from Lear’s antirationalist Freudian one serves the purpose of showing how virtue, even in this ever-changing, more active sense, can still track an objective kind of virtue. To dissociate my view from Korsgaard’s rationalist Kantian one on the other hand serves the purpose of showing how this move toward objectivity does not necessarily entail giving up the insight about a remainder of first nature in the notion of virtue. Let me start by showing in what sense a Kantian approach might be similar to mine. According to Anne Baxley, Kant can make a distinction between the merely self-controlled and the virtuous subject in his own terms, all the while also emphasizing that virtue is a more problematic achievement than the more common reading of Aristotle would suggest. This looks, prima facie, exactly like my suggestion: what makes a subject virtuous, as opposed to merely self-controlled, is that her desires are in full accordance with her rational judgment, yet to achieve this is a more problematic process than standardly conceived, because the desires which need to be trained are in some sense “unwieldy” and incompatible with rationality. If we take what Baxley calls a “tendency toward evil” as what I have called the disruptive inappeasable desires of first nature, then the following makes it look like I

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am fully following Kant, if we accept Baxley’s reading of his practical philosophy: If Kantian virtue retains some element of what initially looks like continence [enkrateia, self-control], this is because our tendency toward evil runs deep, and conquering it takes significant effort and hard work. What is interesting to keep in mind here is that, from Kant’s perspective, the ancients erred in overlooking this point. In neglecting this fact of the matter about human nature as he sees it, ancient virtue theorists assumed it was possible for mere human beings to achieve a form of moral perfection that Kant thinks amounts to holiness of will [superhuman virtue], a state of moral excellence that is not only out of our reach but also serves as an unsuitable ideal, if it is taken as a model of excellence that we human beings can actually approximate. Kant therefore rejects any conception of human virtue that mistakenly holds that we can bring our sensible nature into full or complete harmony with reason so that we need not be constrained by duty to act well. Such a conception of moral excellence conflates human virtue with holiness, and it involves an objectionable and dangerous self-deception as well as a failure to know ourselves as finite imperfect beings, beings that must work hard to cultivate the requisite strength of will to overcome a deep-seated tendency to subordinate moral considerations to considerations based on happiness, and to acquire a moral disposition involving a “moral preparedness to withstand all temptations to evil.” (Baxley, 2010, 80; partially my emphasis)

Also: Kant is certain that the true opponent of morally good character is “an invisible enemy, one who hides behind reason and [is] hence all the more dangerous.” (Baxley, 2010, f/n 31)

In Baxley’s interpretation of Kant, this invisible, evil enemy that hides behind reason and is therefore all the more dangerous seems to have exactly the structure that I have described for the disruptive inappeasable desires (Kant, 1996, 59). 16 However, while acknowledging that there are such strong desires that do not seem to be apt to be harmonized by reason, Kant nevertheless does not give up the Aristotelian idea of achieving full virtue, according to her, where the subject finds a way of stably dealing with these desires. This indeed seems to be identical with my approach. The following is how Baxley understands Kant’s distinction between full virtue and mere selfcontrol that seems to go with my approach: Yet, as we have seen over the course of this chapter, when this propensity to evil—the true enemy of the morally good—is defeated and successfully managed, the Kantian virtuous or autocratic agent has the courage to resist new temptations to transgress the moral law, the fortitude to do her duty from the motive of duty, and the inner freedom enabling her to act virtuously with a

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But while this last passage shows the close similarity of Baxley’s interpretation of Kant to my approach, it also shows its two main differences: 1. This version of Kant seems to be closer to the more common interpretation of Aristotle than my own approach is. It assumes that once the character of a human being is trained in the right way, there will be no disruptions from unwieldy desires anymore. In other words, even though Baxley’s interpretation of Kant agrees with me that achieving virtue is a more problematic process than the standard interpretation of Aristotle makes it seem like, her interpretation still subscribes to the idea of a static form of virtue once these unwieldy desires are conquered. 2. Baxley’s Kantian approach seems to only look at the unwieldy desires as evil, and does not also emphasize their productive or creative potential, as I have described them in their role to achieving ever greater forms of autonomy. This is related to the first difference in our approaches: while I emphasize that the dialectic between disruption and states of virtue is ongoing and leads to ever more autonomous forms of second nature, in Baxley’s interpretation of Kant these unwieldy desires are only there to be conquered, once and for all (even if this does not mean that they are repressed, like in self-control). According to her, the Kantian dialectic does not go anywhere anymore after the (first and only) appropriation of the unwieldy desires. Those desires seem to be nonexisting after the occurrence of some “training of emotions,” just like in the more common interpretation of Aristotle. In my account, however, through the ongoing dialectic of disruption and states of virtue, the disruptive inappeasable desires have a productive and creative role to play in the achievement of ever more autonomous forms of second nature. Now that I have shown the possible sympathies and differences with Baxley’s Kantian notion of virtue, I want to turn toward a Kantian view proposed by Christine Korsgaard which seems to share some even more subtle features of my account, even though it still falls prey to the problem just described. Considering this approach by Korsgaard will then lead us directly into the

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opposite position from which I want to distinguish my own approach: Jonathan Lear’s, which also claims to combine the Aristotelian ethical framework with Freudian moral psychology, but seems to fall into the trap of being antirationalist. Korsgaard and Lear debate the relationship between human beings’ rational capacity and their desires in Lear’s book A Case for Irony. Their respective positions are the two positions that I take to be erring on either side of the two extremes between which my approach is to be understood. Korsgaard calls her own view the “self-constitution view”: roughly, we build our practical identities (our second natures) by making choices about which of our desires and propensities we endorse and which we do not. In her own words: Our identities are our own to make, but the material from which we make them floats in from all over. Practical identity, as I understand it, is at once the material from which we work, and the output of our self-constituting activity. So why shouldn’t it be the case that some of our practical identities, in their role as the materials with which we work, are the result of psychic forces working on us in ways of which we are unaware, and over which we consequently have no control? So what? Once the psychoanalyst brings the resulting forms of identity to consciousness, it is for us to decide whether we really value ourselves under those descriptions or not, just as it is in any other case. The case shows how self-knowledge can be an aid to conscious self-constitution, but, as I will argue, it does not show that conscious self-constitution can be replaced by anything else. (Korsgaard, 2011, 77–78; partially my emphasis)

The way Korsgaard sees it, disruptive desires are some of the material which we take into consideration when we form a practical identity, or our second nature. It is up to us whether we endorse a desire or not. This view shares with other Kantian views the idea that we can “step back” from our desires and decide on independent ground whether we want to endorse them or not. Whether or not a desire is disruptive does not make a difference to her view. More importantly, however, we need to consider what she says in the last sentence of the quote, as this is the respect in which my account of second nature is in agreement with Korsgaard’s, and in which both of our accounts deviate from Lear’s more radical Freudian view: that rational self-constitution cannot be replaced by anything else in order to create a second nature. My claim is that disruptive desires always reemerge again and require the subject to always reorganize the unity of her first and second nature again, and that she does this, besides going through character-changes, through some rational process; the irreplaceability of the rational aspect is what Korsgaard’s view and mine share. Lear, however, goes further and claims that it is the first nature itself, that is, the network of desires that created the disruption, which gives the subject unity again (Lear, 2011). In other words,

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the first nature is the unifying principle of a subject according to Lear, and not the rational capacity of the subject to which philosophers usually assign that role. According to Lear there is such a thing as a full-fledged first nature which gives a human being its unity, and on the basis of which its rationality is then created, derivatively, as it were. We can think of this identity as a network of desires which are the starting point of the subject as such, and which color anything that is intelligible for this subject. It is what determines the subject’s “universe,” as it were. In an account of this kind, there will never be any kind of rationality in a human being’s life that can go away from this identity already created in first nature, and from whose removed vantage point one could either endorse or reject one’s desires, as in Korsgaard’s claim. The existence of a rationality that can go away from this subjective universe is a Kantian fantasy according to Lear. Any rationality is thus an individual rationality in Lear’s account, one that is colored by and in the service of one’s first nature, and the aspiration of “stepping back” from one’s desires is a misleading ad-hoc rationalization of one’s choices at best. That is why I have called Lear’s position an antirational one; it inherits the idea of the primacy of first nature from the Freudian challenge, as outlined at the beginning of the chapter. Korsgaard’s claim that rational self-constitution cannot be replaced by anything else in order to create a second nature is attacking this position exactly. It tries to save, I think, the idea that despite acknowledging that there are disruptive desires in human beings, there can still be such a thing as an independent (objective) point of view from rationality, from which we make conscious choices about how we should constitute ourselves. There is, however, a voluntarist element in Korsgaard’s way of criticizing the antirational position: it is fully up to us to endorse or reject certain desires according to her. But if we take the Freudian challenge seriously, then this is indeed a rationalist’s fantasy: inappeasable desires are disruptive; they cannot be controlled by rational decisions on what one endorses. That is the whole point about them being inappeasable. If we take seriously the point that such desires exist, then Korsgaard’s account of “stepping back” from our desires and choosing which to endorse simply does not work. All one can try according to such an account is to repress them, but then we reduce her Kantian position to one of self-control again, and full-fledged virtue, that is, a full-fledged unity between first and second nature, is not possible. My view seems to avoid the problems of both of these extreme positions. The Aristotelian-Freudian account of second nature takes the idea seriously that disruptive inappeasable desires exist and severely constrain who one can choose to be and what one can choose to do, at any given point. These desires cannot just be repressed, or just not be endorsed, if one wants to achieve unity between first and second nature. But on the other hand my position does not slip into the other extreme, the antirationalist position of Lear’s,

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which claims that this network of desires is really what gives us our unity as subjects. There is no reason to extol this network of desires, the first nature, to the unifying principle of human life, only because one recognizes that it cannot ever be fully contained by rationality. Inappeasable desires will always be there and disrupt the existing unity again, but there is such a thing as a rational capacity for human beings that has some freedom within the limits of the new situation to creatively produce a new synthesis of the newly surfaced desires and the demands of life. This can still be a rational process guided by objective values, even if it is informed by the acknowledgment of inappeasable desires as a remainder of first nature. It is still our rational choices of how we deal with disruptive desires that ultimately create an ever more autonomous synthesis of first and second nature, but it is a kind of rational choice that takes into account the uncontainable nature of such desires, and its own limits in regard to them. Such a rational capacity is not merely individual, that is, determined by a unifying identity of a network of an individual’s desires, but a capacity that all human beings share. Thus, my Aristotelian-Freudian account preserves the possibility of value realism (an important point for it to be Aristotelian) that seems to get lost in Lear’s more radical Freudian account. A rational capacity that is trained to work with the limits given by disruptive desires (as opposed to Korsgaard’s rationalist account) is the kind of rational capacity that we can call virtuous, because it is the capacity to react the right way to uncontainable desires—the capacity for an active, but objective kind of virtue. REFERENCES Aristotle. De Anima. Translated by J. A. Smith. In The Complete Works of Aristotle Volume I, edited by Jonathan Barnes. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991. ———. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by Christopher Rowe and with Commentary by Sarah Broadie. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Baxley, Anne Margaret. Kant’s Theory of Virtue. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Corcilius, Klaus, and Pavel Gregoric. “Separability vs. Difference: Parts and Capacities of the Soul in Aristotle.” In Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, Vol. 39 (Winter 2010). Freud, Sigmund. On Narcissism. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV. New York: Vintage, 1914. ———. Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVI. New York: Vintage, 1917. Kant, Immanuel. Religionsschrift, (Religion and Rational Theology), translated by Allen W. Wood and George Di Giovanni. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Korsgaard, Christine. “Self-Constitution and Irony.” In A Case for Irony, by Jonathon Lear. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. Lear, Jonathan. A Case for Irony. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. McDowell, John. Mind, Value, and Reality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals. Translated by Douglas Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Reginster, Bernard. Freud on Identification. Unpublished.

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NOTES 1. In this chapter I take the notion of second nature to be synonymous with “overall virtue” in Aristotle, that is, synonymous with the character virtues and the intellectual virtues together, as a unity. Moreover, I will argue that second nature always in some sense includes first nature in a transformed form. I note this here in order to avoid the misunderstanding that the distinction between first and second nature is equivalent with the distinction between desires and rationality. Instead, the suggestion here is to think of first nature as only working in accord with an individual’s desires, whereas second nature is working according to both, these desires and rational-ethical insight, together. 2. What I here describe as the overly rationalist account of second nature is currently a very common interpretation of Aristotle’s notion of virtue. Proponents of this view either imply or explicitly state that virtue is achieved once and for all (which is just a different way of saying that it is achieved without any remainder of frustrated desires of the individual). This now common view originates, to my knowledge, from John McDowell (cf. in his Mind, Value, and Reality, 2001). There are other Aristotelians who would argue against such an interpretation, most notably Sarah Broadie (cf. her Commentary in the Rowe translation of the Nicomachean Ethics used in this chapter), but for simplicity I will nevertheless refer to this interpretation as “the common interpretation” of Aristotle in this chapter. 3. In this chapter I will refer to a version of the early Freud, which yields a more disunified account of the human psyche than the later Freud. I think that Freud’s later views became more similar to an Aristotelian account of how human beings develop. Sticking to a part of the early Freud for the purposes of the argument in this chapter does not mean that other parts of the early Freud would also have to be endorsed, like for example his hydraulic tension-reduction model of desire, and similar claims. 4. The challenge for which I use Freud in order to formulate my revision of the notions of second nature and virtue in this chapter could also be formulated by only using non-empirical premises, I think, for example by formulating a similar challenge with Nietzschean assumptions. But I take it as a plus that Freud can also make an empirical claim that human beings in fact are the way we suppose them to be in this challenge (and so it is ultimately irrelevant for my arguments whether Freud’s empirical claims hold up according to today’s psychologists). 5. Throughout the chapter I claim that it is consistent with Aristotle to think of virtue in a more active, change-involving way. This goes very much against the more common interpretation of Aristotle’s ethics, however, where it is more important to emphasize that virtue entails some form of stability. Therefore, I just want to provide a few nonconclusive hints here why I think there is evidence in Aristotle that the more common interpretation might emphasize the static aspect of virtue too much: First, he claims that eudaimonia is an activity in the first sentence of Book I.13 of the Nicomachean Ethics: “Since happiness [eudaimonia] is some activity [energeia] of soul in accordance with complete excellence.” 1102a5. Second, he says that even the virtuous subject can make mistakes (and thus has to adjust and change her understanding) in certain situations (cf. Book III of the NE). Third, he generally states that all things in the sublunary sphere are subject to change (kinesis), and the life of human beings, including their good life, fully belongs into this sublunary sphere. 6. “In the course of centuries the naïve self-love of men has had to submit to two major blows at the hands of science. The first was when they learnt that our earth was not the centre of the universe but only a tiny fragment of a cosmic system of scarcely imaginable vastness. This is associated in our minds with the name of Copernicus, though something similar had already been asserted by Alexandrian science. The second blow fell when biological research destroyed man’s supposedly privileged place in creation and proved his descent from the animal kingdom and his ineradicable animal nature. This revaluation has been accomplished in our own days by Darwin, Wallace and their predecessors, though not without the most violent contemporary opposition. But human megalomania will have suffered its third and most wounding blow from the psychological research of the present time which seeks to prove to the ego that it is not even

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master in its own house, but must content itself with scanty information of what is going on unconsciously in its mind.” Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis: 284–85. 7. What seems to be worth being preserved from such a Primacy of First Nature account is the thought that such an account has the potential to resist pressures of heteronomous social constraints on the individual’s desires, and thus taking such disruptive desires of the individual more seriously might be a stronghold against ideologies and collective dogmatisms. This is so because if one takes these inherently disruptive desires seriously, one cannot “theorize away” the existence of continuing tensions between the individual’s desires on the one hand, and the demands of life and the heteronomous social demands on the other, and they might therefore be a valuable source of autonomy and freedom. 8. It is only a partial transformation precisely because there still remains a part of unchanged first nature in the ego, according to Freud. 9. Note that there are currently two senses of the notion “ego” in use in this passage, one being equivalent to “second nature” as in the rest of the chapter, and the other stemming from Freud’s inconsequent use of “ego” in the quoted passage above, as in “ego-libido.” Ego-libido, as opposed to object-libido, is here confusingly exactly the libido of first nature, a libido directed toward itself (primary narcissism), whereas object-libido in the quoted passage takes the role of second nature, a libido that takes into consideration its relation to others. 10. I think of them as a special kind of desire, namely a desire that is accustomed to become unfailingly and fully satisfied. It is a kind of desire that works according to the structure “no matter with what I come up, it will be satisfied.” In other words, what is distinctive about what I call “inappeasable desires” is that they retain their motivational force, no matter what. It is a memory trace of a feeling of omnipotence, but not a desire for omnipotence. 11. Aristotle does actually have a notion of less-trainable emotions himself, too, namely the epithymiai, but these do not seem to fully fit what I say about inappeasable desires either: they are fixed in terms of their objects, which can only be food, drink, or sex, according to Aristotle. But it is important to note that my introduction of inappeasable desires into Aristotle’s notion of virtue nevertheless is not introducing a new part of the psyche either. See Klaus Corcilius for Aristotle’s distinction between parts of the soul on the one hand and capacities or aspects of these parts on the other. Aristotle says in De Anima that there are exactly three parts of the soul—the nutritive, perceptive, and the rational one—and my point about taking the inappeasable desires seriously does not change anything about this. It only makes a point about an aspect of the perceptual part, the desires, in that there are more disruptive ones besides the desires Aristotle himself considered to exist. Aristotle did acknowledge the phenomena of inappeasable desires (for example, when he talks about how traumatic experiences in childhood can make someone act wrongly later in life in Book VII of the Nicomachean Ethics, and what he says about dreams there), but he did not think that they were an aspect of the normal human psyche, and he therefore did not give them a lot of weight in his ethical considerations (as opposed to his medical ones). Despite this, I want to argue, his concept of virtue is putting enough emphasis on activity that it can appropriate the inclusion of these phenomena and these desires into his ethical system, too. 12. The difference between the virtuous and the enkratic character is, according to Aristotle, that while they both act in the right way, the enkratic’s desires aim toward the wrong action. For example, both the enkratic and the virtuous character do not eat the cake in a situation where it is wrong to do so, but while the enkratic nevertheless desires the cake, the virtuous character does not feel any pull at all to eat it. The virtuous’s desires are unified with her judgment about the right action, and they are trained to never even desire the wrong action. The enkratic’s desires are not trained in this way. It seems then, prima facie, that a virtuous character is not possible if we take Freud seriously, because there is always such a disruptive kind of desire that does not fit with our judgment, and so the best we can hope for is to be selfcontrolled. For this distinction between the enkratic and the virtuous subject, see Book VII of the Nicomachean Ethics, and the following two passages from Book I.13: “Take those with and without self-control: we praise their reason, and the aspect of their soul that possesses reason; it gives the right encouragement, in the direction of what is best, but there appears to be something else besides reason that is naturally in them, which fights against reason and resists it” NE, 1102b14–19; and later:

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“at any rate, in the self-controlled person it [the non-rational part] is obedient to reason— and in the moderate and courageous [i.e., the virtuous] person it is presumably still readier to listen; for in him it always chimes with reason” NE, 1102b27–29. 13. Strictly speaking I then still have not shown that it is in fact our higher nature. All I can really argue for in this chapter is to preserve the possibility for it to be our higher nature despite the Freudian challenge. I will argue at the end of the chapter when I distinguish my account from Lear’s, however, that it is with our rational capacities, and not from our first nature (in the form of desires), that we create and maintain virtue, and this can be taken as a beginning of a positive argument that our second nature indeed is our higher nature (because only second nature includes our rational capacities). 14. The activity of synthesizing the newly surfaced inappeasable desires with the demands of life also partially consists in a rational activity, as I want to argue, and not only in an affective character-change. The “ongoing right reaction to inappeasable desires” certainly also entails especially well-trained desires in some way, but I want to argue that especially well trained desires alone would not be enough—a rational synthesizing also has to take place. This is consistent with the Aristotelian point that there is something distinctive about virtue which is different from self-control: a virtuous subject has acquired a capacity (which is essentially but not exclusively rational) of dealing with disunity and tensions which is not present in the selfcontrolled subject. 15. A related difficulty is the worry that Freud’s concept of the first phase in human psychological development, primary narcissism, where needs are always immediately satisfied and the infant therefore takes itself to be omnipotent, might be a distinctively bourgeois, upper-middle class, nineteenth-century assumption. Aristotle, and indeed many contemporary psychologists, would probably assume in opposition to Freud that, for the children of most people, the world is a very hostile place. It would seem that, in sheer numbers, more infants experience early life as one where their desires and needs are not met, and thus they might never go through a phase of primary narcissism at all. One could technically still argue that they might nevertheless (or even more) have disruptive desires throughout adult life, even if they do not go through such a phase of immediate satisfaction, but at least the developmental story told by Freud (and adopted by me) in order to explain why there are disruptive desires would not be plausible anymore. But note: the developmental story is not necessary for the more substantial claim that there will always resurface such disruptive desires again for adult human beings. Losing the support of this developmental story, however, would put some more weight on the worry that the idea of ongoing unfulfilled desires is just a way of subscribing to a form of perfectionism, which can lend itself to a form of heteronomous social constraints too. 16. There is a different way of interpreting this passage from Kant’s Religionsschrift, “Concerning the battle of the good against the evil principle for dominion over the human being,” and it is not entirely clear whether Baxley really means to interpret Kant in the way I have portrayed it, and which makes it share some features with Freudian moral psychology. The other way of interpreting the “invisible enemy who hides behind reason” in this passage is not to interpret it as disruptive desires that hide behind reason in the sense that they are not admissible through reasoning (which is the similarity to Freud), but as “perverted maxims” which disguise themselves as reason, of which Kant talks in a footnote on 6:59: “The first really good thing that a human being can do is to extricate himself from an evil which is to be sought not in his inclinations but in his perverted maxims, and hence in freedom itself.” In other words, what Kant might have meant by the “invisible enemy who hides behind reason,” and thus the “perverted maxims” here, might rather be a desire which disguises itself as reason. When an individual’s desire disguises itself as a rational maxim, it purports itself to be a maxim for others, too, and so others are supposed to act according to it. If the “invisible enemy” is thus interpreted in this way, then Kant’s target would rather be dogmatisms and ideologies as enemies of reason, and thus interestingly, Kant would ultimately turn out to have a much more similar view to mine than it seems with the Freudian interpretation of the “invisible enemy.”

Chapter Two

The Moral Tragedy of the Biological Imperative What Nietzsche Can and Cannot Teach Us about the Evolution of Morality Scott M. James and Matthew C. Eshleman

INTRODUCTION In trying to understand the nature of ethics, more and more effort is being directed toward understanding the natural history of ethics, that is, the natural history of ethical behavior, of moral emotions, of moral valuation. Increasingly, authors turn to Darwin’s theory of natural selection, and its descendent studies for assistance in these efforts. Nietzsche, while openly hostile to Darwinian thought—even if, as is frequently thought, Nietzsche “bit the hand that fed him”—sketched a moral genealogy which, according to some commentators, anticipated this naturalistic turn. 1 Most notably, John Richardson (2004) argues that Darwinian grounds illuminate Nietzsche’s views: “The novelties in [Nietzsche’s] positions lie with remarkable consistency in the ways he breaks from—and his view advances (in intent) beyond—Darwin” (3). 2 We find this general approach profitable and hope to extend it here, albeit in a programmatic kind of way. We also believe, however, that, although a recent cottage industry on Nietzsche and Darwinism surrounds contemporary Nietzsche scholarship, much, but not all of it, exhibits the following asymmetry: Nietzsche scholars try to work out Nietzsche’s relationship to Darwin, Social-Darwinism, and Neo-Darwinism; whereas relatively few Neo-Darwinians try to show where Nietzsche goes right and wrong. Thus, in an attempt to understand Nietzsche in light of continuing advances in biological 21

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and social sciences, it is important to identify the ways in which Neo-Darwinism not only supports but also breaks with—and advances beyond— Nietzsche. What follows, then, is not primarily an exegesis of Nietzsche. Instead, we ask: If Darwinian theory affords the most perspicacious and compelling interpretation of Nietzsche’s moral speculations (as Richardson maintains), in what ways do these speculations mirror—and fail to mirror—the developing picture of the natural history of ethics and what philosophical advances might we achieve in light of clarifying these similarities and differences? We hope to show that in some key respects the general structure of Nietzsche’s moral psychology recapitulates central features of the biological account currently promoted across disciplines. On the one hand, the idea that natural, sexual, and social selection pressures generated human creatures whose behavior and deliberative practices were morally valenced currently approaches orthodoxy. On the other hand, although Richardson argues that Nietzsche should be read as promoting just such a narrative, the neo-Darwinian breaks from Nietzsche in terms of both the nature of the drives that underlie the practice of moral valuation and the process and content of social selection. To be more specific, we argue that Nietzsche underappreciates how primitive (and, hence, basic) certain pro-social emotions must have been and how these, in turn, partially constitute objects of social selection. Elevating prosocial emotions—for example, care, empathy, and reciprocal altruism—to their proper station, in accordance with our best contemporary biological science, has the effect of not only reframing how we understand the “human sickness” of which Nietzsche often speaks but it also plausibly mitigates Nietzsche’s assault on egalitarianism. 3 Otherwise put, members of the herd are neither nearly as internally divided as Nietzsche insists, nor do pro-social, affective dispositions, which undergird egalitarian societies, necessarily have the kinds of negative consequences that Nietzsche, at times, forecasts. With that said, an unresolved conflict arguably persists, one that puzzles Nietzsche scholars and contemporary evolutionary ethicists alike: the inescapable tendency to make judgments about the moral properties of certain acts (i.e., their rightness or wrongness) in spite of legitimate doubts about the ontological status of such properties. On one highly plausible reading, Nietzsche presciently advances a version of moral nihilism tied to a sophisticated moral fictionalism (Hussain 2007), precisely the combination of metaethical views increasingly popular among many prominent evolutionary ethicists. While we cannot fully work out the following line of analysis, we suggest that our best biology advocates some version of moral fictionalism that finds such a line in Nietzsche. 4 The four sections that follow unfold from the general to the specific and from the affirmative to the critical. The first section (“What Nietzsche Gets Right”) lays out, in a programmatic and general way, several prominent

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strands in Nietzsche’s analyses of “morality” supported by contemporary neo-Darwinian analysis: the role of unconscious motivation, its consequent inherent bias, our questionable autonomy, and the meta-ethical views of moral nihilism and moral fictionalism. Section two (“What Nietzsche Misses”) attempts to map out the ways in which Nietzsche failed to anticipate the nature of our moral development, while section three (“How Nietzsche Misses”) uncovers the reasons why he misses. WHAT NIETZSCHE GETS RIGHT At least since Nietzsche and Freud, we have known that much of what drives our conscious thoughts and behaviors remain largely hidden from us. Nietzsche argues that what we call “consciousness” emerged late on the evolutionary totem-pole, remains rather undeveloped, and may even be ill-suited for survival (GS 11). Further, “due to the nature of animal consciousness, the world of which we can become conscious is merely a surface-and signworld, a world generalized and made common”; consequently, consciousness “involves a vast and thorough corruption, falsification, superficialization, and generalization” (GS 354). 5 (For other significant discussions of Nietzsche analysis of the nature of the unconscious, see, e.g., D 115, 119, 129; GS 11, 333, 355; BGE 20, 32, 191, 192, 230; GM II and III). Recently, the evidence for just how little access we have to our own motives has not simply burgeoned but many of the various ways in which conscious thinking “corrupts” and “falsifies” reality have been clarified with great precision. The work of Kahneman and Tversky (1979) reveals both the opacity of introspective awareness and the many biases that subconsciously influence our decisions—including our moral decisions. Add to this the confabulation tendency: We routinely offer post hoc rationalizations of our decisions that, while quite convincing to our own ear, rarely capture our actual motives. Josh Greene’s work in moral psychology demonstrates how we employ these tendencies in the moral domain. Or consider “moral dumbfounding,” the term Jonathan Haidt (1993, 2012) gives to describe situations where subjects express unambiguous moral judgments about the wrongness of certain acts (e.g., killing one’s aging dog and eating it) but fail, even after prolonged periods of reflection, to justify the judgment. Subjects find themselves making moral judgments and assuming that a chain of reasoning must lead to the judgment; hence, they frequently seek to uncover that chain. But, like Greene, Haidt shows that the judgment does not have its source in reasoned deliberations. Rather, we simply feel that an act is wrong and then go about constructing a post hoc argument that more or less supports that judgment (GM.II.4). 6

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Given that our subterranean unconscious life motivates various mistakes when it comes to consciously understanding our moral situation, it follows that our moral connections (if not commitments) to others are largely beyond our control. Our moral selves are not, first and foremost, freely chosen. To be sure, Nietzsche may well be at pains to show that even if some of us can exert something like self-control, it does not come for free. 7 The view may seem, at first blush, unremarkable given the widening scope of evolutionary psychology; however, it was only recently that theorists have come to appreciate the distinct innovation this lack of conscious self-control represents, albeit developed along lines only loosely related to Nietzsche. For example, the economist Robert Frank (1988) recently developed this general theme in an evolutionary context: human emotions, far from being evolutionary by-products, constitute strategic mechanisms that function to solve recurring commitment problems that confronted our ancestors. The somewhat paradoxical idea is that a cognitively sophisticated organism will enjoy greater success over the long run by selectively ceding behavioral control to the independent operations of emotions. (To be sure, it is not the individual who cedes control, but natural selection.) On this hypothesis, expressions of feelings of love or revenge—or something like “moral guilt,” say—exemplify and signal to others a disposition to commit to acts that deliver long-term benefits. For example, the incentive to keep a promise will often appear minimal by comparison to the incentive one had to make the promise in the first place, and so it can seem irrational to keep one’s promise after one has enjoyed the benefits of making the promise. 8 Thus, for individuals like us embedded in complex social arrangements, such thinking (and its attendant behavior) will eventually prove too costly. Now imagine an individual who, despite perhaps making similar cost/ benefit analyses, nevertheless just feels bad at the thought of reneging on her promise (she’s stung by a “pang of conscience,” as it were). 9 The feeling arrives reflexively and, despite its unwelcome arrival, is nearly impossible to overcome. The immediate result is that this individual is more likely to keep her promise, and the long-term result is that, in the eyes of her groupmates, she will be an attractive ally. If this general theme describes the origin of much of our moral selves, then Nietzsche’s suspicions are, at one level, vindicated—on more than one level in fact. We were not free to choose our moral selves, nor the general structure of our moral values. At the same time, our freedom to respond to others, on any given occasion, is severely circumscribed. To press Hume’s dictum into novel service, moral reason is a slave of the passions, just like the “slave revolt” in morality gave rise to greater and greater possibilities of self-control. Nietzsche also correctly assesses the fact that honestly seeking to grasp our nature by way of our best science and philosophy should lead us to reassess the nature of our received system of valuation: by exposing our “true

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natures” we expose the true ontology of value. Indeed, a careful appraisal of the forces that led to our particular moral system should, argues Nietzsche, directly undermine our confidence in its objective status. The modern ethical discovery consists in locating not an independent realm of value, but a human tendency to value: “Whatever has value in the current world, has it not in itself, from nature—nature is always valueless—but one has once given it a value, as a gift, and we are these givers and gifters!” (Z.i.15). Although this view (variously described as subjectivism, projectivism, or fictionalism) has long been a staple of modern moral theory, its recent growth in popularity results from the reawakening of evolutionary thought since the 1960s. Reconstructing an evolutionary account of moral judgment leads Richard Joyce (2005, 108), for instance, to the view that “the human tendency to project emotions onto the world lies at the heart of our moral sense.” Quite a few prominent moral philosophers, applying the same evolutionary principles, arrive at a complimentary conclusion. 10 Otherwise put, the meta-ethical implications of the above general considerations prove difficult to escape. Philip Kitcher (2005, 176) argues that “at the initial stage, proto-morality is introduced as a system of primitive rules for transcending the fraught sociality of early hominids.” If this is correct, then “there’s no issue here of perceiving moral truths . . . The criterion of success isn’t accurate representation, but the improvement of social cohesion.” Like Kitcher, Joyce (2007) argues that reconstructing the genealogy of our moral judgment, by way of Darwinian selection, belies the assumption that there are values “in the world” to be discovered: “The function that natural selection had in mind for moral judgment was [nothing] remotely like detecting a feature of the world” (131). Though she travels along a different path, Sharon Street (2006) arrives at the same general conclusion: “The function of evaluative judgments from an evolutionary point of view is not to ‘track’ independent evaluative truths, but rather to get us to respond to our circumstances in ways that are adaptive” (157–58). WHAT NIETZSCHE MISSES In our view, where contemporary evolutionary theory most notably diverges, perhaps only in emphasis, from Nietzsche concerns social selection, its relationship to natural selection, and attendant pro-social emotions. What Nietzsche plausibly misses, or, to put matters more softly, underplays, concerns the suite of social drives (e.g., care, empathy, deference, reciprocal altruism, etc.) that now appear no less animal, no less basic than the domineering drives he stresses. The so-called will to power does not deserve genealogical priority over the will to bond. What Nietzsche calls “punctual unreflective obedience” and “mutual good deeds” must have been instantiated much earlier

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than he frequently implies (GM.III.18). Otherwise put, pro-social emotions required for small group cohesion by socially dependent beings—that is, creatures that cannot survive on their own—seems likely to come before groups begin to dominate other groups in the way Nietzsche describes, see, for example, GM.I and II. So understood, there is a sense in which Nietzsche seems to take away with one hand what he gives with another, insofar as Nietzsche’s infamous “blond beasts” presuppose some base level, pro-social behaviors, in order to make their warlike tendencies effective. 11 This raises an interpretive worry raised most poignantly by Aaron Ridley (1998, 20–21): “[w]hat Nietzsche is evading in all of this, of course, is the recognition that the nobles need a ‘bad’ conscience themselves even before they can create the conditions required to produce it in others . . . the nobles need a ‘bad’ conscience to do what they do” (DC 20–21). 12 We think that what the putative noble warriors were able to accomplish—for example, conquer wandering hoards and sculpt them into something approximating settled societies—presupposes pro-social emotions and behaviors. Unfortunately, Nietzsche says very little about how such emotions and behaviors could arise outside of repressive conditions. 13 To come at this point from a somewhat different direction, to the extent that Nietzsche presupposes the evolution of morality (in, what Leiter refers to as, the pejorative sense) is essentially a matter of transforming homo individualis into homo moralis, of subduing and inhibiting animalistic individuals in their natural state of independence, this picture of human evolution stands increasingly at odds with hypotheses coming out of contemporary psychology, neuroscience, primatology, and anthropology. 14 For example, Nietzsche describes the so-called “blond beasts” as a solitary species that thrives on anarchy (GM.III.18–19, emphasis added, see also BGE 199–201). Somehow this putatively solitary species, whatever exactly that may mean, either lacked or enjoyed a very weak herd instinct. This seems highly implausible, since the strength of dominating groups would have required a very high degree of social-coordination. To overstate the case only slightly, we are social “all the way back.” If legitimate, this correction could have substantial implications for Nietzsche’s revilement of traditional moral norms, for it would undercut grounds for alleging that morality is merely the product of some later cultural process out of keeping with nature’s designing hand. Otherwise put, the building blocks for what we’ve come to understand (and misunderstand) as morality must have arisen much earlier than Nietzsche frequently suggests. Nietzsche seems to think there was a period during which our basic drives and motives (which eventually constituted reactive values) were formed, a period marked by persistent struggle and aggression—and only later did society begin to distort that nature by laying over it other motives: care, empathy, deference, self-control, drives that together comprise in part the

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herd instinct. It is these that eventually led—regrettably in Nietzsche’s view—to morality (in the pejorative sense). On Richardson’s reading of Nietzsche, Darwinian theory cannot by itself account for morality’s evolution for it only “gives the start of the story,” for it only explains “the animal in us,” where this is not to deny that animals have values (2006, 78). But Nietzsche insists that this story needs supplementing: “there’s a somewhat different form of selection that is, with us, superimposed on the natural selection that more completely explains plants and animals” (ibid., emphasis added). This is what Richardson refers to as ‘social selection,’ and it is this that explains “our more peculiarly human behaviors” (2006, 78). Notably, Richardson’s usage of “social selection” departs from standard biological use (more on this below). Richardson describes a process now commonly referred to as ‘memetic selection’ (Dawkins 1976), according to which traits are not acquired via genetic selection, but “by copying and remembering the practice of (other members of) the social group” (2006, 82). This is the transforming power of customs and practices, a power whose structure is distinct from natural selection. The key point here, however, is that Nietzsche’s narrative, as interpreted by Richardson, assumes that the stages of moral evolution were both sequential and antagonistic: social selection represents a later evolutionary process “set . . . upon and against these [Darwinian] values long sedimented into us by ‘nature,’” . . . “rewriting . . . and overwriting . . . the dispositions shaped by natural selection” (2006, 80, 83; emphasis added). Habits produced by social selection allegedly work “against natural selection,” constantly working “to oppose and suppress inherited drives” (2006, 84). Nietzsche refers to the process as “taming” and “domestication.” Moreover, since this form of selection works “toward a different overall end,” we should not be surprised that social selection produces dispositions that “hinder the organism’s preservation and growth” and disrupts the “coordinated service of the single reproductive end . . . the simple ‘health’ of animal life” (ibid.). This then is the path that leads us to one of Nietzsche’s more infamous themes: human “sickness.” If evolution had been confined to natural selection, had there never been social selection pressures, man would have functioned in a state of relative health, free from the divisive forces of social life. Instead, our path led to group living: And thus began the greatest and uncanniest illness, from which humanity still today has not recovered, the suffering of the human over the human, over himself: as the result of a forcible sundering from the animal past. (GM.ii.13)

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HOW NIETZSCHE MISSES Our best evidence no longer supports Nietzsche’s account of social selection, at least as understood by Richardson. At worst, it gets things positively backward, insofar as the very drives Nietzsche laments (i.e., social values) could not have been the product of social selection (in Richardson’s sense), for it is these drives that made society possible in the first place. Absent those drives, the conditions for social cohesion could not have been met and so, patently, could not have been their cause. At best, Nietzsche’s narrative arbitrarily downplays the centrality of our social drives and thus obscures the authenticity of both social and moral commitments. This in turn risks overlooking entirely other forms of human “sickness”—the sickness that accompanies social rejection and isolation, for instance, and the various ways in which our biology does not keep up with mundane social changes. In any event, it’s possible to see Nietzsche as the first (and most provocative) thinker in a long line of thinkers to frame the explanatory problem of the evolution of morality as a problem of bridging the divide between homo individualis and homo moralis. The idea continues to seduce (philosophers in the main), so much so that writers feel compelled to remind their contemporaries of the revised paradigm: “philosophers would do well to follow de Waal (2013) and avoid the pessimistic and superficial portrait of an exclusively selfish and egoistic human nature that earlier sociobiological writers like Dawkins (1976) and Ridley (1996) promulgated so effectively” (Boehm 2014, 176). Homo individualis is very likely a biological myth. A more perspicacious rendering of the problem would be: What forces transformed homo socialis into homo moralis? There was a time, perhaps hundreds of millions of years ago (well before the hominoids), during which organisms lacked any recognizable social dispositions. But converging lines of evidence now make it increasingly likely that by the time the first hominids came down out of the trees and diverged from Old World primates (approximately five mya), crucial components of a social nature were already common features of the population. The biological anthropologist Chris Boehm maintains that five to seven million years ago, “we had in place empathetic perspective taking and self-recognition, along with some ability to form political coalitions that united subordinates” (2014, 174). Cross-species investigations reveal that the forces of sex selection, kin selection, and reciprocal altruism reliably and regularly produce populations that bring organisms together, even if predatory and self-interested behavior routinely tear them apart. Evidence from primatology and neurobiology suggests that “human morality . . . can be seen as an expansion of the primate capacity to care for others, which is wired in humans’ social brain from its emergence in early ontogeny” (Ferrari 2014, 301). Patricia Churchland argues that “with the evolution of mammals, the rudimentary ‘self-caring

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organization’ is modified to extend the basic values of being alive and well to selected others,” principally through the evolving activities of the nonapeptides oxytocin and vasopressin, whose lineage goes back some 500 million years (2014, 288–89). The forces responsible for these trends do not, pace Nietzsche, operate at a level above natural selection. The processes of selection are no less natural. As previously noted, social selection has a different usage among biologists than it does for Richardson. For the former, social selection is like any other selection, in that certain phenotypic traits are being selected for, traits that, during the period of evolutionary adaptiveness, tended to provide a biological advantage (even if slight) for the organism who possessed it. It’s just that, in the case of social selection, “genetic selection . . . is accomplished by the social, as opposed to the natural environment” (Boehm 2014, 168). So where a trait tended to decrease an organism’s ability to thrive in a social setting, this would suppress that trait’s frequency in the population. Conversely, where a trait tended to increase an organism’s ability to thrive in a social setting, this trait would spread. Nietzsche, however, seems to have appreciated only half the picture. Nietzsche is correct that, according to Richardson, “social selection designs drives and practices that serve the survival or expansion of the social group” (2006, 84). But leaving matters here is biologically untenable (and, for Nietzsche, invites derision, for it encourages the impression that these “valuings and rank-orders [of morality] are always the expression of needs of a community and herd: that which benefits it first—and second and third—, that is also the highest measure for the values of all individuals” [GS116]). Darwinian selection—be it sexual, kin, social, or whatever—must ultimately be measured by its impact on the individual. “Survival or expansion of the social group” means nothing if it does not redound to the biological fitness of the individual. At least methodologically, biologists continue to hue closely to the belief that the unit of selection is the individual, if not individual gene. For example, in describing how moralistic group punishment would have tended to suppress individualistic alpha tendencies and to promote egalitarianism, Boehm stresses that “for the reputational type of social selection the level of evolutionary competition is strictly individual:” Furthermore, when entire groups actively apply punishment to make a deviant reform or eliminate him, the level of genetic selection is still individual. The group does serve as a critical social environment, but basically the selection impact falls upon the individual. (2014, 178)

To connect the dots, then: Because individuals increasingly exhibited (limited forms of) care, empathy, trust, and moralistic punishment, the groups of which they were a part fared better ceteris paribus than groups where such

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tendencies were in shorter supply. But on this basis one should not conclude, as Nietzsche does, that individuals have been molded to serve the ends of the group, that obedience to the needs of the group is good only for the sake of the group. It is this move that contemporary Darwinian logic emphatically rejects. When the group fares better as a result of the prevalence of social instincts among its individual members, the individual member in turn fares better—fares better, that is, than the individual in groups where such instincts are lacking. After all, groups comprised of socially attuned creatures, because they regularly engage in moralistic punishment, can insulate themselves from a mutant organism seeking to exploit their altruism, a protection not available to groups that exhibit the kind of herd instinct Nietzsche envisions (think of the Tragedy of the Commons). That is, on Nietzsche’s model, according to which values are selected only “on behalf of the herd” (Richardson 2006, 92), members of such a group would be particularly vulnerable to a mutant whose values dispose him to satisfy his own ends only. Such a population would be evolutionarily unstable and unlikely to persist for long (cf. Skyrms 1996). Standard evolutionary models show that such an individual will, over generations, drive the population in the direction of selfishness. A more biologically realistic account would be one in which organisms exhibit just those social instincts, modulated to the conditions of the group, that reliably deliver individual returns on group investment. By way of sophisticated selective feedback, the herd instinct (not to mention, deference, selfcontrol, friendship, and empathy) was good only because (and when) it was good for my ancestors. In short, the social instincts were selected for the sake of the individual. Frans de Waal, who perhaps more than anyone has campaigned to correct the misperception (perpetuated, ironically enough, by his own 1982 text) that hominids’ closest ancestors were Machiavellian schemers, recognizes the counterintuitiveness of this idea: “We are facing the profound paradox that genetic self-advancement at the expense of others—which is the basic thrust of evolution—has given rise to remarkable capacities for caring and sympathy” (1996, 5). If indeed it turns out that these drives constitute a central part of our animal drives, and Nietzsche insists on cultivating the animal drives, it is worth asking what attitudes we ought to take toward our social selves. CONCLUSION: NIETZSCHE’S REVENGE? If the biological imperative must, of factual necessity, instantiate pro-social emotions and dispositions, one should ask just how far such “good will” extends. Although we have called into question certain features of Nietzsche’s story about how human animals evolved out of nonhuman animals on

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the basis of social selection that supervenes, as it were, on natural selection, Nietzsche’s analysis really gains force, especially in GM, when aggressive extra-group conflict arises and one group dominates and enslaves another group. Otherwise put, a great deal of archeological and anthropological data suggest that prior to such extra-group conflict, small scale hunter-gather societies were largely peaceful and egalitarian, existing without much serious warfare between clans and groups, albeit with certain qualifications—for example, forms of gender inequality can be found early on (Flannery and Marcus, 2014). Could the most prominent generator of cultural change (perhaps even of putative “high culture” itself) arise out of or be dependent upon extra-group conflicts and its constituent phenomena like piracy, warfare, enslavement, and subjugation? If natural selection gave rise to small groups of social-human-animals, perhaps the survival conditions under late-staged, extra-group invasion led to significant transformations of human existence and new kinds of selective pressures. The tragedy of the biological imperative, at least for tender-hearted creatures, would then be that this imperative does not reach universality. It would perhaps remain crucially and cruelly hemmed in by families, clans, social ranks and states, and so forth (cf. Greene 2013). Is it possible that what should remain biologically unstable find stabilizing forces in cultural formations, for example, in technology? What should be biologically unstable, for example, dominant individuals and freeriders, could only be held in place by tenuous social forces. Unless humans can cooperatively coordinate on scales much greater than biology could ever demand, then perhaps the human animal turned in upon itself to a degree even unimaginable by Nietzsche himself and would lead to the end of “civilization,” if not undermine the biosphere itself. Perhaps Nietzsche worries over egalitarianism should go precisely the other way round. REFERENCES Abbey, Ruth and Fredrick Appel. “Nietzsche and the Will to Politics.” Review of Politics, Vol. 60, No. 1 (1998): 83–114. Ansell-Pearson, Keith. “Nietzsche’s Anti-Darwinism” (Review). The Journal of Nietzsche Studies, Vol. 42 (2011): 130–34. Berry, Jessica. “Perspectivism and Ephexis in Interpretation.” Philosophical Topics, Vol. 33, No. 2 (2005): 19–44. Blackburn, Simon. Ruling Passions: A Theory of Practical Reasoning. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Boehm, Christopher. Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. ———. “The Moral Consequences of Social Selection.” Behavior, Vol. 151 (2014): 167–83. Carlsmith, K. M., J. Darley, and P. Robinson. “Why Do We Punish? Deterrence and Just Deserts as Motives for Punishment.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 83 (2002): 284–99.

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Carlsmith, K. W., T. Wilson, and D. Gilbert. “The Paradoxical Consequences of Revenge.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 95, No. 6 (2008): 1316–24. Churchland, Patricia. “The Neurobiological Platform for Moral Values.” Behavior 151 (2014): 283–96. Conway, Daniel. “How We Became What We Are: Tracking the ‘Beasts of Prey.’” In Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals: Critical Essays, edited by Christa Davis Acampora. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006. Revised from early essay published in A Nietzschean Bestiary: Becoming Animal beyond Docile and Brutal, edited by Christa Davis Acampora and Ralph R. Acampora (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004). Cox, Christoph. Nietzsche: Naturalism and Interpretation. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999. Daigle, Christine. “Nietzsche: Virtue Ethics . . . Virtue Politics?” Journal of Nietzsche Studies, No. 32 (2006): 1–21 Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976. Ferrari, P. “The Neuroscience of Social Relations: A Comparative Approach to Empathy and to the Capacity of Evaluating Others’ Action Value.” Behavior, Vol. 151 (2014): 297–313. Foot, Philippa. “The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of Double Effect.” Oxford Review, No. 5 (1967): 5–15. Forber, Patrick. “Nietzsche Was No Darwinian.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 75, No. 2 (2007): 369–82 Frank, Robert. Passions within Reason: The Strategic Role of the Emotions. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1988. Gellens, Sven, and Benjamin Biebuyck. “The Mechanism of Cultural Evolution in Nietzsche’s Genealogical Writings.” Philosophy Today, Vol. 56, No. 3 (2011): 309–26. Gemes, Kenneth, and Simon May. Nietzsche on Freedom and Autonomy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Gibbard, A. Wise Choices, Apt Feelings: A Theory of Normative Judgment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. Greene, Joshua. “Cognitive Neuroscience and the Structure of the Moral Mind.” In The Innate Mind: Structure and Contents, Vol. 1, edited by Peter Carruthers, Stephen Laurence, and Stephen Sich. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. ———. “The Secret Joke on Kant’s Soul.” In Moral Psychology, Vol. 3, edited by W. SinnottArmstrong. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008. ———. Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap between Us and Them. New York: Penguin USA, 2013. Haidt, J., S. Koller, and M. Dias. “Affect, Culture, and Morality, or Is It Wrong to Eat Your Dog?” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 65 (1993): 613–28. Hussain, Nadeem. “Honest Illusions: Valuing for Nietzsche’s Free Spirits.” In Nietzsche and Morality, edited by B. Leiter and N. Sinhababu. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Janway, Christopher, and Simon Robertson, eds. Nietzsche, Naturalism and Normativity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Johnson, Dirk. Nietzsche’s Anti-Darwinism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Joyce, Richard. The Evolution of Morality. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007. Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011. Kahneman, Daniel, and A. Tversky. “Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk.” Econometrica, Vol. 47, No. 2 (1979): 263. Katsafanas, Paul. “Nietzsche’s Theory of Mind: Consciousness and Conceptualization.” European Journal of Philosophy, 13 (April 2005): 1–31 ———. “Nietzsche on the Nature of the Unconscious.” Inquiry, Vol. 58, No. 3 (2014): 327–52. Kitcher, P. “Biology and Ethics.” In The Oxford Handbook of Ethics, edited by D. Copp. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. ———. The Ethical Project. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. Migotti, Mark. “Slave Morality, and the Bushmen.” In Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals: Critical Essays, edited by Christa Davis Acampora. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006. Revised and excerpted from longer essay first published in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 58, No. 4 (1998): 745–80.

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Nietzsche, F. Thus Spake Zarathustra. (1882–1885). ———. Human, All Too Human. (1876–1879). Prinz, Jesse J. The Emotional Construction of Morals. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Richardson, John. Nietzsche’s New Darwinism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Ruse, Michael. “Evolutionary Ethics: A Phoenix Arisen.” In Issues in Evolutionary Ethics, edited by Paul Thompson. Albany: SUNY Press, 1995. Skyrms, Brian. Evolution of the Social Contract. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Street, S. “A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value.” Philosophical Studies 127 (2006): 109–66. Thiele, Leslie Paul. Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of the Soul: A Study of Heroic Individualism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton, University Press, 1990. De Waal, Franz. Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. ———. Peacemaking among Primates. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989.

NOTES 1. A considerable and growing body of recent work debates the precise nature of the relationship between Nietzsche and naturalism. Needless to say, the options for how to characterize this relationship run across a broad spectrum, in part, since, on the one hand, there is no settled, single definition of “naturalism” and, on the other, different commentators interpret Nietzsche in significantly different ways. For a good account that sets out an array of the different ways in which one might understand the relationship between Nietzsche and naturalism, see the Introduction to and essays that comprise Janway and Robertson (2012). Alternatively, at the other end of the spectrum, some claim that “Nietzsche finds it necessary to enter the discursive parameters of naturalism and so chooses to engage with it from within—in short, he assumes the guise of a naturalist in order to discredit naturalism” (Ansell-Pearson 2011, 132, rehearsing Johnson 2010). Against the excesses of Johnson (2010), Cox (1999) accepts that Nietzsche adopts naturalism over and against metaphysics and theology, while maintaining that naturalism must go beyond scientific reductionism. 2. Like almost all interpretive questions about Nietzsche’s work, Nietzsche’s relationship to Darwin, Darwinism, and Social-Darwinism remain hotly contested. Although our sympathies lie with Richardson (2004) and those who share our pro-attitude toward reading Nietzsche through the lens of Darwinism (see also, e.g., Gellens and Biebuyck 2012), Richardson is not without critics—see, for example, Berry (2005) and Forber (2007). Although we offer some criticism of Richardson below, we are, nonetheless, sympathetic to the spirit of Richardson’s project, largely because our long-range efforts aim toward saying something about the nature of ethics that goes beyond both Nietzsche and contemporary Neo-Darwinism. 3. Like all aspects of Nietzsche interpretation, even when it comes to questions concerning egalitarianism, one easily finds disagreement. Some commentators argue that Nietzsche’s ethics and politics cannot be easily separated. Thus, Nietzsche’s elitist ethics are continuous with his putative elitist politics. For example, Abbey and Appel (1998) maintain that Nietzsche is ultimately concerned with the flourishing of the few noble souls, as opposed to the flourishing of all. 4. We find Nadeem Hussain’s (2007) provocative, in spite of its recent critiques. Even if Hussain’s fictionalist account should be properly construed not so much as an interpretation of Nietzsche, per se, which it obviously is, but rather as motivated by some of what Nietzsche says, which it surely does, then the painful exegetical process of getting Nietzsche exactly right, while not unimportant, need not necessarily impede our current project. Otherwise put, Hussain admits that “there are inadequate textual resources for ascribing to [Nietzsche] a satisfying answer” to questions about the semantics of normative claims and, thus, that there are no “adequate grounds for ‘assigning’ Nietzsche a view on such subtle matters as whether ethical language is primarily cognitive or non-cognitive” (2007, 160 n. 6). With that said, Brian Leiter takes Hussain to task for historical anachronism, that is, FN wasn’t really aware of

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anything like semantic factionalism but only ontological factionalism in the air at that time, where the two versions of fictionalism are importantly different. Although Hussain responded to Lieter by pointing out historical antecedents, Leiter objects that of the examples Hussain gives, of the ones with whom Nietzsche was familiar, they held the wrong kind of fictionalism, namely of the ontological but not semantic variety. See, for example, Leiter take on Hussain’s fictionalism at his blog: unpublished, online: http://brianleiternietzsche.blogspot.com/2008/03/ is-nietzsche-fictionalist.html. The more serious challenge to Hussain’s fictionalist reading regards what Nietzsche scholars label subjective realism. Although we cannot comment on the details of this interpretative debate, our hunch is that the two readings are not necessarily incompatible and that Leiter’s claim to historical anachronism supposes Nietzsche couldn’t go beyond the specifics of historical precedent. It’s seems a rather short theoretical step from ontological to semantic fictionalism, at least for a genius like Nietzsche. 5. Like all thing Nietzsche, no consensus can be found on how to interpret Nietzsche’s views on the unconscious. For two good, recent accounts of Nietzsche views of the unconscious, see Paul Katsafanas (2005 and 2014), where the latter (2014) responds to numerous criticism of the former (2005). 6. For instance, philosophers have long assumed that exploration of the trolley problem (Foot 1967) promises insight into basic normative principles of permissible and impermissible conduct. But Greene (2005; 2008; 2013) offers compelling evidence that our responses to the trolley problem(s) have little to do with our underlying normative commitments, and almost everything to do with the degree of affective response signals such scenarios induce in us. It’s not an internal conflict between deontology and consequentialism as a generation of moral philosophers have supposed, but (roughly) a conflict between feeling and reason. With that said, Nietzsche, in different places, historicizes consequentialism and deontology. Nietzsche sometimes seems to think that something like consequentialism was truer and earlier than something like deontology, though, in other places, he’s very critical of the “British Psychologists” whose prejudices misled them when it came to telling a plausible story about the “origins” of morality. With that said, Nietzsche’s claims that what we call “reason” arises rather late on the evolutionary totem pole and that even though Philosophers have extoled the virtues of humans qua rational beings, Nietzsche sees much of this as a basic misunderstanding of human nature. So Nietzsche could plausibly find sympathy with Greene’s basic point. 7. It is this “moral determinism” that Nietzsche staunchly resists; the higher imperative is “self-selection,” to borrow Richardson’s expression. This involves, according to Nietzsche, “a ‘will to self-determination, to self-value-setting, this will to a free will’” (HH.i.P.3). For a good collection of essays on Nietzsche and agency see Gemes and May (2009). 8. Joyce (2007, chapter 5) makes a powerful case for this style of thinking in the moral realm. 9. We appreciate that our Frank-to-Nietzsche comparison is rather impressionistic. Nietzsche argued that many conditions had to be met before humans were able to make and keep promises—for example, they needed to be able to make relatively accurate and fine-grained, cost-benefit analyses; social spaces had to become sufficiently stable to admit orderly and hence predictive relationships between the past and future; and the putative will-to-forget needed to be repressed and suppressed (GM.II.2–8). Of course, the story Nietzsche tells in GM.II about the violence necessary to burn memory into the flesh of humans seems, at least on the surface, at odds with the rather vague story Nietzsche tells about the noble warriors. Could the noble warriors make and keep promises before the age of violent repression? If so, violent repression might be sufficient, but it’s not. 10. Michael Ruse (1995), Allan Gibbard (1992), Simon Blackburn (2001), Philip Kitcher (2011), Sharon Street (2006). 11. Although it is true that Nietzsche claims members of the noble warrior class “are kept so strictly within limits inter pares [amongst equals], by mores, worship, custom, gratitude, still more by mutual surveillance, by jealousy, and who on the other hand in their conduct toward each other prove themselves so inventive in consideration, self-control, tact, loyalty, pride, and friendship” and that “they are not much better than uncaged beasts of prey toward the outside world, where that which is foreign, the foreign world, begins” (GM.I.11). Not only has Nietzsche no story about how such creatures developed these positive qualities but, as can only be

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suggested below, many of these qualities seem to require developments in the story that comes later in GM.II, in which case, Nietzsche appears to beg the question. 12. Although Daniel Conway (2006) attempts to soften Ridley’s worry, we think that FN’s story about repressive mechanisms elaborated in GM.II comes so far down the evolutionary stream that it begs a great deal of evolutionary questions and renders much of what Nietzsche claims, at least, in need of significant qualification. 13. Migotti (2006) notes that Nietzsche sometimes points back to a premoral period or what he calls a first stage, where “communes” were the norm (see, for example, GM.I.5). Although Migotti doesn’t quite put matters this way, what we call pro-social behaviors could be loaded into this “period.” As noted above, Nietzsche has rather little to say about this dark period and how the noble warrior class could arise out of it. This absence, along with various ambiguities discussed below, make Nietzsche very difficult to pin down. Whatever the case may be, we believe that Nietzsche must downplay pro-social emotions in order to make his critique of morality in the pejorative sense more rhetorically compelling. 14. This claim should be read as a provocation. For a reading of Nietzsche that tends to promote the individual as prior to and over the herd, see Thiele (1990). It should be said that Thiele examines this issue of heroic individuality with regard to various epistemic questions; whereas, we are here primarily interested in the relationship between individual organisms, natural selection, and social dimensions of hominid and human existence. To be sure, Nietzsche sometimes sounds like the problem of individuality arises precisely to the degree to which the herd instinct is strong (see, for example, GS). On this reading, the puzzle for Nietzsche is how individuals could have emerged from such a herdlike species where weak individuals form masses that exhibit hostility to anyone who stands out and does not conform. It’s unclear, however, whether and to what extent Nietzsche understands the herd instinct as basic and resulting from natural selection and, hence, shared by all human beings; or, rather, results from social selection. Nietzsche sometimes makes it sound as if forces like the herd instinct and consciousness arise rather late in the historico-evolutionary game and they result from the menace of powerful (groups of) highly self-sufficient individuals. Our general point is this: there could be no such thing as strong, entirely self-sufficient individual hominid creatures, since groups would always be stronger. Take the strongest single individual: two equally strong beings (or two slightly less strong beings) in coordinated effort would always overthrow that single, strong, self-sufficient being.

Chapter Three

On the Relevance of Evolutionary Biology to Ethical Naturalism Parisa Moosavi

INTRODUCTION Neo-Aristotelian metaethical naturalism aims to naturalize ethical normativity using ideas from Aristotle’s teleological metaphysics. Defenders of this program such as Philippa Foot and Michael Thompson argue for a continuity between the ethical and the natural realm. They argue that ethical normativity is an instance of natural normativity, a kind of normativity already present in nature among plants and nonhuman animals. In the same way that an oak tree is good insofar as it has deep roots that allow it to flourish qua oak tree, a human is good insofar as she has virtue and reason that allow her to flourish qua human (Foot, 2008). One of the major challenges for neo-Aristotelian naturalism is finding a place for natural normativity in the biological world—for example, giving an account of what makes the deep roots of an oak tree good. Aristotle started from an essentialist, teleological conception of the nature of a species that does not seem to make sense in the context of modern science. Post-Darwinian evolutionary biology seems to have little to say about the good or flourishing of a species. Thus, instead of appealing to a scientific metaphysics, neo-Aristotelians typically make use of Michael Thompson’s account of living things in terms of the natural history of life-forms. Appealing to this natural-historical account, Foot offers a teleological framework of natural normativity, according to which the various parts and features of a living organism are evaluated in relation to the function they serve in enabling the organism to realize the characteristic good or flourishing of its life-form. 1

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She then argues that ethical normativity falls under this kind of natural normativity, as it concerns what enables humans to flourish. However, critics like William Fitzpatrick have taken issue with Foot’s framework of natural normativity and argued that her naturalistic project fails. Fitzpatrick argues that what drives living organisms forward through evolution is replication of their genes and not any conception of flourishing of the organism. He gives a causal-historical account of biological teleology in terms of gene replication, and argues that neo-Aristotelian flourishingbased accounts of function are untenable (Fitzpatrick, 2000). Advocates of neo-Aristotelian naturalism respond by rejecting this objection as missing the point of their project. They argue that Foot’s notion of natural teleology is just a different notion from the one employed in evolutionary biology and has different theoretical aims (Hacker-Wright, 2009; Lott, 2012). As I discuss below, this response assumes that we don’t need to look at biology to see if natural teleological claims have application, because biology is simply irrelevant to the purposes of metaethics. Moreover, it assumes that we can’t look to biology to find a defense for these teleological claims, because the only conception of function in biology has to do with gene replication. My aim in this chapter is to argue against these two suppositions. I first argue that evolutionary biology is in fact relevant for assessing the naturalistic credentials of neo-Aristotelian naturalism, which means that we do have to consult biology to see what it tells us about natural normativity. Then I argue that, contrary to what both defenders and opponents of neo-Aristotelianism have assumed, it is not obvious that evolutionary biology is inimical to this view. Fitzpatrick’s account of biological teleology is not the only account of teleology advocated in philosophy of biology, and there is room for an alternative. In the next section, I overview Thompson’s and Foot’s arguments for neo-Aristotelian naturalism, and bring out the notion of natural normativity on which they rely. In section 3, I move to Fitzpatrick’s objection regarding this notion, and discuss the responses given to Fitzpatrick by Lott and Hacker-Wright. Section 4 contains my argument for the claim that evolutionary biology is relevant for assessing the naturalistic credentials of neo-Aristotelian naturalism. Finally, in section 5, I address the question of what evolutionary biology may tell us about neo-Aristotelian normativity. I argue that the account of evolution that Fitzpatrick takes for granted is not uncontroversial, and that there is an alternative conception of evolution within the philosophy of biology, which is in fact more congenial to the neo-Aristotelian project.

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NEO-ARISTOTELIAN NATURALISM AND NATURAL NORMATIVITY As a variety of ethical naturalism, neo-Aristotelian naturalism is distinctive for its use of ideas from Aristotle’s ethics and metaphysics. Firstly, it adopts the Aristotelian doctrine that ethics concerns human life in particular, as opposed to a more general form of being such as rational agency or personhood. The criteria for ethical evaluation are taken to depend on the nature of human beings and what human beings are and do as such. Secondly, it appeals to a teleological view of nature, which resembles Aristotle’s metaphysics. Unlike traditional ethical naturalists who view ethical judgments as based on facts that fall within the scope of natural science, defenders of neoAristotelian naturalism like Michael Thompson and Philippa Foot deny that ethical judgments can be investigated scientifically (Pigden, 1991, 421–31). They reconceptualize facts of nature as having features that can only be fully specified teleologically. Thompson maintains that living things occupy a distinctive category of being, which is marked by the particular logical form of representations of living things. He argues that thought about living things requires situating them against the background of a kind or a “life-form.” When we represent an individual as living, we implicitly draw on an understanding of the lifeform or species to which that individual belongs. A conception of the lifeform is necessary to make sense of the various processes and vital operations that go on in organisms from time to time, for example, eating, breathing, growing, and so forth. For example, when we think of an individual animal as a cat, we implicitly employ a conception of the cat life-form. It’s only given this conception that we can recognize a cat’s parts as legs or teeth, or its activities as eating or reproducing. That is because physically different things can amount to the same vital process or organ, and physically similar things can amount to different vital processes or organs, in different lifeforms. 2 A life-form conception can be expressed in a set of statements that capture the natural history of the species by articulating its characteristic elements, phases, and the relations of dependence among them. Thompson calls these judgments natural-historical judgments. Despite their general form, sentences that express natural-historical judgments are not universal judgments or even statistical generalizations. Consider a natural-historical judgment like “The bobcat has four legs.” It concerns the life-form bobcat, which can have any number of bearers. But it does not imply that all or most of bobcats actually have four legs. 3 We cannot infer from this judgment that any particular cat has in fact four legs. Thompson claims that natural-historical judgments have what we may call “normative implications.” Roughly speaking, they ground claims to natural defect by a principle of inference

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saying “from: ‘The S is F,’ and: ‘This S is not F,’” to infer: “This S is defective in that it is not F” (Pigden, 1991, 80). Thus, for instance, given the natural-historical judgment above, we can infer that a cat without four legs is defective. Foot restricts normative implication to teleological natural-historical judgments, which concern what plays a part in the flourishing of the organism, or its flourishing (2008, 30). She argues that for plants and nonhuman animals, flourishing has to do with the ends of self-maintenance and reproduction. So teleological natural-historical judgments give the “how” of what happens in the life cycle of a species that leads to achieving these ends, and thereby determine the function of various parts and features of an organism. Foot argues that these judgments provide a schema for natural normativity, because they capture “the way an individual should be” in order to flourish according to its form of life (2008, 33–34). This account of natural normativity provides the first step in the neoAristotelian project of naturalizing ethics. Foot extends this account to the case of human beings, and claims that “the concept of a good human life plays the same part in determining goodness of human characteristics and operations that the concept of flourishing plays in the determination of goodness in plants and animals” (2008, 44). She acknowledges that the transition to human beings is complicated, because the human good is not limited to the biological ends of survival and reproduction. But she argues that the structure of evaluation is still the same. Ethical judgment concerns evaluation of human beings with respect to their rational will, but these evaluations are to be understood within the same schema of natural normativity outlined above. Foot’s argument for this claim is complex and not the focus of this chapter. But aside from this transition to human beings, we can focus on the framework of natural normativity and ask if it succeeds as a naturalistic base for the neo-Aristotelian project. THE EVOLUTIONARY NOTION OF FUNCTION A very obvious and intuitive objection to the neo-Aristotelian approach seems to be that the teleological view of living things does not fit the scientific picture of the living world offered by evolutionary biology. William Fitzpatrick develops this objection elaborately in his book Teleology and the Norms of Nature. He gives an account of biological functions in terms of gene replication and argues that such an account renders the neo-Aristotelian notion of function groundless and unnecessary. 4 Fitzpatrick uses an analogy between biological functions and artifact functions to argue that natural-selection history is relevant for determining biological functions. He argues that if we encounter an unfamiliar artifact, we

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look at its process of design to determine its function. Similarly, encountering biological entities, we should look at natural selection to determine their functions. That is because an organism’s natural-selection history plays the same causal role played by the process of intelligent design in the case of artifacts: it is “ultimately causally responsible for the non-accidental compresence and organization” of the parts and features of the organism (Fitzpatrick, 2000, 38–40). Hence, Fitzpatrick concludes that natural selection determines the functional structure of organisms. 5 Fitzpatrick then appeals to a Gene Selectionist view of evolution to argue that what natural selection has “designed” organisms to do is replication of their genes. 6 According to Gene Selectionism, natural selection results from genes increasing their frequency in the gene pool by exerting phenotypic effects in organisms such that these effects ultimately serve to promote the propagation of these genes more effectively than other alleles. Hence, natural selection is ultimately driven by the effects of genes on their own replication through generations (2000, 56). Given this understanding of biological functions in terms of natural selection, Fitzpatrick argues that for an entity to have a biological function is for it to play a nonaccidental role in the “biological working”of an organism, which at the most general level consists in promoting the “ultimate biological end” of replication of its genes (2000, 103–4). Given this account of biological functions, Fitzpatrick argues that biological functions do not have anything to do with promoting flourishing or welfare, because there is no reason to think that gene replication, which is a blind evolutionary force, always promotes organismic welfare. 7 Fitzpatrick concludes that Foot’s view, which understands biological functions in terms of promotion of flourishing or welfare, is false. Advocates of neo-Aristotelian naturalism have responded to this objection by arguing that Foot’s notion of natural teleology is just a different notion from the one employed in evolutionary biology. John Hacker-Wright and Micah Lott have each responded to Fitzpatrick along these lines, while bringing out the fact that Foot herself recognizes that her notion of function is different from the notion of function used in biology. In fact, Foot explicitly warns against mistaking her account of functions for an account of biological adaptations. She makes it clear that she is concerned not with this “technical sense,” but with the “everyday uses” of words like “function” and “good.” She explains that the evolutionary notion of function is concerned with continuation and extinction of species over time, whereas her notion has to do with the life of individual organisms at a certain time (Foot, 2001, 39). Hacker-Wright explicates the difference between these two notions of function further by describing the different theoretical aims of each. He argues that the scientific notion of function is aimed at offering explanations in evolutionary biology; in particular, explanations about how the contingent facts regarding living things came to be. But Foot’s notion doesn’t claim to

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be explanatory at all. It makes “a logical claim about what is involved in identifying something as an organism.” So it’s not even a contender in the same field as Fitzpatrick’s notion (Hacker-Wright, 2009). Micah Lott similarly points out that neo-Aristotelian functions don’t aim at explaining “how a life form came to be as it is.” They rather have to do with the functional relations that are present within a life-form at a given time. So just because biologists have a different approach to biological teleology, it doesn’t follow that the neo-Aristotelian approach is illegitimate (Lott, 2012). IS “NATURAL NORMATIVITY” NATURAL? Even if Fitzpatrick’s argument does not show that there are no functions in the neo-Aristotelian sense, it still raises serious doubts about whether relying on such functions is compatible with the naturalistic aspirations of neo-Aristotelianism. If Fitzpatrick is right that his account captures the only notion of function licensed by evolutionary biology, neo-Aristotelians cannot look to science for supporting their account of natural normativity. But then the question is how they can support their claim that their account captures anything real about the natural world. Notice that even if Thompson is right that our everyday thinking about living things already presupposes life-form concepts and their normative implications, the question remains whether this common-sense thinking is correct. Science often dispenses with our folk concepts by offering a theory that is superior to our common-sense understanding and explains the relevant phenomena better. This sometimes results in revising our folk concepts and replacing them with the concepts introduced in the relevant scientific theory. So folk concepts are open to being corrected by our best scientific theories and cannot be taken for granted. However, little has been said in the way of a positive defense of the neoAristotelian notion of normativity. Most defenders of this view have pointed out that we need to presuppose a normative conception of organisms before we can even start doing biology. For instance, Hacker-Wright claims that such a conception “is always in play when we make a judgment of an organism,” regardless of whether we are doing armchair speculation or evolutionary biology. He explains: “There are plenty of other ways of evaluating organisms, say, from the perspective of adaptive fitness, but the other evaluations depend upon natural normativity because they are evaluations of members of life forms” (Hacker-Wright, 2009, 316). Similarly, Lott claims that “to so much as have a topic for evolutionary explanation, we must rely on Thompson-Foot judgments of life form.” Lott argues that in the same way that when we represent an object as a wing or a movement as flying, we make implicit reference to a life-form conception, we make such a reference when

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we represent something as a gene, or an activity as reproducing. So even biology is committed to these life-form conceptions, which already contain “the materials for normative judgments” (Lott, 2012). Nonetheless, these claims are largely made without actually looking at biology’s conception of genes or organisms to see if such a concept of lifeform is at work there. What Hacker-Wright and Lott seem to ignore is that if we adopt Gene Selectionism, the natural kinds of evolutionary biology wouldn’t be the kinds identified by common sense (Sterelny and Griffiths, 1999, 38–39). The world as described by evolutionary theory would not include “organisms,” let alone Thompson’s natural-historical conception of them. What we call organisms would be merely vehicles that often carry traits by virtue of which genes are selected and replicated. Notice that in many cases (cases of “extended phenotypes”) the effect of a gene by virtue of which it is selected is not an effect of the organism in which it resides. For instance, caddisfly larvae glue debris together and construct “houses” that have the same protection effect as a mollusk’s shell. So a Gene Selectionist point of view, which treats these traits alike, does not have to ascribe any special explanatory role to organisms as entities with cohesive and integrated bodies (Ibid., 38–39). The confidence of neo-Aristotelains that they don’t need to look at biology may have to do with Thompson’s claim that the concept of a life-form is not an empirical concept that we abstract from our observation of living things. Thompson believes that “life-form” is an a priori concept that we need to presuppose in order to have observations of living things at all. His argument for this claim has to do with his rejection of “extreme individualism” in approaching the question “What is life?” (Thompson, 2008, 49). Thompson argues that it is not possible to define life by saying how things must be in a certain region of space if there is a living thing there. He looks at several attempts to define life by giving a list of properties that living things have in common—properties such as being highly organized and homeostatic, responding to stimuli, reproducing, and so forth. He argues that all such attempts fail to correctly capture the domain of living things, because the conditions they specify are either too inclusive or too exclusive. If we try to articulate these properties in a way that characterizes all and only living things, we would have to assume the idea of a living thing in our description (Ibid., 49). 8 Thompson concludes that we cannot say what makes something a living thing without placing it in a “wider context,” which he takes to be the context of a life-form concept (Ibid., 53). Nevertheless, one could accept Thompson’s conclusion about the need for a wider context without agreeing with his characterization of this wider context. Aside from corresponding to our common-sense descriptions of living things, there is no argument offered for the accuracy of Thompson’s particular understanding of life-forms and the notion of “natural defect” de-

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fined on that basis. For all we know, the correct characterization of life-forms may depend on evolutionary history and whether a trait has served to promote the propagation of genes that created it. That is, it could turn out that true natural-historical judgments are the ones that are underwritten by Fitzpatrick’s notion of biological function (2000, 209–10). 9 Of course, one could argue that one or the other of these ways of characterizing life-forms is more apt for grounding a theory of virtue. But the issue here is not whether these notions fit a theory of virtue. The issue we are concerned with is whether they really apply to the natural world—whether it is really true that deep roots are good for an oak tree. Neo-Aristotelians want to argue that we are already committed to this normative judgment by introducing the wider context ‘oak tree’ to our metaphysics. But if it turns out that evolutionary biology replaces our common-sense notion of ‘oak tree’ with one that dispenses with any interesting normative implications, this would undermine the naturalistic credentials of normative claims about oak trees. One may insist that we do not need to show that neo-Aristotelian functions are necessary for a scientific understanding of the world. It is a legitimate notion of function on its own right and does not need the sort of indispensability argument that Hacker-Wright and Lott put forward. However, without such an argument, it would not be clear why neo-Aristotelian naturalism should count as a naturalistic account of normativity. There is a gap in the neo-Aristotelians’ claim to naturalism, which I believe calls for looking into evolutionary biology. WHAT PHILOSOPHY OF BIOLOGY MAY TELL US Aside from assuming that they do not need to look at biology to fill this gap, neo-Aristotelians have also assumed that they cannot find any support for their argument by looking at biology. I believe this is because neo-Aristotelians have largely assumed that Fitzpatrick’s picture of evolutionary biology is accurate and the only notion of function supported by biology has to do with gene replication. However, the picture of natural selection that Fitzpatrick mainly gets from Richard Dawkins is not uncontroversial. Gene Selectionism, which puts genes at the center of evolutionary change and almost eliminates the role of organisms, is in fact disputed in philosophy of biology. As I argue below, there is an alternative view available that suits the neoAristotelian project better. Let me start by a critique of the received view of evolution that is made by Richard Lewontin. This critique concerns the concept of biological adaptation, which is invoked to explain the fit of organisms to their environments. Lewontin believes that the difficulty with the concept of adaptation—together with other problems of the received view which I would not be able to

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discuss here—constitutes the motivation for an alternative view of evolution that does not put genes at the center and ascribes an active explanatory role to organisms (Lewontin, 1978; 2001; Gould and Lewontin, 1979). Here, after discussing Lewontin’s critique, I sketch this alternative view and argue that it can support the kind of natural normativity that neo-Aristotelians are after. One important phenomenon that evolutionary biology aims to explain is the fact that organisms fit their environments remarkably well. Their morphology, physiology, and behavior seem to have been carefully designed to enable them to appropriate the world around them. Consider how fish live under water and have fins for swimming, or how moles live underground and have long claws for digging. It just seems to be a manifest fact about living things that they are well suited to their conditions of existence. On the received view, this fitness is explained by appeal to selection, which promotes traits based on their capacity to fit the organism to the challenges posed by the environment. The idea is that external environment poses problems such as acquiring space, consumables, members of the opposite sex, and so forth, for the organisms. Whichever organisms by chance have the morphology or behavior that makes them the most successful in solving these problems, leave the most offspring and thus propagate their genes (Lewontin, 2001, 63). So the organic form, which according to Gene Selectionism is nothing more than a survival machine built by genes, gradually provides better and better solutions to the problems posed by the environment, and the end result is the state of being adapted (Lewontin, 1978, 213). Lewontin takes issue with the way this explanation views organisms as solutions to pre-existing problems posed by the external world. He argues that there is a difficulty in defining the external world for the process of adaptation: if the organic form adapts by solving the problems posed by the environment, then these problems must exist before the organic form fits the environment. Or, as Lewontin puts it, “there must be empty niches waiting to be filled by the evolution of new species.” However, although the physical world certainly predates the organism, the “niches” or the problems do not. There are infinite ways in which the physical world can be interpreted as a problem, and before there is an organism, the problem to be solved is underdetermined. To use an example from Denis Walsh, take the physical world under water. On its own, this environment does not constitute any problems. It is only if we take the viewpoint of the organisms that live under water that we recognize problems such as obtaining nutrition or locomotion. Moreover, each of these problems can in fact take many different forms depending on the organism that is facing the problem. For instance, paramecia and porpoises both live in the aquatic environment, but they are faced with different locomotion problems. Porpoises, which are 1.5 to 2.0 meters long and weigh

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about 65 kilograms, experience the viscosity of water almost in the same way as we do: water flows and can be displaced easily. So they have evolved a strong fluke that can stroke water. But for paramecia, which have a length of approximately 200 microns, the viscosity of water is experienced differently, much in the same way that we experience corn syrup. This is why paramecia have evolved helical bands of cilia that can ‘screw’ them through the thick medium by rhythmic beating (Walsh, 2012, 99–100). So the problem of locomotion is underdetermined by the physical properties of water alone. It depends on the properties of the organism as well as those of the surrounding physical environment. Lewontin argues that because the problems are underdetermined in this way, we cannot predict and explain evolutionary change in terms of the autonomous features of the physical environment. Notice how, in the above example, we cannot explain why paramecia have evolved cilia merely by mentioning the physical properties of water. Without taking the capacities of paramecia into account, the problem to be solved is underdetermined—not just epistemically, but metaphysically too. Moreover, Lewontin argues that viewing adaptation as a solution to pre-existing problems leaves out the role of organisms in creating their environment. He points out that organisms don’t experience their environment passively; they rather change it by their activities. Plants physically change the soil, beavers build dams, and birds make nests. These activities not only causally alter the physical environment, they also change the aspects of the environment that are relevant to evolutionary change. For example, nest-making does not only add nests to the environment, it also makes the availability of dried grass an important aspect of the environment that should figure in our explanations of adaptive change. Thus, Lewontin suggests that the concept of adaptation in the received view is inadequate and has to be revised (Lewontin, 1978, 203). As Walsh explicates in his reformulation of Lewontin’s critique, the difficulty with the concept of adaptation results from the commitment of the received view to suborganicism and explanatory externalism. Suborganicism is the assumption that genes or replicators are the units of inheritance and phenotypic control, to the point that evolution is defined as “change in the relative frequencies of replicator types in a population.” Organisms are taken to be simply the interface between the replicators and the environment: “survival machines built by replicators to serve their purposes.” Explanatory externalism is the assumption that adaptiveness should be explained by appeal to selection, which is the exclusive power of the external environment. Environment is viewed as the source of adaptive change, as the demands of environment determine which organisms survive and which do not. Thus, there is a “division of explanatory labour” between the contributions of replicators and environment. One causes inheritance and development while the other causes adaptive change. Insofar as biological form is adaptive, it is

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explained by appeal to selection from external environment, while if it is not adaptive, it is explained by suborganismal processes of inheritance and development (Walsh, 2012, 91–93). Notice how these commitments of the received view result in a conception of living things as passive. Evolution results from the external forces of environmental selection and the internal blind machinery of replicators. By now it should be clear why this view does not support any genuine notion of organismal teleology. Organisms and their activities do not figure in explanations of evolutionary change, except as vehicles for phenotypes created by genes and consequently selected by the environment. Let me now turn to Walsh’s alternative view, which he calls Situated Darwinism (Walsh, 2015). Walsh undertakes to develop the conception of adaptation that follows from Gould and Lewontin’s suggestion to “put organisms with all recalcitrant complexity back into evolutionary theory” (1979, 89–90). He argues that instead of seeing environment as posing antecedent problems for organic form to solve, we should view environment as partly constituted by the organism’s engagement. He conceives environment as a set of affordances or possibilities for engagement, and he calls it an affordance landscape. He argues that what explains adaptive evolution is not an autonomous external world, but an affordance landscape, which intimately involves the organism itself. Adaptation is a fitting, not to a physical world per se, but to affordances. Given this conception, for example, porpoises and paramecia do not really share the same environment. They have very different affordance landscapes, because they have different capacities and enjoy different possibilities for engagement with water. Thus, we can explain why they each have solved the problem of locomotion in water in the way they have by appealing to these different affordances. Notice the difference between this explanation and the one offered by the received view. The received view is committed to explanatory externalism and insists that selection is caused by autonomous features of water. Even acknowledging that adaptation is a response to organism-relative features of water, the received view insists that there are objective measures of these organism-relative features, such as the Reynolds number (Walsh, 2012, 103). But the Situated Darwinist explanation conceives the explanans as affordances of water for a paramecium that is an organism with distinct capacities and way of life. The key difference is that affordances imply that there are goal-directed entities from whose point of view we can see affordances as affordances. In fact, Walsh views affordance and goal as interconnected concepts, and characterizes them in terms of each other: For a system to experience its conditions of existence as affordances it must generally be capable of responding to them as affordances, by exploiting the opportunities they provide for the attainment of its goals, or by

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mitigating the impediments. In turn, to be a purposive system is to be a system that is capable of responding to its conditions in ways that are conducive to the fulfilment of, or ameliorative of the impediments to, those goals (Walsh, 2012, 267). Thus, in order to explain adaptive evolution, we need to presuppose systems with goal-directed capacities. We need to appeal to the goal-directed capacities of organisms to identify which aspects of the external environment are relevant to evolutionary change. In fact, we need to ascribe an active role to these capacities. Notice that since organisms partly constitute their affordance landscape, they also alter the landscape as they make changes to their form. As Walsh explains, for example, with the evolution of multicellularity, a whole new set of affordances emerged for the new multicellular organisms. Features of the physical world that were irrelevant to survival and reproduction at the scale of a single cell, became critical to survival and reproduction given the multicellular form (2012, 103–4). Thus, according to Situated Darwinism, organisms are not just passive mediums caught between the autonomous forces of external environment and blind machinery of replicating genes. They direct evolutionary change by constructing their affordance landscape. They interact with their experienced environment and respond by making changes that are conducive to their goals of survival and reproduction. So here we have a conception of evolution that gives an active explanatory role to the teleological features of organisms. Unlike the received view that only ascribes ends to genes (and only metaphorically so), Situated Darwinism ascribes genuine ends to organisms. Organisms are placed at the center of the causes of evolution. They are not simply subject to the influence of their conditions of existence; they partially constitute and respond to these conditions. They are agents of evolutionary change—evolution happens as a side-effect of their doing what they do. They pursue their goals as they negotiate their affordance landscape and form their conditions of existence. Notice that although the goals of organisms ultimately have to do with survival and reproduction, for each kind of organism these goals would take a different form depending on the organism’s way of life. 10 This is why, I think, the kind of teleology that Situated Darwinism ascribes to organisms fits the neo-Aristotelian notion of function quite well. As with Foot’s schema of natural normativity, an organism’s life-form and its characteristic way of survival and reproduction determine what goodness for the organism consists in. Of course, this notion of organismal goodness may be nothing like the intuitive conception of animal welfare that Fitzpatrick appeals to. Even the goal-directed organisms that are part of Walsh’s picture are not designed by a benevolent god. But neo-Aristotelian naturalism does not need to claim that they are. Foot’s framework of natural normativity evaluates individuals

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based on criteria internal to their life-form, not based on an external notion of welfare that is probably derived from our human notion of happiness. In fact, Foot acknowledges that what constitutes goodness for plants and nonhuman animals is not anything like the human good or human happiness. It is only the structure of evaluation—the way the characteristic good of the life-form determines goodness and defect—that is claimed to be the same. Hence, Situated Darwinism offers an alternative understanding of evolution, according to which teleological notions apply directly to organisms. This suggests that we can carve a genuinely naturalistic notion of normativity such that we might be able to say that ethical normativity is continuous with that notion. Although I hope I have said enough to motivate Situated Darwinism as an alternative to the received view, my aim here has not been to defend this view. I have only tried to put it forward as a plausible view within contemporary philosophy of biology that can serve the purposes of neoAristotelianism. What I hope to have shown, however, is that the gene selectionist view of evolution is not uncontroversial, and it is possible to argue for neo-Aristotelian naturalism by defending an alternative conception of evolution. CONCLUSION In this chapter, I have examined neo-Aristotelian naturalism in light of a challenge posed by Fitzpatrick regarding its underlying notion of natural normativity. I have argued that despite Hacker-Wright’s and Lott’s quick rejections of Fitzpatrick’s appeal to evolutionary biology as missing the point of the neo-Aristotelian project, his argument in fact raises serious doubts regarding the naturalistic credentials of neo-Aristotelian naturalism. I have argued that not only are they wrong to think that evolutionary biology is irrelevant to their metaethical project, they are also wrong to think that it unequivocally votes against their view if taken to be relevant. It is worth emphasizing that the relevance of evolutionary biology to ethical naturalism does not amount to a case for evolutionary ethics. The suggestion is not that we can derive normative ethics by looking at evolutionary biology. I have made no claims about how natural-historical judgments are to be made about human beings, and particularly in relation to their rational will. The relevance of biology to the neo-Aristotelian project is more subtle, and concerns the naturalistic credentials of this metaethical view. My suggestion is that we should look at our best philosophical understanding of evolutionary biology to see if the neo-Aristotelian notion of natural normativity has a grip in reality. This, I believe, shows the relevance of evolutionary biology to the debate over neo-Aristotelian naturalism in a way that has

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not been recognized by the proponents of this view, and in a way that can potentially even work in their favor. REFERENCES Fitzpatrick, William Joseph. Teleology and the Norms of Nature. Milton: Taylor & Francis, 2000. Foot, Philippa. Natural Goodness. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2008. Gould, Stephen Jay, and Richard C. Lewontin. “The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme.” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B. Biological Sciences, Vol. 205, No. 1161 (1979): 581–98. Hacker-Wright, John. “What Is Natural about Foot’s Ethical Naturalism?” Ratio, Vol. 22, No. 3 (2009): 308–21. Lewontin, Richard C. “Adaptation.” Scientific American 293 (1978): 212–28. ———. The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism, and Environment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. ———. “Gene, Organism, and Environment.” In Cycles of Contingency: Developmental Systems and Evolution, edited by Susan Oyama, Paul E. Griffiths, and Russell D. Gray. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001. Lott, Micah. “Have Elephant Seals Refuted Aristotle? Nature, Function, and Moral Goodness.” Journal of Moral Philosophy, Vol. 9, no. 3 (2012): 353–75. Moore, George Edward. Principia Ethica. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Pigden, Charles. “Naturalism.” In A Companion to Ethics, edited by Peter Singer. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1991. Sterelny, Kim, and Paul E. Griffiths. Sex and Death: An Introduction to Philosophy of Biology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Thompson, Michael. Life and Action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. Walsh, Denis. “Situated Adaptationism.” In The Environment: Philosophy, Science and Ethics, Topics in Contemporary Philosophy, edited by Campbell, O’Rourke, and Slater, 89–116. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012. ———. Situated Darwinism: Organisms, Agency, and Evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.

NOTES 1. According to this account, what makes the deep roots of an oak tree good is that they enable it to survive given the way of life of an oak tree that is, an upright plant that needs deep and sturdy roots. 2. Notice how eating is physically different in humans and fish, or how the same process of cell division amounts to reproduction among bacteria and growth among humans. 3. “The domestic cat has four legs” would still be true if most cats lose one leg in an accident. 4. Fitzpatrick also offers a more direct argument against Foot’s notion of function by claiming that it cannot satisfy the conditions of a successful account of function. I don’t discuss this argument here, because I believe it essentially begs the question against Foot and has been adequately dealt with in Micah Lott’s response to Fitzpatrick (See Lott, 11–12). 5. I believe Fitzpatrick’s argument for this claim fails. He claims it’s in virtue of the fact that the design process is causally responsible for putting the machine together that we look at it to determine the function of the artifact. However, we can think of examples where the process that is causally responsible for putting an artifact together doesn’t determine its function. Sometimes the function of an artifact is changed after its users discover that it could be put to another use. Take the case of birth control pills, which were originally designed for the opposite purpose. Or a coffee mug that is exclusively used as a pencil holder. Unless we

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presuppose a notion of function that identifies function with the designer’s intentions, it’s simply not true that in order to determine the function of an artifact we should look at the process that is causally responsible for putting it together. Thus, Fitzpatrick’s claim that in order to determine biological functions we should look at natural selection doesn’t follow. Although I think we should reject Fitzpatrick’s claim that all biological functions are determined by natural selection, I will grant that there is a kind of biological function that is determined by natural selection, and I will conceive Fitzpatrick’s project as giving an account of this particular kind of biological function. As I will argue below, even this weakened version of his argument is enough to raise doubts regarding the welfare-based accounts of function. So I will look at the rest of his argument conceived in this way. 6. Fitzpatrick relies on Gene Selectionism because he takes it to be the most general and unified perspective for explaining natural selection. Since both sides of this debate seem to take Gene Selectionism for granted, I don’t get involved in the criticisms of this view here. However, I believe a line of response that is available to neo-Aristotelians is questioning Gene Selectionism and defending an alternative view of natural selection. 7. Fitzpatrick gives many examples of cases in which organismic welfare—which he describes as our intuitive conception of well-being—diverges from what promotes gene propagation. For instance, male elephant seals fight with each other in competition for gaining exclusive control of the harem, which sometimes results in their injury or even death. While this behavior is effective in replicating their genes and thereby has a biological function, it’s not conducive to their well-being given what we ordinarily think of as well-being for a sentient animal. 8. For instance, the idea of homeostasis (keeping oneself in the same state) or reproduction (making more of the same) appeal to the notion of sameness. But we need to specify this notion further, because anything is like any other thing and unlike it in innumerable ways. Thompson argues that the relevant sense of sameness in these ideas is not an “individually determinable fact”—it’s not fixed or determined by anything in the individual itself. To get at the relevant sense of sameness for an individual, we must recognize that it is an instance of a kind, of which there could be other instances. (See Thompson, 30.) 9. Notice that although Thompson and Foot don’t say much about the truth conditions for natural-historical judgments, they are keen to emphasize that these conditions don’t have to do with evolutionary history. 10. For example, for male elephant seals the goal of reproduction would require being good at fighting and getting exclusive control over the harem, whereas for worker ants this goal requires working hard to protect the queen and reproductive siblings.

Chapter Four

A Gift or a Given? On the Role of Life in Løgstrup’s Ethics Robert Stern

In the final analysis, one’s thinking about ethics depends on one’s way of thinking about the relation between humankind and the universe. —K. E. Løgstrup (2007, 136)

If we are going to give nature a place in ethics, do we have to think of it as created by a benign and intelligent creator, as otherwise it must remain normatively neutral—or can we find a basis for value and normativity in nature that is independent of any such theistic conception? This is obviously a fundamental question in ethics, with a long pedigree stretching back through history. My aim in this chapter is to outline the issue as it figures in the ethics of the Danish twentieth-century theologian and philosopher K. E. Løgstrup. I have chosen to discuss his work in this context as I think it raises the question in a particularly interesting and acute way; for as we shall see, Løgstrup very much stands at the point of tension between these two options, which has made his thinking on this issue hard to place. To some, it is obvious that he was a creation theorist, basing his ethics on the claim that our lives have been created; but to others, it is equally obvious that this is something he was committed to avoiding by offering a secular and humanistic ethics instead. My aim here is not to settle that interpretative question conclusively—which like comparable questions concerning the place of religious commitments in thinkers like Spinoza, Kant, and Hegel is perhaps ultimately unresolvable—but rather to explore the options that are available, thus hopefully shedding light on the kind of complexities this question can raise. I am aware, however, that Løgstrup is a relatively little-known figure, and that therefore some background is needed. I will thus provide a brief intro53

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duction to his life and works in the first section. I will then set out his key ideas, where of particular interest will be his claims about the relation between ethics and his conception of life—and whether that conception requires us to think of life as created if it is to do the work that it required of it within his ethical thinking. Once we see the importance of this issue to Løgstrup’s ethics, I hope it will then be clear why his writings raise significant issues that are central to this topic: namely, what view we must take of nature if we are to give it any import within our ethical theorizing. LOCATING LØGSTRUP Løgstrup was born in 1905 and died in 1981, and had a significant influence on the thought of his native Denmark, and in Scandinavia more generally, though until recently he was little known in the wider world. 1 Formally educated as a theologian in Copenhagen, he also read widely in philosophy, and used the opportunity to travel before the Second World War to study with Heidegger and other philosophers. His early reading was influenced by Kant and the phenomenological movement (particularly Edmund Husserl, Max Scheler, Hans Lipps, and Heidegger himself), as well as by Kierkegaard, in addition to Lutheran theology. After a few years as a pastor in the Danish state church, he became professor of ethics and philosophy of religion in the theology faculty at the University of Aarhus in 1943, where he spent the rest of his academic career. He published his first major work Den Etiske Fordring (The Ethical Demand) in 1956 (the English translation published by Notre Dame University Press appeared in 1997). He published several later books and articles in ethics, theology, metaphysics, and philosophy of art (where extracts from some of the later ethical writings are translated in Beyond the Ethical Demand, University of Notre Dame Press, 2007, and a two volume selection from the four volume work on metaphysics was published in translation by Marquette University Press in 1995; several more works are available in German, mainly translated by his wife, whom he met while studying in Germany before the war). 2 As this sketch suggests, while coming out of a theological background and being engaged with many of the key theological controversies of his time, and while also being himself a committed Christian believer, Løgstrup nonetheless insisted on the need to put theology in dialogue with philosophy, and equally on the need to explore the relation between ethics, metaphysics, and religious belief. He was therefore explicitly hostile to the more conservative theological forces of his period, and what he perceived as their irrationalist and exclusivist agendas. At the same time, in reading his work it is important to acknowledge that he is not writing as a standard secular philosopher, but is precisely concerned to trace the points at which philosophy

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requires theology and vice versa—where one of those points is the connection between nature, value, normativity, and creation. I will now explore how Løgstrup handles that connection by looking at three central conceptions in his ethics: the radical ethical demand, the idea of life as a gift, and his account of what he calls “the sovereign expressions of life.” THE RADICAL ETHICAL DEMAND Løgstrup speaks most prominently of a radical ethical demand in his first major work, The Ethical Demand, while in later writings from 1968 onward he talks more about “sovereign expressions of life”—though as we shall see, there are important connections between the two ideas. Løgstrup introduces the idea of radical ethical demand by reflecting initially on the religious proclamation of Jesus, and in particular the commandment “to love thy neighbour as thyself.” However, he says he wants to make sense of this in more than just theological terms, for “[i]f a religious proclamation is not understandable in the sense that it answers to decisive features of our existence, then accepting it is tantamount to letting ourselves be coerced—whether by others or by ourselves—for faith without understanding is not faith by coercion” (1997, 2). Thus, he writes later in the book reflecting on what he has achieved: “We took the proclamation of Jesus as the point of departure for our reflection on the ethical demand . . . [and] we have tried [to account for it] in a purely human manner” (1997, 207). As this suggests, Løgstrup’s approach is to examine what ethical outlook is embodied in the love commandment by considering in more detail what it is to love the neighbor, and then to consider how to make sense of that commandment in terms of “decisive features of our existence,” 3 which include the metaphysical implications of taking it seriously. It is then in this second phase of the inquiry that questions concerning creation will arise, but where Løgstrup places such questions fundamentally in the context of the first phase, of whether such ideas are required to make sense of the ethical demand and what he takes this demand to involve. At the outset, Løgstrup states that the “character of the demand contained in the proclamation of Jesus” is that it is “silent, radical, one-sided and unfulfillable” (1997, 5) characteristics he then goes on to elaborate in the discussion that follows, while also adding some further related features, namely that it is “invisible,” that it is “isolating,” and that no one has a right to make it—while all these characteristics set the ethical demand apart from conventional social demands and norms. In order to understand what comes next, it is therefore important to explain what Løgstrup means by these features of the radical ethical demand.

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In claiming that the ethical demand is silent, Løgstrup means that it cannot be articulated in two ways: first, in responding to the needs of another person, you cannot just do whatever it is that they ask you to do, as that may not reflect their genuine needs; and secondly, you cannot just appeal to established social norms and conventions, as there may not be any such norms and conventions governing the case, and even if there are, in the ethical situation it is up to you to take responsibility for how you decide to act, rather than just relying on such norms. This thus makes the ethical demand radical in the sense that you must determine for yourself how to act and bear responsibility for that, as opposed to cases where one just follows prevailing conventions. As a result, Løgstrup argues, the demand “isolates” the individual on whom the demand falls, and makes them into “a singular person,” as they cannot then submerge themselves in following these conventions or what the other person wants (1997, 45). Løgstrup also suggests the demand is radical in the sense that it can only be fulfilled unselfishly and so may require us to act in ways that go against our own interests; this means that it may then “intrude disturbingly into my own existence” (1997, 45), where we in general prefer to be left to just get on with our lives—though Løgstrup makes clear that he does not think this radicality should be confused with “limitlessness.” 4 Thirdly, Løgstrup claims that “[t]he radical character [of the demand] manifests itself also in the fact that the other person has no right him or herself to make the demand, even though it has to do with the care of his own life” (1997, 45). The demand is also one-sided, he argues, in the sense that it does not involve reciprocity or the right to make “counterdemands,” so that if I act for your good, this does entitle me to ask for something in return. Fourthly, Løgstrup says that the demand is unfulfillable, but not in the sense that it is exorbitant and limitless, but in the sense that if it is felt as a demand and thus as something one is required to do, one has already failed as a moral agent, as to genuinely love the other is not to feel under any obligation act on their behalf. Finally, in addition to these central features of the demand, Løgstrup also mentions that the demand is invisible because Løgstrup thinks we can never be entirely sure if we have acted out of love for the other, or for more selfish or conventional motives, where this opacity applies not just to our understanding of others, but equally to ourselves. 5 Now, up to this point, Løgstrup can be read as “unpacking” the love commandment and the ethical demand it embodies, taking it for granted that the commandment corresponds to something many people see as a fundamental ethical norm, which Løgstrup summarizes as follows: “The radical demand says that we are to care for the other person in a way that best serves his or her interests” (1997, 55). 6 He thus takes himself to have brought out how this demand operates and what it asks of us, in ways that he hopes we will recognize and acknowledge. Of course, it might still be argued that he

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has mischaracterized the demand, or indeed that there is no such demand— for example, it could be objected that such care has to be reciprocal; that it is based on a corresponding right; and that it is too paternalistic in giving insufficient weight to the desires of others in responding to their needs. 7 However, while such questions are certainly pertinent, we will not deal with them here, as they are not directly relevant to the focus of this chapter, which emerges more clearly when we turn now to the second phase of Løgstrup’s inquiry: namely, if we accept something like the radical ethical demand as characterized above, what are its broader metaphysical commitments? What “features of our existence” and view of the world do we need to take seriously in order to make sense of the ethical demand as Løgstrup has presented it to us? (2007, 10). 8 One answer Løgstrup offers is relatively straightforward: namely that the love commandment and thus the ethical demand is only really intelligible given the fact that we are dependent on one another—otherwise, it would lose all normative force, as the need for care would not arise at all. Thus, the demand would not hold in a world in which “human beings were so independent of one another that the words and deeds of one were only a dispensable luxury in the life of another and my failure in the life of the neighbour could easily be made up later” (1997, 5); but of course this is not the case, even though in falsely exaggerating our own autonomy and sovereignty, we often overlook this fact, while we are also disturbed by the degree in which (as Løgstrup famously puts it) we hold the life of other people in our hands, and so try to ignore this dependence as much as we can (1997, 15–16). As Løgstrup emphasizes, however, as soon as one thinks about such a basic phenomenon as trust, one sees immediately the extent to which we rely on others within a thoroughly social world, and that without this reliance we would not be the kind of creatures we are. While this claim may be highly plausible, nonetheless Løgstrup thinks that more is required to make sense of the ethical demand, where what comes next is more controversial. For, Løgstrup argues, a further metaphysical step is needed, namely to accept that “life is a gift,” where it is this step that raises the question about creation with which we began: does conceiving “life as a gift” necessarily involve conceiving life as something given by God, and if so how could this be made consistent with Løgstrup’s claim to be operating in a “purely human manner”? Or might it be understood in a way that does not require any appeal to the notion of a creator at all, in a form that is straightforwardly humanistic and secular? As we shall see, there are different answers that one can give to these questions, making possible rather different readings of Løgstrup’s position. 9 Given Løgstrup’s general approach as outlined above, I think that the right way to address these issues is to ask what work the idea of “life as a gift” is supposed to do in relation to the ethical demand: how does this idea

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help us make sense of the demand as Løgstrup conceives it, in the same way that taking note of our interdependence helps us make sense of it? If we can understand what work the idea of “life as a gift” is meant to do, we can then see what it involves, and thus how far it requires a commitment to a divine creator or whether no such theological conception is necessary and we can understand “life as a gift” in a more secular manner. 10 Now, as Løgstrup himself presents it, the idea of “life as a gift” is primarily brought in to explain three features of the demand: first, why we are required to care for the other person at all and what form that care takes; second, why the demand is one-sided and not reciprocal; and third, why no one has a right to make the demand for care, even though we are nonetheless required to offer that care to them. Løgstrup argues that insofar as we take the ethical demand seriously in these ways, we are implicitly committed to seeing life as a gift—so by understanding the former, we can see what is involved in the latter. As regards the first feature, the idea here is this: the demand requires us to care for the other, where that care fundamentally consists in helping their life to go well in some broad sense—so not necessarily in just making them “happy” by fulfilling their subjective preferences or providing them with sensory stimulation, but enabling them to realize their capacities more fully and develop as living beings. Now, one sense in which that commits us to seeing “life as a gift” is in assuming that life and all that this involves is a good thing, rather than a curse, so that in furthering someone’s life one is giving something of positive value to them, and not harming them or damaging their well-being. Løgstrup thus takes it as a potential challenge to the ethical demand that one’s life might be going so badly that one cannot see it as a gift in this way, but rather as something one would be better without; but while taking the challenge seriously, he argues that in general this cannot be our view of life, as otherwise the ethical demand would have no meaning to us. 11 On the contrary, he thinks one fundamental conception we have of caring for others is to foster what he calls their “zest for life” or “courage of life,” which is precisely their sense that life is good and worthwhile, and something to be fostered and developed (1997, 15). Now, clearly, this first way of thinking about life as a gift—namely as something good, rather than as a curse—is entirely compatible with a theological conception of creation, but would not seem to require it, as the secular humanist could also hold that life is a fundamental good which we should foster both in ourselves and in other living beings. It thus seems possible to read “life as a gift” in this sense in noncreationist terms, as just a claim about the value of life, and the disvalue of what frustrates it. A second feature of the ethical demand which relates to the idea that “life is a gift” is its one-sidedness, namely that in responding to your needs and providing care to you, I cannot demand anything in return as a quid pro quo.

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Thus, Løgstrup writes that this “presupposes—upon this presupposition its one-sidedness depends—that a person has his life and the world in which it is lived only as something received” (1997, 170–71) and that “[t]he one-sided demand contains an ontology, a fundamental and constitutive definition of being, namely, that human life and the world that goes with it have been given to human beings as a gift” (1997, 171). The question is, therefore, what conception of “life as a gift” is needed to make sense of the ethical demand’s one-sidedness: is a secular understanding sufficient, or is something more religious required? From the way in which Løgstrup presents the issues, the first option certainly seems available, where he specifies that what it is in life that has been given, namely “all the different possibilities of life with which the individual has been showered: understanding, speech, experience, love and many others” (1997, 116). On this basis, he argues, we can owe something to the other without having wronged them, but simply because we have received our life as a gift, “so that nothing which is possessed by a person, no happiness, no endowment, no advantage makes them sovereign over their own life” (1997, 116). Løgstrup insists that this is crucial to his characterization of the ethical demand and particularly its lack of reciprocity: In other words, the demand which makes void protest from the viewpoint of reciprocity does not arise exclusively from the fact that one person is delivered over to the other. This demand makes sense only on the presupposition that the person to whom the demand is addressed possesses nothing which he or she has not received as a gift. Given that presupposition, the demand is the only thing which makes sense. (1997, 116)

What Løgstrup has said so far about life as a gift does seem open to a perfectly secular understanding: namely, that we are not ourselves completely responsible for our lives and the various good things in them, but that we find these things given to us by the possibilities that life itself offers for understanding, adventure and excitement, love, discussions with others, and so on. While we can control how some of this goes through our various abilities, possessions, and advantages, it should be clear to us that this control is very limited and that we remain greatly dependent on these possibilities for our lives to go well, as things we are given rather than what we bring about for ourselves. Much of what makes up our lives is a gift in this sense, which does not require the idea of God as the giver to be intelligible, but just the denial that we are sovereign individuals who entirely determine our own existence, like the people in Hobbes’s state of nature who are compared to mushrooms that simply spring out of the earth fully formed. 12 The question, then, is whether this secular conception of the gift can do the work that Løgstrup requires it to do, which here is to challenge the reciprocity claim; and this would seem quite plausible. One form of response

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might focus on the talents or capacities you possess which are called upon in a situation where the ethical demand arises: for example, perhaps I suddenly fall ill, and you can use your medical training as a doctor to assist me. In terms of reciprocity, you might think I am only entitled to be given that assistance if you can ask something from me in return. But if your medical talents are something you have received as a gift, in the sense that it is just your good fortune to possess them, then arguably you have no right to lay claim to them here as something for which you can extract a return from me, and so reciprocity fails. There is, however, an obvious difficulty with this first response, which is that it relies on a sense of life being a gift that may seem implausibly strong to many: for while of course we recognize that some of our talents and capacities are naturally determined in a way that means we cannot claim credit for them, nonetheless we can assert ownership over them if we chose to develop them for ourselves, in a way that then arguably gives us a right to demand something in return for their use. So, if you have trained hard as a doctor and spent many hours devoting yourself to learning your trade, you might then reasonably claim something back from me for the medical help that you are called upon to provide. Nonetheless, of course, one response to this might be to press the idea of talents and capacities further, and to argue that while you may have worked hard to become a doctor, nonetheless this very capacity itself, of hard work and dedication, is itself a kind of gift in the sense that you have been endowed with it from the beginning, and so cannot claim credit for the talents you have then been able to nurture as a result. Moreover, your path in life as a doctor was no doubt made possible by many kinds of good fortune, such as upbringing, education, and cultural influences. In this way, it could be said, in the end none of the capacities that I might call upon in making my demand on you are ones you can claim to own for yourself, making any “counterdemand” illegitimate. Now, this way of taking Løgstrup’s position would bring us into the same kind of territory as familiar debates between John Rawls and Robert Nozick over the relation between desert and ability, where Nozick protested against Rawls’s account of justice that it treats our abilities and talents as merely a matter of moral luck, which Nozick claimed then puts too much pressure on our ideas of personhood and self-ownership (1984, 213–31). 13 Løgstrup could be read as simply adopting the more Rawlsian view on this matter, but where it is unclear what he might say in response to Nozick’s critique. Nonetheless, there is another way of taking Løgstrup’s position here which goes in a somewhat different direction. This is the idea that even if Nozick is right and we can legitimately claim credit for some of our capacities and abilities, such that on their own they might form a basis for reciprocity, nonetheless it is still undeniable that we possess a good deal for which we

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cannot claim credit, thus putting us in debt—and also that we cannot repay anyone for those things, and therefore that I cannot refuse to help people unless they repay me because I am in no position to pay off my own debts, making void the demand for reciprocity. Thus, for example, I owe my life to my parents, where it is arguable that this is a debt to them that I cannot repay; I am therefore in no position to refuse help to you in a situation of need unless you can repay that help, or demand reciprocity from you here, as so much of what I have has to be treated as a gift that cannot be recompensed to anyone. Once this is recognized, by its own logic of justice and debt, the demand for reciprocity can be undermined: a person who is a debtor in this way cannot refuse to come to the aid of others unless they receive repayment, given how indebted they are themselves. 14 Thus, in considering the one-sidedness of the ethical demand, it seems intelligible to account for this by understanding “life as a gift” in a purely secular manner: insofar as the capacities with which you can help others are not fully owned by yourself and come to you as a matter of good fortune, while one will always remain in debt to others in a manner that cannot be repaid, this then means that you are not entitled to demand anything in return for the use of those capacities in responding to individuals who are in need. We may now turn to the third feature of the ethical demand which Løgstrup relates to the idea of “life as a gift,” namely that while others may be obliged to care for us in the light of the demand, this is not based on any corresponding right that we possess: On the other hand, the other person has no right to make the radical demand that everything that I say or do in our mutual relation, I shall say or do for his sake and not for my own. . . . The fact out of which the demand arises, namely that more or less of his life is in my hands, is a fact which has come into being without his participation or mine, and without him or I being able to say our piece. He therefore cannot identify himself with this—created—fact and make the demand into his own. (1997, 46)

This third feature may seem to make a secular understanding of “life as a gift” particularly problematic, as indeed the final sentence from this passage suggests. For, it could be argued, if we do not ourselves possess this right to make the demand, then surely someone must, where the only alternative may then seem to be God as the creator whose creation we are, who brings it about that we are interdependent in the first place, and who is thus entitled to require that we respond to each other in certain ways, even if we cannot demand this ourselves. However, while I think this way of reading Løgstrup’s argument here is certainly possible, I now want to suggest that there is another alternative, which we will be able to see more clearly if we turn from The Ethical Demand to his later conception of “the sovereign expressions of life.”

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THE SOVEREIGN EXPRESSIONS OF LIFE As I have mentioned, the idea of “the sovereign expressions of life” is not explicitly present in The Ethical Demand, but is first used in Opgør med Kierkegaard (Controverting Kierkegaard) in 1968. However, as we shall see, there is still a fundamental continuity in Løgstrup’s thinking here. While he never gives a definitive list, these “sovereign expressions of life” are said to include mercy, openness of speech, hope, trust, and love (2007, 125). Firstly, we might ask what makes openness, trust, mercy, and so on into “expressions of life”? The Danish term here is “livsytring,” where “ytring” may also be translated as “manifestation” as well as “remark” or “utterance”—so the suggestion here is that this is how life articulates itself, or properly realizes itself. Thus, through our following norms of trust, openness, mercy, and the like, life comes to its full expression through us, as our capacities for life are realized—and it is because this is the case that they are norms in the first place. By contrast, opposed to these sovereign expressions of life are alternative forms of acting and thinking that are life-denying and constraining, such as distrust instead of trust, hate instead of love, reserve instead of openness, despair instead of hope. Løgstrup calls attitudes of this sort “‘obsessive’ or ‘encircling’ phenomena” (2007, 51) because they turn the individual back in on themselves in a way that is both harmful to the individual and to the community more generally. On the other hand, “a person becomes his true self, and concretely so, by realizing himself in the sovereign expressions of life and identifying himself with them,” (2007, 54) while they also enable us to live together successfully: “The spontaneous expressions of life exist to allow our coexistence and communal life to endure and develop. They are summoned forth by the very coexistence and communal life that they realize . . . [I]f distrust [were taken to be] preferable to trust, hate to love, lies to truth, then coexistence and communal life cease. We can undermine the expressions of life, and we do, but not without life being destroyed. If trust, openness, compassion between us vanished and no longer broke through our attempts to destroy them, we would be done for” (2007, 128–29). Secondly, we might ask what makes these expressions of life “sovereign”? The key idea is that we ourselves do not bring it about that the world contains trust, openness in speech, mercy, and so on, in the way that we bring it about that people can get married or that they can own property: rather, unless life already followed these norms, it would not be possible at all. Thus, as Løgstrup puts it: “The sovereign expression of life precedes the will; its realization takes the will by surprise. It is one of those offerings in life which, to our good fortune, preempts us, and in whose absence we should be unable to carry on from one day to the next” (2007, 15). In calling the expressions of life “sovereign,” Løgstrup therefore means to contrast this

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with claims that we might be tempted to make about our sovereignty over these norms as their creators or instigators, which he holds are inapplicable here—a mistake he thinks is made by the character Ulrich from Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities: “Ulrich . . . assumes that we are a species of worldless individuals, ourselves the authors of our goals 15—as though there were not a challenge that proceeds to us from the world and its order. The ethical point of view is not a product of our aspirations but a backlighting effect that illuminates them, engendered by the basic givens of our condition which are not within our power to change” (2007, 95; 1972, 29). Thus, regarding the openness of speech, Løgstrup writes: “The expression of life is indeed mine, but not in the sense that I invest it with its definitive character. My speech is indeed mine, and it is indeed up to me whether I will be open in my speech, but it is not I who have brought it about that the definitive feature of speech is its openness. If I deceive another or raise my guard, I challenge the definitive feature of speech which attaches to it in advance of, and independently of, me” (2007, 46; 2013, 100). Now, it is this idea that sovereignty belongs to the expressions of life, and not to us, that I think can be helpful in opening up a more secular understanding of Løgstrup’s claim concerning the ethical demand on which we have been focusing, namely “that the other person has no right to make the radical demand that everything that I say or do in our mutual relation, I shall say or do for his sake and not for my own” (1997, 46). For, it can now be seen that the fundamental contrast Løgstrup is drawing in this passage is between a socially constituted contractual situation where he thinks we do possess such rights as something that has been agreed upon between us, and the situation of the ethical demand which comes into being independently of any such agreement, and (like the sovereign expressions of life) is not normatively constituted in this way: The radical character [of the demand] manifests itself also in the fact that the other person has no right to make the demand, even though it has to do with the care of his own life. Such demands as the other person—on their own behalf—has a perfect right to make are of an entirely different nature. They are conditioned by the social norms and standards—moral, legal, and conventional—that are implied in our life together with and over against one another. They are well-founded demands of which the other person is either conscious and which he or she is able to formulate, or of which he or she could have been conscious and which he or she could have been able to formulate. At any rate he can lay claim to these demands because he is fully within his right to assume that he and I are in agreement concerning the validity of the morality, the law, and the convention in question. If his demands hold good he must therefore also be able to show that they correspond to the social norms. On the other hand, the other person has no right to make the radical demand that everything that I say or do in our mutual relation, I shall say or do for his sake and not for my own. This is precisely a demand regarding which we have

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Thus, for example, if I am a patient in a hospital, I have the right to demand that the doctors set aside their own interests (within limits) and devote themselves to caring for me; but, Løgstrup seems to be suggesting, that right only holds because we are operating within a contractual situation in which they have agreed to relate to each other in this manner, as a result of this constructed social norm. However, the obligation to care represented by the ethical demand does not arise in this way, where in this respect it is akin to the sovereign expressions of life, which we do not and cannot constitute for ourselves, which means that the right to care cannot be said to apply here. By looking at Løgstrup’s conception of the sovereign expressions of life, we can thus see how he can conceive of certain normative structures of care being given rather than brought about in a contractual manner, as something we do not ourselves create but which are always already in place—and precisely because we do not create them for ourselves, Løgstrup argues, talk of a right to this care is misplaced. 16 Thus, because the ethical demand differs fundamentally from social norms and conventions which we bring about for ourselves, 17 this means that while we can talk about an entitlement to make the demands associated with the latter, we cannot assert a right to the kind of care and concern associated with the ethical demand, even though others are required to show such care and concern. To make sense of this difference, we have to see “life as a gift” not in the sense that it is given to us by God who then has a right to make this demand in a way that we do not, but rather that life has forms of normativity that we do not bring about through our human practices, but which are given to us prior to those practices, in ways which (Løgstrup thinks) rule out any talk of rights in this context. Thus, as has been suggested by Hans Fink and Alasdair MacIntyre, it is possible to argue that what Løgstrup says about life being a gift may rely “merely on life being something given in the ordinary philosophical sense of being prior to and a precondition of all we may think and do,” 18 in contrast to the social norms and conventions which we construct for ourselves; for as we have seen, it is arguably this secular conception of “life as a gift” which Løgstrup is appealing to when he claims that the ethical demand does not rest on the rights of the person to whom care is owed.

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A RELIGIOUS INTERPRETATION? However, although we have seen how there may be an understanding of “life as a gift” that is both secular and can do the work that Løgstrup wants it to do in relation to the ethical demand, we now need to consider an important challenge that may seem to come from Løgstrup himself: namely, does it make sense to think of life as structured by sovereign expressions of life such as trust, mercy, openness of speech and so on, unless we think of life as created by a benign God? If these normative structures are “given” without being constructed by us, how can they be inherent in life itself simply as such, unless that life was brought into being with certain purposes by a creator? As John Cottingham has argued recently: To spell it out more explicitly, if the pattern after which we are shaped, whether we like it or not, is one that allows us true fulfilment only if the love that is deep in our nature wells up and overflows towards our fellow-creatures, only then have we the highest and most compelling reasons to live in accordance with that love (2014, 86; cf. 2005, 56). 19

For Cottingham, we only have “the highest and most compelling reason” to love the other person if there is “a pattern after which we are shaped” which is properly realized through the exercise of that love; if there were no such pattern, the reason to love the other would be weakened, and could be overridden by reasons stemming from our own interests and concerns, making love optional rather than required. On this account, therefore, without a conception of life as “patterned” through some kind of creative act, the normativity of the ethical demand and the sovereign expressions of life would seem to lose their force. Now, it may seem that Løgstrup is in agreement with a view of this sort, and thus in the end his account of ethical normativity is also based on a claim about the created status of life. For, in several places Løgstrup writes that “the expressions of life suggest a religious interpretation,” and where his account of that interpretation may seem to imply that he would accept with something like Cottingham’s position, so that he too endorses a creationist conception of ethics: Unlike all those things which we ourselves have created through established institutions, such as manufactured products and technological apparatuses, expressions of life—thanks to their goodness and appeal—suggest a religious interpretation. . . . [T]he religious explanation is that expressions of life originate in the power to exist which we ourselves are not but which is closer to us than we are to ourselves (1995, 90–92; 2015, 115–16).

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Like Cottingham, we may take Løgstrup as arguing here that ultimately, because the sovereign expressions of life do not come from us, but are the way in which life is designed by a power that has created it, that this is what gives them their normative force which otherwise they would lack, so that Løgstrup is committed to a theistic ethics after all. Nonetheless, while this is certainly a possible reading of Løgstrup’s position, there are also reasons to think that once again his view is more complex than this suggests—where this complexity arises in determining what precisely it is about the sovereign expressions of life that “suggest a religious interpretation.” On an account like Cottingham’s, what does so is the very normativity of those expressions of life, as in his view we would lack “the highest and most compelling reason” to act in accordance with them if we were not thereby following God’s purposes in creation. 20 However, it is not clear that Løgstrup himself would go as far as this, as he seems to hold that the needs of the other are sufficient in themselves to generate a reason of this sort, making us responsible for others in a way that does not require us to think that our lives together have been created by God. For example, in The Ethical Demand, he speaks of trust as follows: “As surely as a person with the trust he either shows or desires gives more or less of his life [liv] into the other’s hand, so surely does the demand to take care of this person’s life [liv] belong to our life [tilværelse] such as it happens to be” (1997, 17). Here, it would seem, the normative basis for the demand to respond appropriately to the trusting person, is that she has made herself vulnerable through this display of trust, thereby giving rise to the demand to respond appropriately and offer the kind of care that is hereby required. It would thus seem that it is this responsibility for others in conditions of this kind that generates the demand, regardless of any appeal to issues of creation. Likewise, in outlining his “ontological ethics” in an article entitled “Ethics and Ontology,” Løgstrup writes that “the ethical demand take[s] its content from the unshakeable fact that the existence of human beings is intertwined with each other in a way that demands of human beings that they protect the lives of others who have been placed in their trust.” 21 Again, here it seems that this “unshakeable fact” of our interdependence is what generates the demand on us that comes through trust and the other sovereign expressions of life, in a way that is apparently sufficient to explain that normativity of that demand for Løgstrup, without any appeal to the idea of creation. However, if this is right, what can he mean by saying that “the sovereign expressions of life suggest a religious interpretation”? If that “suggestion” does not come about because we need to ground their normativity in a creationist picture, how else can the “suggestion” arise? I think this question can be answered if we see that for Løgstrup, even if the normativity of the ethical demand and the sovereign expressions of life do not require us to think that life is created, nonetheless we still need an explanation of how and why it is

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the case that the world is so ordered as to make trust, mercy and so on possible, namely how it is that the world is hospitable to the good in this way. This is essentially a metaphysical question, not a normative or axiological one—and to answer it “a religious interpretation is suggested,” in the sense that creation can be said to offer an account of this metaphysical fact, though of course it does not amount to a proof, which is why Løgstrup speaks of it as being “suggested” and as an “interpretation.” Thus, as Løgstrup puts it in System og Symbol (System and Symbol): “When something as unconditional as an expression of life comes from the universe, the thought springs to mind that humankind is not irrelevant to the universe” (2007, 139). That is, given that life for us would be impossible without the sovereign expressions of life being operative in the world, this suggests that the universe is not indifferent to us but has been created in such a way as to make this life possible. Nonetheless, the expression of life does not rest on or require a religious commitment to creation to ground its normativity as such; this is taken for granted in Løgstrup’s account, as what leads us to the idea of creation is the hospitality of the universe to this normativity, for otherwise it might seem too incredible for it to be ordered along these lines, as a world in which these goods are realized. It is thus not God’s act of creation that makes the sovereign expressions of life good at an axiological or normative level, but that he created the universe is nonetheless “suggested” by them insofar as we live in a universe in which they can be fulfilled and upheld. If we take this approach, we can then see how Løgstrup can hold that ethics may well have implications for the question of creation, but that nonetheless the former does not rest on the latter, but on our nature as living creatures caught up in relations of interdependence and care. In this chapter, we have considered a variety of respects in which Løgstrup treats ethics as deeply entwined with “one’s way of thinking about the relationship between humankind and the universe,” thus showing how he contributes to the debate concerning the relation between nature and ethics which is the focus of this volume. On his account, at the most fundamental level, as creatures within that universe who depend on each other in crucial ways, we find ourselves bound into relations of power over, and hence responsibility for, one another, in a way that gives rise to the ethical demand. However, various features of that demand require us to conceive of “life as a gift,” so the question then arises whether Løgstrup’s account of the normativity that governs our relations with one another within the universe is dependent on there being a creator of that universe. I have argued, however, that while Løgstrup holds that his position certainly “suggests a religious interpretation,” what this means can still be made consistent with the project of The Ethical Demand, which is to “determine in strictly human terms” what it is to love the neighbor, and why such love is required of us, given the kinds of creatures we are.

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REFERENCES Andersen, S., and Kees van Kooten Niekerk, eds. Concern for the Other: Perspectives on the Ethics of K. E. Løgstrup. Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2007. Brunner, E. The Divine Imperative: A Study in Christian Ethics. London: Lutterworth, 1941. Cottingham, J. The Spiritual Dimension: Religion, Philosophy and Human Value. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. ———. Philosophy of Religion: Towards a More Humane Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Guenther, L. The Gift of the Other: Levinas and the Politics of Reproduction. Albany: SUNY Press, 2006. Kymlicka, W. Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Introduction, 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Løgstrup, K. E. Norm og Spontaneitet. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1972. ———. Metaphysics, Vol. 1. Translated by Russell L. Dees. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1995. ———. Skabelse og Tilintetgørelse: Metaphysik IV: Religionsfilosofiske Betragtninger. Aarhus: Klim, 2015. ———. The Ethical Demand. Translated by Theodor I. Jensen, edited by Hans Fink. Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1997. ———. Beyond the Ethical Demand. Translated by Susan Drew and Heidi Flegal, edited by Kees van Kooten Niekerk. Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2007. ———. Opgør med Kierkegaard. Aarhus: Klim, 2013. Nozick, R. Anarchy, State and Utopia. Oxford: Blackwell, 1984.

NOTES 1. Philosophers from the English-speaking world who have discussed his work in recent times include Alasdair MacIntyre, Simon Critchley, Zygmunt Bauman, and Stephen Darwall. A bibliography of works on Løgstrup in English is available here: http://tinyurl.com/j3xxhhb. 2. Further bibliographical details are provided in the references to Løgstrup’s works provided in the notes. 3. The Danish term translated as “existence” here is tilværelse, which can also be translated as “life.” Løgstrup and his wife used it to translate Heidegger’s term Dasein into Danish. 4. See 1997, chapter 3, §2. 5. Cf. chapter 5, §1. 6. A slightly better translation would be: “The radical demand says that the other’s life should be cared for [varetages] in a way that best serves the other.” 7. Løgstrup responds to this last worry in chapter 1, §5. 8. Løgstrup himself presents the structure of The Ethical Demand in roughly this two-stage way in a summary of the text in a later work in which he replies to his critics: “First I analyse how the life of one person is interwoven with the life of another, and from this I deduce the content of the demand, which has to do with taking care of the life of the other person that has been surrendered to us. Some way into the book I make it clear that the one-sidedness of the demand cannot be deduced in this way, but presupposes that life has been given to the individual person.” 9. A further complication is that in his later “Rejoinder” to his critics, Løgstrup states that he was wrong to imply that the key distinction is between the “human” and the “religious,” but rather that it should be between the “human” and the “Christian”; so that while he maintains that The Ethical Demand does not “belong within the realm of the particularly Christian” (except for chapter 12 which discusses Jesus’s authority), he implies that a more broadly religious ethics that makes room for the “the religious truth that life is a gift” and for “questions of creation and absolute authority” would still count as a human and philosophical ethics in this

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sense, as they do not involve any specifically Christian doctrinal commitments. See Beyond the Ethical Demand, 10–11. 10. Because this chapter concentrates on whether Løgstrup’s conception of “life as a gift” requires a theological conception, it does not consider whether aspects of the ethical demand that do not directly relate to this conception might also require a theological interpretation—for example, Løgstrup’s claim that in face of its apparent unfulfillability “an ultimate authority” is needed to insist that the demand can still be fulfilled (cf. The Ethical Demand, 171/Den Etiske Fordring, 195), where it is again a matter of interpretation whether this commits Løgstrup to treating this authority in theistic terms, or in a more secular manner. These issues will be discussed elsewhere in Robert Stern, The Radical Demand in Løgstrup’s Ethics, forthcoming. 11. Cf. chapter 6, §4. 12. Cf. Thomas Hobbes, De Cive, chapter VIII, §i: “Let us return again to the state of nature, and consider men as if but even now sprung out of the earth, and suddainly (like Mushromes) come to full maturity without all kind of engagement to each other.” 13. For an outline of these debates, see Will Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Introduction, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 107–10. 14. An argument along these lines has also emerged in some of the literature on birth and reproduction: cf. Lisa Guenther, The Gift of the Other: Levinas and the Politics of Reproduction (Albany: SUNY Press, 2006), 161: “I am responsible not because the Other has done something to earn my response, as if I were merely settling the score or repaying a debt, but rather in response to a gift [of birth] that exceeds measure and disrupts the logic of reciprocity—infinitely.” I am grateful to Alison Stone for drawing my attention to this literature, and to pointing out its possible connections with Løgstrup. 15. The Danish word here is mål, which also has the implication of a “standard” or “measure.” 16. Of course, the conception of rights that Løgstrup is operating with here could be challenged, and on different conceptions his position might look less plausible; but that issue is not relevant to our purposes here, where it is the way he employs his view of rights to contrast social norms with sovereign expressions of life that is of primary significance to our current concerns. 17. This theme can be seen to be present not just in Løgstrup’s later discussion of sovereign expressions of life, but also in The Ethical Demand itself: cf. “Trust is not of our own making; it is given. Independently of us, our life is created in such a way that it cannot be lived in any other way than that the individual, through trust that is either shown or desired, delivers himself to the other person and thereby places more or less of his life in his hands” (The Ethical Demand, 18), and “We may compare natural love with the trust which is a basic part of human life. In both cases it would be absurd to say: This is my own achievement! . . . For this reason trust and love also contain an understanding of the fact that our life and the person who is the object of our love have been given to us as gifts” (The Ethical Demand, 138–39). 18. Hans Fink and Alasdair MacIntyre, “Introduction,” in The Ethical Demand, xv–xxxviii, xxxv. For an interesting challenge to this view, see Hans S. Reinders, “Donum or Datum? K. E. Løgstrup’s Religious Account of the Gift of Life” in Svend Andersen and Kees van Kooten Niekerk (eds), Concern for the Other: Perspectives on the Ethics of K. E. Løgstrup (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2007), 177–206; see also the reply by Jakob Wolff in the same volume: “A Response to Hans Reinders’s ‘Donum or Datum?,’” 207–16. 19. “For the theist . . . there is a domain of eternal and necessary value, a divine reality that infuses all possible worlds; the purposes of God are necessarily good, and the nature of human beings, qua created beings, is such that that they can only be truly fulfilled by living in conformity with his moral purposes.” 20. For a similar view, cf. Emil Brunner, The Divine Imperative: A Study in Christian Ethics (London: Lutterworth, 1941), 124: “Life claims our reverence not in itself but as the Divine Creation.” 21. K. E. Løgstrup, “Ethics and Ontology,” translated by Eric Watkins in The Ethical Demand, 265–93.

Chapter Five

Varieties of Naturalism From Foot’s “Natural Goodness” to Murdoch’s Non-Dogmatic Naturalism Maria Silvia Vaccarezza

Close friends and colleagues at Oxford, Foot and Murdoch both challenged the dominant philosophical paradigm of their days by presenting themselves as “naturalists” from an ethical point of view. However, the same word seems to imply quite different things for each of them, as is showed very clearly by their answer to two main questions regarding the way nature relates to ethics, namely: (i) Is the good a natural property? (ii) Is there any human nature, and, if so, does it ground normativity? Foot answers “yes” to both questions. In her work on Natural Goodness, she offers a contemporary version of the conception according to which what grounds normativity is human nature, with its objective and universal traits, rooted in biology and in the functioning of the human being. Consequently, as the title of her latest work suggests, she conceives the good as a natural property, namely, the actualization of rationality. On the other hand, what Iris Murdoch proposes, especially in her The Sovereignty of Good, is an alternative view of what it means to be naturalists. While Murdoch has no doubt that the good is a non-natural property, she nevertheless maintains that moral properties are real, and defines herself a kind of naturalist. As for human nature, rather than being a metaphysical concept indicating the human telos, nature is for Murdoch (following Freud much more than Aristotle, but also harking back to the Christian doctrine of original sin) the fallen condition of human beings, that makes them selfish and unable to bear the otherness of reality—a condition from which one can redeem oneself through asceticism, by virtue of another characteristic trait of human nature: the 71

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opening to the good. Human nature consists therefore, for Murdoch, of two conflicting forces: one that pushes the subject inward, and one that opens up to the good. Thus, she answers “no” to the question over the naturalness of good, while maintaining that the good is real; and she answers “yes” to the normativity of human nature question, although she replaces the traditional metaphysical account of it with a revised one. In what follows, I will explore these two rival accounts, so to show their peculiarities, and also their strengths and weaknesses. After having exposed both views and analyzed how they account for the interaction between nature and normativity, I will argue that Murdoch’s non-dogmatic naturalism is much more apt than Foot’s view to resist the many objections that can be raised to most forms of traditional and contemporary neo-Aristotelian naturalism. Thus, the ultimate purpose of this chapter is that of criticizing Foot’s reductionist perspective, in order to vindicate the superiority of Murdoch’s non-dogmatic naturalism. TWO NATURALISTS FIGHTING A COMMON ENEMY Although they develop deeply different theories, the starting point for both Foot and Murdoch is one and the same: namely, that of defeating a common enemy represented by non-naturalistic meta-ethical theories. From the beginning of her philosophical work, Foot argues both against G. E. Moore and his critique of naturalism (and the so-called naturalistic fallacy), and against emotivism and prescriptivism. The two latter philosophical positions represent the main target of her critique, insofar as they renounce to the objectivity of goodness, preserved by Moore, and turn Moore’s thesis into a subjectivist one, by replacing the intuition of a non-natural property with subjective attitudes and emotions. As Foot states when explaining the point of her fundamental Virtues and Vices, “Two themes run through many of the essays: opposition to emotivism and prescriptivism, and the thought that a sound moral philosophy should start from a theory of the virtues and vices. It was reading Aquinas on the individual virtues that first made me suspicious of contemporary theories about the relation between ‘fact’ and ‘value’” (Foot 2002, xiii). At the very beginning of Natural Goodness, Foot clearly states that her main purpose in developing a form of Aristotelian naturalism is that of fighting moral subjectivism and non-naturalism: “To contemplate a naturalistic theory of ethics [means] to break really radically both with G. E. Moore’s anti-naturalism and with the subjectivist theories such as emotivism and prescriptivism that have been seen as clarifications and developments of Moore’s original thought” (Foot 2001, 5).

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Similar statements are made by Iris Murdoch. In several passages, while explaining her work’s main goal, she identifies her philosophical target with reversing the status quo of British moral philosophy, a “piece of our philosophical history [that] might be described as the elimination of metaphysics from ethics” (Murdoch 1997c, 63) according to a dogmatic principle: “You cannot attach morality to the substance of the world” (ibid., 65), since “[ . . . ] if you do this you are in danger of making your morality into a dogma, you are in danger of becoming intolerant of the values of others” (66). Refuting this “Protestant, liberal, empiricist” (70) view means, for Murdoch, rejecting existentialism and its emphasis on choice and free will: “I have classified together as existentialists both philosophers such as Sartre who claim the title, and philosophers such as Hampshire, Hare, Ayer, who do not. Characteristic of both is the identification of the true person with the empty choosing will, and the corresponding emphasis upon the idea of movement rather than vision. This emphasis will go with the anti-naturalistic bias of existentialism. There is no point in talking of ‘moral seeing’ since there is nothing morally to see. There is no moral vision. There is only the ordinary world which is seen with ordinary vision, and there is the will that moves within it” (Murdoch 1997b, 327). Both British moral philosophy and existentialism, according to Murdoch’s reading, have excluded value from the objective world by identifying moral life with publicly observable behavior and transforming morality into the sum of explicit acts of choice. The reason why anti-naturalism is a common enemy of both Foot and Murdoch is therefore that it makes ethics a subjective field, and merely a matter of choice. The strategy chosen by Foot—espousing a form of neoAristotelian naturalism—is, as far as I know, a standard strategy displayed by virtue ethics to fight such an account of morality, since such naturalism easily guarantees the relationship between facts and values, whereas the latter is a less obvious way of facing this issue. However, as I will claim throughout the chapter and stress in its conclusion, Foot’s approach, no matter how standard it may appear prima facie, proves incapable of responding to several challenges, whereas following Murdoch’s path represents a more fruitful way to develop a plausible form of naturalism. Therefore, after sketching Foot’s account and showing the reasons of its weakness in the next section, in the following one I will outline at more length what I take to be Murdoch’s non-dogmatic naturalism, so to defend its legitimacy and to show its robustness and plausibility.

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PHILIPPA FOOT’S NATURALISTIC ETHICS: A CRITICAL APPROACH Philippa Foot’s philosophical path, which consists of several stages, is characterized by the recovery of a naturalistic ethics that refers explicitly to Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. Agnostic from a religious point of view, Foot is nevertheless a great admirer of Aquinas. The rediscovery of Aquinas’s thought, certainly influenced by her friendship with G. E. M. Anscombe and Peter Geach, 1 constitutes, together with the influence of Wittgenstein, one of the fundamental tenets of her thought, as she clearly admits. 2 But in the first period—despite her being already a naturalist, and assigning a central role to the virtues—Foot ultimately seems to ground morality on the agent’s interests and desires, revealing a Humean perspective on practical reason, as it is quite evident, for example, in the essays Moral Beliefs and Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives (both reprinted in her Virtues and Vices). It is only in the last period of her work, and particularly in her latest Natural Goodness, that Foot undertakes a radical turn, and promotes a new form of neo-naturalism, deeply indebted both to the Thomistic notion of nature and to its biologistic reformulation operated by Michael Thompson. 3 This new form consists in elaborating an original theory according to which moral evaluation is a particular case of the evaluation of living beings, and is based on the analysis of their functioning in the light of the species they belong to. The key concept involved is that of natural normativity, according to which goodness is the finalistic tension of each being toward its perfection, and moral evaluation is a particular instance of evaluation of the living beings’ functioning. The dispositions of the rational will are good or bad depending on their relationship with the goodness of the human being, and virtue is the disposition to exercise perfectly the characteristic functions of the human being. Moral evaluation, thus, far from being the expression of interests and desires, consists in knowing certain facts about the species one belongs to. According to this account, the objectivity of goodness is preserved by its naturalness, since goodness is conceived as the telos of a flourishing human life, and consists in developing and exercising natural human functions. What Foot proposes is therefore a form of strong naturalism 4 that undoubtedly succeeds in recovering moral objectivity against emotivism and prescriptivism. On the other hand, her account of moral evaluation and goodness presents significant weaknesses, highlighted by many. First, one could wonder whether an entirely nonevaluative account of human nature can really afford us with the list of traits that constitute a good life, and whether it is really possible to identify those traits irrespective of our previous moral opinions on what a good life consists in (cf. Donatelli, 183). Michael Thompson himself has addressed this difficulty, 5 by suggesting that

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Foot does not claim that moral considerations are inferred from a neutral observation of human nature, but rather that it is typical of human beings to be capable of a non-Humean and non-Hobbesian practical reasoning that enables them to grasp the moral demandingness of some kinds of traits. According to this thesis, which Thompson calls “local Footianism,” instead of moving from the characteristic human traits to reason out the good ones, we move from the traits we judge to be good, and we manage to justify their goodness by showing their being excellences of a rational will. 6 To this reading it has been objected that Foot does not simply support this “weak” thesis, but also the much stronger Aristotelian thesis according to which Aristotelian naturalism affords us with the criterion to rationally discriminate among reasons for acting (cf. Donatelli 2003, 185). Another important question, raised by Chappell and Lenman, is “whether any conception of the human telos can survive the replacement of Aristotelianism by modern evolutionary science” (Chappell 2013, 164): to assume that it is an unchanging human essence that tells us how to live “as a matter of science” is a dangerous move, since evolutionary science has already refuted such an account of human telos. But this is exactly what happens in Natural Goodness, which develops a “basically zoological conception of the good life for humans, while at the same time being remarkably unkeen to talk about the best science we have for discussing zoology, neoDarwinism” (Lenman 2005, 47). In other words, if we want to ground morality on a quasiscientific account of human life, we need to refer to what science tells us about life. In his defense of Foot, Thompson, on the contrary, “does briefly consider that it might be relevant to advancing our understanding of what life is to make some reference to DNA but dismisses this as doing no more to advance our understanding than ‘pointing to a few gorillas and turnips’ (Thompson 1995, 256–57)” (Lenman 2005, 47). One does not need, on this basis, to take up reductionism; one could also adopt a more sophisticated account of human telos, considering it both real and “emergent from those more basic levels” (Chappell 2013, 166). I agree with Chappell’s proposal to “dismiss a quasi-scientific account of human nature” and restore an “empirically informed philosophical reflection” on the human telos, supported by experience and rooted in ordinary life, based on a moral phenomenology and open to answers coming from art, novels, and poems. I take this suggestion to be extremely sympathetic with Julia Annas’s proposal of a “stronger relation” between reason and our biological nature (Annas 2005, 15–16). Although her criticism is addressed mainly to Rosalind Hursthouse, it seems to fit Foot’s thought as well, since both Hursthouse and Foot admit that biology must be interpreted by reason, but they nevertheless both keep claiming that biological nature sets constraints on what counts as virtue for a human being. On Hursthouse’s view, while developing her own account of the good life, one must take into account how to promote the four

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biological goods which are typical of oneself as a social animal, namely (a) individual survival; (b) continuance of the species; (c) characteristic enjoyment and freedom from pain; (d) good functioning of the social group. In Hursthouse’s thought the relationship between reason and these goods is, according to Annas, a weak one, since “the four ends form a robust constraint on the exercise of our rationality” and therefore “human nature provides a kind of barrier which rational thinking has to respect.” There are some worries with this weaker relation, which Annas highlights: (i) biological factors are not equally treated when it comes to reasoning out good ways of living. Some of them are counteracted (e.g., biological differences among the sexes in, say, reasoning out what is a good life for a man and for a woman. In this case we don’t think women should be constrained by reproduction), others are not (e.g., when denying the need for impersonal benevolence, we appeal to biological factors, such as the need for growing up our own children in order to promote the continuance of our species); (ii) according to the weaker relation, virtue does not guarantee flourishing, because of “factors about human nature which our reason is powerless to alter” (20). According to a stronger relation, on the contrary, “our human nature is simply the material that our rationality has to work with. [ . . . ] My practical rationality is seen as a skill or expertise which gets to work on the circumstances of my life, including of course the rest of my human nature, and makes something of it, in the way that a craftsperson makes an object from raw materials. Human nature does not have to be seen as wholly plastic and transformable into anything at all; after all, a good craftsperson will respect the potentials of the materials. This corresponds to the point that we are living beings of a distinctive kind, and that projects for living well have to work with this point. But what is distinctive about us is that our ways of living can be transformed as a whole by our rationality; we can choose and create new ways of living” (22). A stronger relation between nature and rationality seems much more sustainable since, as Annas observes, this is how things effectively work in human experience, where there are no sheer natural data: what is biological is always rationally interpreted and/or permeated by rationality, as it is quite evident when thinking about apparently biological-only activities such as satisfying the need for food or sex. Everything which seems natural is “an already socialized aspect of our life which is subject to negotiation” (24). This strong criticism fits perfectly Foot’s account of the relation between biological ends and reason, and particularly her account of the so-called “Aristotelian categoricals” and “Aristotelian necessities,” 7 which, precisely as the four ends outlined by Hursthouse, set robust constraints on what counts as a good life. Indeed, despite all her attempts to show the peculiarities of human good, due to the possession of practical reason, when compared to the good of other living beings, Foot is nonetheless openly con-

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vinced that “there is no change in the meaning of ‘good’ between the word as it appears in ‘good roots’ and as it appears in ‘good dispositions of the human will’” (NG, 26). Thus, even if she tries to assign a nonsymbolic role to practical reason, she fails in adequately accounting for it; this is due to her too strong conviction that what a good human life is cannot be reasoned out, but only described by a careful observation of the kind of living things humans are. Significantly, in a crucial passage Foot equates good life and being-a-good-kind-of-thing without any further justification: “To determine what is goodness and what defect of character, disposition, and choice, we must consider what human good is and how human beings live: in other words, what kind of a living thing a human being is” (Foot 2001, 36; my emphasis). Natural goodness therefore is assumed as the criterion against which the morality of actions can be evaluated without any crucial role assigned to practical reason; in other words, objectivity is recovered at the expense of both an active role of practical reason in identifying moral goodness, and the peculiarities of moral normativity compared with ontological normativity. To sum up, Foot’s strict naturalism raises several strong objections, to which it is unable to give a satisfying answer. Let’s turn, now, to Murdoch’s account. A NON-DOGMATIC NATURALISM: IRIS MURDOCH AND THE GOOD In some passages of her work, Iris Murdoch defines herself as a ‘non-dogmatic naturalist.’ In order to understand the meaning of this peculiar expression, let us first of all examine briefly the ‘non-dogmatic’ half of the definition, that is to be found in the non-naturalistic way she characterizes the good. When in The Sovereignty of Good she outlines its main features, she recovers the Platonic image of the sun: “[The sun] is real, it is out there, but very distant. It gives light and energy and enables us to know the truth. In its light we see the things of the world in their true relationship” (Murdoch 1997d, 376). As this image suggests, one of Murdoch’s strongest worries is that of avoiding any simplistic characterization of the good, and any reduction and absorption into other concepts. The good, in her view, must be preserved in its otherness and irreducibility to the good objects, even if they owe their goodness to its power of shedding light. According to Murdoch, every definition of the good would reduce its sovereignty and mystery. Therefore, before trying to characterize the good, and linking it to the exercise of the virtues, of attention and love, Murdoch suspends any philosophical argument in favor of a mystical attitude, and establishes as a necessary premise to the subsequent arguments the acknowledgment of an aspect of

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mystery, that won’t be exhausted by the following discourse. Only someone who acknowledges the ultimate unknowability of the good, and the fact that the good is always beyond our grasp, can try to understand it. This is why Murdoch thinks of morality as “a sort of unesoteric mysticism, having its source in an austere and unconsoled love of the Good” (ibid., 376). It would be misleading to interpret these statements as if they were expressive of a débâcle of rationality and a declaration of irrationalism. I take them rather as demonstrating Murdoch’s indebtedness to Plato and to Simone Weil, rather than to Aristotle. On the one hand, she lines up against Moore’s successors when affirming that “the concept Good resists collapse into the selfish empirical consciousness. It is not a mere value tag of the choosing will” (ibid., 376), but, on the other, she is with Moore when it comes to the good’s definability: “functional and causal uses of ‘good’ (a good knife, a good fellow) are not, as some philosophers have wished to argue, clues to the structure of the concept” (ibid., 376). This latter criticism is quite evidently directed against the distinction between attributive and predicative uses of the adjective “good,” 8 and against neo-Aristotelians: it is wrong to reduce goodness to a function of an omnipotent will, but it is likewise wrong to identify it with one of the world’s objects, making it a form of “natural goodness”: “[ . . . ] if we try to define Good as X we have to add that we mean of course a good X. if we say that Good is Reason we have to talk about good judgement. If we say that Good is Love we have to explain that there are different kinds of love. Even the concept of Truth has its ambiguities and it is really only of the Good that we can say ‘it is the trial of itself and needs no other touch’” (ibid., 380–381). Therefore, we need to dismiss the attempt to define the good exhaustively: all we can know about goodness is its relation to a genuine openness to reality: “Goodness is connected with the attempt to see the unself, to see and to respond to the real world in the light of a virtuous consciousness” (ibid., 376). This fact marks a deep difference with other contemporary attempts to restore a philosophical account of the virtues, since the latter assume as their starting point the identification of the good with a specific “object”—be it rational nature or happiness—and, to put it roughly, conceive the virtues as a means to achieve it. But things with Murdoch are different, since she challenges any reductionist account of the good (and even Aristotelian reductions) by combining aspects of Moore’s reflection with a sui generis Platonism and with Weil’s peculiar mysticism. That said, Murdoch does not take refuge in her peculiar “negative theology” nor in what she calls “practical mysticism,” and goes ahead by saying something more about the good. Again, something unexpected: namely, that the closest thing to the good is humility. Since “unselfing”—that is, coming out of oneself and letting reality get in—is what makes one closest to the good, the humble man is what most resembles the good: “Humility is a rare

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virtue and an unfashionable one and one which is often hard to discern. Only rarely does one meet somebody in whom it positively shines, in whom one apprehends with amazement the absence of the anxious avaricious tentacles of the self. In fact any other name for Good must be a partial name [ . . . ]. The humble man, because he sees himself as nothing, can see other things as they are. He sees the pointlessness of virtue and its unique value and the endless extent of its demand. [ . . . ] Although he is not by definition the good man, perhaps he is the kind of man who is most likely of all to become good” (ibid., 385). Murdoch, thus, claims that the good is a non-natural property, meaning that it cannot be defined in terms of natural objects, nor can it be identified with any of them; however, she holds that it is real, that it has to do with a certain attitude toward reality, and that it can be therefore experienced and encountered in the world. 9 Non-Reductionist Moral Realism Up to this point, I have outlined Murdoch’s “non-dogmatic” side, which I have located in her account of the indefinability of good. Let us now turn to her “naturalistic” half. Given that it does consist neither in an account of the good as a natural property nor in a standard “natural law view,” 10 we are left to identify it with her peculiar form of moral realism. To put it another way, I claim that Murdoch is a naturalist insofar as she endorses non-reductionist realism, rather than a natural law theory stricto sensu (Murphy 2011; Jordan 2008, 212; Antonaccio 2000, 119). First, I will explain what this statement means; afterward, I will try to establish whether this peculiar view amounts to a kind of naturalism at all. What does it mean, then, to espouse non-reductionist realism? For Murdoch, we should abandon the idea of reality as inhabited only by what meets scientific criteria and is publicly observable, and accept a wider notion of reality, namely, one capable of embracing anything that can be perceived by a just and loving observer. A reality that contains normative characteristics, “moral facts,” accessible only to beings with a certain type of subjectivity. It is precisely for this reason that Murdoch makes the word “reality” a persistent refrain, contrasting it with “inimical” words such as fantasy, illusion, dream, and even freedom and will, and protecting the space this term is worth preserving. From a meta-ethical point of view, Murdoch is undeniably a realist. 11 But when trying to identify which kind of realist she is, things become harder, and a lively debate, animated by a number of different voices and interpretations, arises. Some take Murdoch to be a classic realist (Kerr 1997, 68–88), others a reflexive realist (Antonaccio 2000), others a pragmatic realist (Pihlstrom 2005). Bagnoli attributes to her a distinctive position, opposed both to

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noncognitivism and to standard realism (Bagnoli 2007, 123). Jordan (2014) explains this disagreement on Murdoch’s realism by recognizing in her writings a certain amount of ambiguity and inconsistency: some passages explicitly refer to a reality conceived as exerting its authority from “over there,” outside the subject, while others refer to a moral world which is made up by the subject’s accuracy of vision and concepts; in a word, by her Gestalt. The ambiguity, therefore, is between moral facts as something the subject must acknowledge and obey, and moral facts as deep configurations of her vision. We should therefore take Murdoch’s appeal to realism non-naively: she is not simply rehabilitating classic moral realism, as she quite often reminds us: “Freedom, itself a moral concept and not just a prerequisite of morality, cannot here be separated from the idea of knowledge. That of which it is knowledge, that ‘reality’ which we are so naturally led to think of as revealed by ‘just attention,’ can of course, given the variety of human personality and situation, only be thought of as ‘one,’ as a single object for all men, in some very remote and ideal sense” (IP, 330). Again, even more clearly: “The world which we confront with is not just a world of ‘facts’ but a world upon which our imagination has, at any given moment, already worked; and although such working may often be ‘fantasy’ and may constitute a barrier to our seeing ‘what is really there,’ this is not necessarily so” (Murdoch 1997a, 199). At the same time, she is not even fostering a sophisticated form of constructivism: too strong is her insistence on terms like vision, obedience, reality as a normative idea, and on the need to destroy the images that imprison the self: “I would suggest that, at the level of serious common sense and of an ordinary non-philosophical reflection about the nature of morals, it is perfectly obvious that goodness is connected with knowledge: not with impersonal quasi-scientific knowledge of the ordinary world, whatever that may be, but with a refined and honest perception of what is really the case, a patient and just discernment and exploration of what confronts one, which is the result not simply of opening one’s eyes but of a certain perfectly familiar kind of moral discipline” (Murdoch 1997b, 330). What is at stake, therefore, is a complex and sophisticated idea of reality, which is meant to be normative without ending up in a “dogmatic naturalism,” since it is partly articulated by the interpretive activity of the agent, who bears the responsibility of elaborating “rich and fertile conceptual schemes” (Murdoch 1997b, 336). Therefore, when Murdoch proposes a non-dogmatic naturalism, what she has in mind is a non-reductionist realism centered on experience, conceived as the “meeting point” of subjectivity and objectivity. Moral properties depend on the experience of human agents, similarly to secondary qualities or, better, to the subject-related imports that, according to Taylor, are both objective and subject-dependent. This peculiar realism seems capable of resisting the objections seen in the previous sections, since it elaborates a norma-

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tive account of reality without depriving practical reason of its central role in interpreting and shaping experience. The Twofold Human Nature According to what I have said so far, Murdoch’s naturalism partly consists in her non-reductionist realism. But this, some might argue, is not enough to call her a naturalist in a nonmetaphorical sense. 12 Here we are helped by the second meaning of “nature,” namely that related to an account of human nature. As long as the good is not conceived as a natural human telos, any Aristotelian account of human nature disappears as well. But this does not imply getting rid of any account of nature; in Murdoch’s thought, indeed, the traditional view is replaced by another, Platonic-Christian-Freudian image of nature. This substitution means that human nature is real, and taken to be a meaningful source of direction for the ethical life. However, nature does not primarily consist of a set of biological properties indicating to the agent how she should live, and is rather conceived as a contradictory “locus,” characterized both by positive and negative forces and drives. What does this account of nature consist in? In Murdoch’s perspective, neither the agent is a neutral “vision-bearer” nor—as existentialism and empiricism hyperoptimistically and unrealistically do—is she to be seen as someone whose instrumental rationality puts her in full control of her existence. We should rather recover a realistic image of human beings as fallen creatures. This awareness is what Christianity calls “original sin,” and Freud first explained scientifically: the ego is dominated by selfish drives and selfcomforting dreams, where the agent takes refuge to escape reality. Our “selfdefensive psyche” (Murdoch 1997d, 368) is a “powerful energy system”: “We are anxiety ridden animals. Our minds are continually active, fabricating an anxious, usually self-preoccupied, often falsifying veil which partially conceals the world” (ibid., 369). At the same time, however, every human being is also “naturally” directed toward the good, that is, toward reality in its otherness, reality as something to respect, to contemplate with humility, and to love. Human nature consists therefore, for Murdoch, of two conflicting forces: one that pushes the subject inward, and one that opens to the good. This is why morality is so important: because it can foster the second force, through techniques of purification, such as focusing one’s attention to the beauty of art, and cultivating forms of detached love. Therefore, even if morality is not to be deduced from any account of human nature, and the latter is conceived as contradictory, there is something morality can learn from nature. Let’s ask now: does this “something” prove significant enough to support and justify, together with her moral realism, Murdoch’s self-definition? Or, in other words, can Murdoch’s position be said to represent a form of naturalism after all? My answer is yes, if we take

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as legitimate not only forms of traditional “strong” naturalism, but also weaker perspectives, that assign a moral relevance to an analysis of our human nature and telos, without depriving reason of its leading role in morality. The idea of nature we need, as pointed out by Chappell, cannot be entirely derived from science, but needs to be enriched by an account of what Wittgenstein used to call “the shared customary behaviour of mankind,” that is, of ordinary life. This means rooting morality in an account of nature conceived not only as bios, but also as the telos of human life; a telos whose features are discovered through a careful phenomenology of human experience, and through an exploration of the “fabric” of our being. CONCLUSION To sum up what I have shown in this chapter, both the authors considered rehabilitate a certain kind of naturalism in reaction to the dominant paradigm of their days. Foot’s naturalism consists in (i) considering the good a natural property; (ii) grounding normativity in nature as a metaphysical and biological source of value. Murdoch’s position, on the other hand, can be called naturalistic insofar as it (i) endorses moral realism and (ii) relies on an account of human nature and on a description of the human telos in terms of ordinary human experience. 13 Thus, both accounts, despite their differences, can be genuinely named “naturalistic.” What conclusion can be drawn from the analysis of these two different perspectives? For sure, that there is more than one legitimate way to be naturalists; also, that some naturalisms prove capable of better resisting objections, without renouncing objectivity and realism in ethics. Defending naturalism, therefore, does not by itself imply being committed to hold reductionist claims (i.e., to reduce ethics to a metaphysics grounded primarily on a quasi-scientific biology). On the contrary, such reductionist moves, despite appearing plausible prima facie, as well as robust in safeguarding objectivity, turn out to be incapable of resisting decisive objections. I hope to have shown that Murdoch’s way of pursuing a non-dogmatic naturalism, on the other hand, no matter how peculiar, represents a legitimate and much more fruitful way to develop a plausible form of naturalism without ending up in reductionism. REFERENCES Annas, J. “Virtue Ethics: What Kind of Naturalism?” In Virtue Ethics Old and New, edited by S. M. Gardiner, 11–29. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005.

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Antonaccio, M. “Form and Contingency in Ethics.” In Iris Murdoch and the Search for Human Goodness, edited by M. Antonaccio and W. Schweiker. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. ———. Picturing the Human: The Moral Thought of Iris Murdoch. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Bagnoli, C. “Iris Murdoch: il realismo come conquista individuale.” Oggettività e morale. La riflessione etica del Novecento, by G. Bongiovanni, 114–30. Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2007. Chappell, T. “Virtue Ethics in the Twentieth Century.” In The Cambridge Companion to Virtue Ethics, edited by D. C. Russell. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Donatelli, P. “Non basta l’umanità. Philippa Foot sulla bontà naturale,” Iride 38 (2003). Foot, P. Natural Goodness. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. ———. Virtues and Vices and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Jordan, J. E. G. “Iris Murdoch’s Genealogy of the Modern Self: Retrieving Consciousness beyond the Linguistic Turn.” PhD diss., Baylor University, 2008. https://beardocs.baylor. edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/2104/5240/Jessy_Jordan_phd.pdf?sequence=1. Kerr, F. “Back to Plato with Iris Murdoch.” In Immortal Longings: Versions of Trascending Humanity, 68–88. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1997. Lenman, J. “The Saucer of Mud, the Kudzu Vine and the Uxorious Cheetah: Against NeoAristotelian Naturalism in Metaethics.” EUJAP, Vol. 1, No. 2 (2005): 37–50. McDowell, J. “Two Sorts of Naturalism.” In Virtues and Reasons. Philippa Foot and Moral Theory, edited by R. Hursthouse, G. Lawrence, and W. Quinn. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. Murdoch, I. “The Darkness of Practical Reason.” In Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, edited by P. Conradi. London: Chatto & Windus, 1997a. ———. “The Idea of Perfection.” In Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, edited by P. Conradi. London: Chatto & Windus, 1997b. ———. “Metaphysics and Ethics.” In Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, edited by P. Conradi. London: Chatto & Windus, 1997c. ———. “The Sovereignty of Good over Other Concepts.” In Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, edited by P. Conradi. London: Chatto & Windus, 1997d. Murphy, M. “The Natural Law Tradition in Ethics.” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2011. http://www.iep.utm.edu/natlaw/. Pihlstrom, S. Pragmatic Moral Realism: A Trascendental Defence. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005. Thompson, M. “The Representation of Life.” In Virtues and Reasons: Philippa Foot and Moral Theory, edited by R. Hursthouse, G. Lawrence, and W. Quinn, 247–96. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. ———. “Three Degrees of Natural Goodness.” Iride 38 (2003): 191–97.

NOTES 1. As it is well known, particularly important for Foot have been Anscombe’s Modern Moral Philosophy and Geach’s 1977 volume, The Virtues. 2. See Foot 2002, 2: “It is my opinion that the Summa Theologica is one of the best sources we have for moral philosophy, and moreover that St. Thomas’s ethical writings are as useful to the atheist as to the Catholic or other Christian believer.” 3. Cf. Thompson 1995. 4. In disagreement with Foot, John McDowell highlights the limits of her account and elaborates a different kind of naturalism, which is not grounded on a justification external to morality. This means a naturalism based not on the first (biological) nature, but on the “second” one, that is, the one shaped by the virtues and acquired through moral education. Second nature, according to this view, is what enables the agent to acknowledge the relevant reasons for acting. Cf. McDowell 1995.

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5. Cf. Thompson 2003. 6. Cf. Donatelli 2003. 7. The first expression is borrowed from Michael Thompson, while the second from Elizabeth Anscombe. 8. A distinction put forward by Peter Geach in his Good and Evil (1956), and entirely embraced by Foot. 9. Here we might be reminded of Wittgenstein, and of his view of the ethical not as something to be found among the world’s facts, but as an attitude toward all the facts of the world. Compare Murdoch’s reading of Wittgenstein, MGM, especially chapter 2 on “Fact and Value.” 10. To which Foot could be easily ascribed. For an account of the “natural law view,” see Antonaccio 1996. 11. This label does not fully account for Murdoch’s appeal to reality and realism. It is important to note that this appeal has been read mainly in its meta-ethical dimension, without devoting equal attention to an analysis of Murdoch’s realism as an overall perspective. I have argued that three sorts of realism can be found in Murdoch’s writing: (i) meta-ethical realism; (ii) methodological realism, that is, adherence to reality as the criterion to judge the goodness of a theory; (iii) existential realism, that is, a realistic attitude toward existence, which consists in openness to reality and a dismissal of illusions. 12. I am indebted to Riccardo Fanciullacci for some deep and decisive remarks on this point. 13. Daniele Bertini has rightly pointed out to me that the contents of Murdoch’s account of human nature can partly considered old-fashioned, for example, in its apparently acritical acceptance of Freudism. I am grateful to him for letting me note this point, but I also think that the legitimacy of Murdoch’s naturalism does not rest upon the validity of her account of human nature; one could replace the latter with a more up-to-date one, without undermining the general structure of her argument.

II

The Ethics of Nature

Chapter Six

Un/natural Creation(s) Posthumanism, Biotechnology, and Exploring the (Place in) Nature of Humans and Artificial Life Scott Midson

When the world ceases to signify as God’s creation, humanity’s place within it, indeed the very idea of the human being as creature, undergoes profound transformation. —Wirzba (2015, 7)

INTRODUCTION: FROM POSTHUMANS TO POSTHUMANISMS Posthumanism, in spite of having a wide range of meanings and applications, and referring most broadly to a set of multiform methodological orientations to the human, is often more narrowly assumed to relate solely to a specific type of posthuman figure. That figure is often imagined through the lens of sci-fi films and books as a sentient artificial intelligence or machine-like entity. 1 In these crude yet popular portrayals, posthumanism is located within the technological nonorganic, non-natural, and nonhuman body, resulting in a clearly identifiable posthuman figure which is antithetical and even antagonistic to the human. While these posthumans may appear to challenge the human by posing a threat to human survival, they also reveal something significant about how the human is constructed in distinction from the nonhuman, resulting in a divided view of nature. Posthumans in this sense provide a type of foil to the human and to nature, being labeled as “unnatural” and “artificial,” 2 but, of course, not all posthumans are made of technological parts. Indeed, as MIT technologist Rodney Brooks suggests, we may already 87

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be shifting from a robotics revolution that contends with the autonomization of machines, where machines are seen as distinct from organic beings, 3 to a biotechnology revolution where human and machinic bodies are merged and brought into question. Here, Brooks predicts, “our machines will become much more like us, and we will become much more like our machines” (2003, 10–11). Many questions can be raised here, including whether we should or should not be mixing such biological and technological categories. While not concerning myself specifically with this issue, however, I shall touch upon it here in asking whether and how such biotechnological assemblages destabilize categorical distinctions, chiefly between nature and artifice. To elaborate and slightly rephrase this question, the issue that I seek to raise here is about the artificiality of technology, which has implications for how we perceive and relate to new technological developments, and whether or not these are (or perhaps whether or not they should be) accommodated for in conceptions of “nature.” I ultimately propose that the distinction between nature and artifice is a smokescreen for the underlying tensions and continuities across these categories that are in fact more porous than we might first consider, and in outlining this I refer to both posthumanism and theology which have key stakes in these discussions and issues. Regarding posthumanism, I explore the connection between technology and artificiality typically promoted by terms such as “artificial intelligence” and “artificial life,” and ask whether biotechnological assemblages challenge the assumptions that we use to determine and discriminate artificiality from its antithesis. I make similar explorations via Christian theology, and explore what artificiality might be dichotomized against, considering “nature” and “creation” as two viable suggestions, and additionally critiquing these notions throughout the analysis while engaging with different figures and theories of posthumanism. WHAT IS (THE ANTITHESIS OF) ARTIFICIALITY? As a useful starting point, the Oxford English Dictionary defines “artificiality” as something “made or produced by human beings rather than occurring naturally, especially as a copy of something natural.” 4 Already there is the assumption that there is a difference between humans and nature contained in this definition, and posthumans, as fashioned by humans, are inevitably and irrefutably to be regarded as artificial, according to this definition and distinction. “Artificial intelligence” (AI), then, is a human-created copy of natural intelligence; likewise, “artificial life” (AL) is a human-created copy of natural life. Taking the latter, AL, we might consider one important case study in this field as an “animat,” which is an “artificial animal; a robot or

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computer simulation with sensors, actuators and nervous system that are directly inspired by actual living organisms” (Binder, Hirokawa and Windhorst, 2009, 123). The purpose of these “creatures” is “to provide some insight into real issues in biological or cognitive science” (Webb, 2009, 270), and particularly insofar as they are contained within computer screens, we might have little difficulty in recognizing their artificiality. 5 We might additionally use the noun “life” sparingly in these cases, in the same way that we might not attribute Sims in the popular Maxis video game franchise a sense of being “living,” even artificially. Barbara Webb shares in some of these concerns, insisting that animats should be regarded as models for biological animals in accordance with their intended use, that is, in coming to understand animals’ behavior (2009, 274–75), while simultaneously questioning how effective they are as models in their detachment from specific animals and their inability to replicate the complexity of biological life (2009, 281–82; cf. Bullock, 2009, 303–5; cf. Long, 2012, 4–5). If this is the case, then we may in fact learn very little about biology, and the distinction between nature and artificiality is bolstered. This is but one example, though, and the field of animats has developed in ways that might challenge how we think about artificiality further. If the animat is taken as a model, then the emphasis is already placed on the natural world that it mimics, and so the dictionary definition of artificiality and the animats’ adherence to that label is readily confirmed. This is a tautology, however, and so another way that we might figure animats is not as models, but rather as analytical systems in their own right (Webb, 2009, 275) such that they are embedded in a more complex world where the natural and artificial interact, rather than being kept in radically separate realms. To this end, Webb writes, “it is a mistake to argue that because a system is a simulation, it therefore cannot be an instantiation” (2009, 276). 6 Illustrating something of this complexity and interaction, we might consider “neurally controlled animats” that combine “small networks of real brain cells, computer simulations, and robotics into new hybrid neural microsystems” (Potter et al., 2004, 1094; cf. Neurolab, “Neurally Controlled Animats”). This animat is no longer a mere digital model, and real living cells are now incorporated into the system. As a New Scientist article describes of the process of making this biotechnological assemblage: The neural cortex from a rat foetus is surgically removed and disassociating enzymes applied to it to disconnect the neurons from each other. The researchers then deposit a slim layer of these isolated neurons into a nutrient-rich medium on a bank of electrodes, where they start reconnecting. (Marks, 2008)

Is this still artificial? In one sense, the neuronal culture is derived from organic matter, but in another, it is refigured and developed in a radically

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different way to that of a ‘natural’ process, by separating the cellular networks so that they are forced to form new (and apparently stable) connections (cf. DeMarse, Wagenaar, Blau, and Potter, 2001, 305–6). Either way, both parts come together in the biotechnological assemblage and begin to challenge how we regard artificiality beyond that of a simpler model (cf. Bakkum, Potter, et al., 2004, 131). 7 One particularly influential way of assessing these biotechnologies is to continue to regard them as artificial, potentially as a way of expressing concern or even disgust at the extent of change that they have brought about to the natural world (cf. Dinello, 2006, 185). Jacques Ellul pithily encapsulates this attitude: Technique is opposed to nature. Art, artifice, artificial: technique as art is the creation of an artificial system. [ . . . ] It destroys, eliminates, or subordinates the natural world, and does not allow this world to restore itself or even to enter into a symbiotic relation with it. [ . . . ] We are rapidly approaching the time when there will be no longer any natural environment at all (1964 [1954], 79).

For Ellul, technologies directly contrast the natural world in a damaging way, and so presumably biotechnologies such as neutrally controlled animats enact or at least represent a diminished view of life as something that is open to technological control. In moving beyond a model-based view that keeps technology and nature separate, the closer interaction of the two in the world has potentially deleterious consequences that need to be curbed, and nature is here appealed to in judging (bio)technologies; artificiality takes on negative connotations that are attributed to technologies. OUT OF THE GARDEN, INTO THE LABORATORY? In 2015, Pope Francis published his second papal encyclical, Laudato Si. Widely commended for bringing ecological concerns to the foreground of his concerns among those pertaining to social justice (Bell, 2015; Hamilton, 2015; McKibben, 2015), it made critiques of technologies similar to those posited by Ellul. For the Pope, bluntly put, “we were not meant to be inundated by cement, asphalt, glass and metal, and deprived of physical contact with nature” in favor of an “artificial tranquillity” (31, 32). 8 While highlighting the theological significance of the discussion of technology and nature, the message here seems to be one of valorizing nature in contradistinction from the technological world in which we now exist—this is the case even where the technological world is designed to be aesthetically pleasing, as it is seen as merely masking a deeper and more fundamental beauty. That beauty, in theological terms, is strongly associated with a view of creation; as Norman

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Wirzba points out, the Judeo-Christian account of creation takes place in a garden, and this is of profound importance (2015, 98). Gardens, unlike built environments, “are places in which people are more readily compelled to see the variety and complexity of creatures and life processes beyond human design or control” (Wirzba, 2015, 104). There is, then, an element of human action and centrality associated with the transformation from creation to artificiality. Where human concerns trump those of animals and wider creation, instead acting in favor of constructed places such as shopping centers and industries, we distance ourselves in destructive ways from that which is created and good. 9 Sally McFague describes this as the transition from “first nature” to “second nature”: humans were once hunter-gatherers, but now things like biotechnologies that represent “the hybridization of the twenty-first century” threaten us with “the deterioration and destruction of everything we hold dear” (in Bohannon, 2014, 223). As an expression of this, we might pause to reflect on the biotechnologization of animals as livestock: Celia DeaneDrummond notes that this changes how animals are seen, and she uses the notion of “post-animal” to refer to “the disruption of traditional meanings of what it is to be an animal with a creaturely life of its own and its own telos” (2015, 147). Animals are, in other words, reduced by humans to mere tools and objects of domination, and the notion of the post-animal as something unnatural and created by humans thereby suggests that we enter the realm of artificiality. The implication, moreover, is that humans are also debased in this process, as Deane-Drummond suggests that the post-animal is linked to the in-human and the post-human, where humans are open to the same technological manipulation as animals (2015, 147). It is human activity, particularly invested in biotechnologies, that is seen as destructive here, suggesting that humans themselves are increasingly divided from nature, which is understood somehow as a carrier of divine grace. These points are connoted in Laudato Si. One example of how this technological world can be considered as “artificial” can be found in how technologies change the nature of relationships: Real relationships with others, with all the challenges they entail, now tend to be replaced by a type of internet communication which enables us to choose or eliminate relationships at whim, thus giving rise to a new type of contrived emotion which has more to do with devices and displays than with other people and with nature. (2015, 33)

The suggestion here is that technologically mediated communications, although acknowledged as useful to an extent, are replacing “real” relationships, and so are in some way unreal, or at least less real. There is a strong emphasis on the selectivity and malleability of these unreal relationships,

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thereby depicting a centrality of the human who decides and shapes them; yet concomitantly the role of other humans and nature within those relationships is marginalized, and they are replaced by “devices and displays” as markers of a technological world. Humans are thus caught somewhat in the middle: on the one hand, they are on the side of people and nature that are abandoned in favor of technological devices that mediate and reshape communication and relationships; on the other hand, they are the ones using such devices and displays. In the context of the garden highlighted by Wirzba, humans are both part of the natural world and the goodness of creation, but are also disjointed from it. 10 Within this framework, technologies seem to be antithetical to nature and can be paralleled with the succumbing to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, thereby accentuating a rift between humans and the rest of nature (cf. Wirzba, 2015, 144 What is clear is that there is a desire to recognize a threshold between nature and its antithesis that technologies cross, and that they are assessed according to. What is less clear, however, is how we quantify or understand that antithesis: “artificiality” is only once referred to in Laudato Si (2015, 32), 11 and so while we might deduce its significance in relation to “real” relationships including with “nature,” and in its dealing in “contrived” emotion in the passage above, these explorations do not take us far enough in fully understanding that concept. An implication of this is likely to be that, arguably, what is meant by “nature” or “real” is equally shrouded and uncertain, given that references to those notions and their opposites are vague. It is nonetheless tempting to appeal to notions of nature when assessing technologies, particularly given the association between creation and the paradisiacal garden. As theologians such as Gordon Kaufman have noted, though, “the concept of nature, at least as we think of it today, had no real place in the biblical story at all” (2000, 5); our conceptions of nature and creation may be projections from more contemporary times (cf. Haraway, 2004, 186), likely to have been prompted by increasing levels of technologization and concomitant industrialization. This is potentially tautologous, and may explain why Joan Broadhurst-Dixon considers “to criticise technology’s denaturing tendencies [as] the ultimate in philosophical naivety” (1998, 125). In other words, technology and nature are not diametrically opposed, but we construct notions of nature and technology as two sides of the same coin, and so fail to recognize both faces at once in a kind of zero-sum game. This is to say, to borrow Elaine Graham’s phrasing of the matter, “there can be no ‘back to nature’ because the ‘nature’ to which we appeal is always already reproduced through the medium of techno-scientific representation and intervention” (1999, 426). The notion of “nature” and artificiality, it seems, are deeply intertwined and mutually constitutive, but awareness of this is muted, leading us to treat them as though they were antithetical, as though they were as separate as the models originally discussed of animats were figured from

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reality. Part of the reason for this muting might have much to do with how nature and creation are closely linked; as John Gray claims, “thinking of our bodies as natural and our technologies as artificial gives too much importance to the accident of our origins” (2002, 16). At the same time, notions of nature and artifice do provide a necessary way of assessing certain technologies that can be useful, particularly where it comes to post-animals, as coined by Deane-Drummond. We must however be cautious not to localize the threat solely within technology so as to misleadingly demonize it, given that technology, as with artificiality, to reiterate, is not an isolated category. What is therefore needed is a way of decoupling and further critiquing notions of creation and nature, and nature and artifice, so that technologies in particular are not uncritically relegated under the latter category. NATURAL AND UNNATURAL SELECTION Gray goes on to say, “If we are replaced by machines, it will be an evolutionary shift no different from that when bacteria combined to make our earliest ancestors” (Gray, 2002, 16). On this point, we return to the theme and issue of posthumanism. As stated at the beginning of this chapter, there is a tendency to associate posthumanism with a particular type of posthuman being, and here Frankenstein’s monster may be the archetypal figure. The figure can be seen as threatening in terms of: (1) what it learns from its creator (and other humans) and its subsequent desire to destroy; and (2) its monstrous nature as a composition of different parts. While the first point has been widely picked up in attending to the threat of the creator as much as (if not more than) the threat of the created posthuman, in contending with the issue of artificiality, it is the second point that responds most strongly to the critique of nature that I have been developing, and that I shall thus address firstly. Frankenstein fashioned his posthuman by means of unnatural production, a radical androcentric reworking of human sexual reproduction between a loving man and woman. In this regard, his monster is seen as artificial, and the process of its unnatural creation has resulted in Frankenstein (erroneously taken to refer to the created rather than the creator) lending its name to all manner of “unnatural” biotechnological products, including GM crops and “Frankenfoods.” 12 As Jeffrey Smith writes of the genetic engineering process behind these, it “takes artificial combinations of genes that have never existed together, forcibly inserts them into random locations in the host genome and then clones the results; it is clear that the process differs from natural breeding” (2007). Artificiality is again marked in contradistinction from that which is natural, and it is this that has come to define our fears and distaste for many posthuman figures in fiction, and their nonfictional derivatives and cousins such as GM crops. Yet, as has now been suggested, it is not enough

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for theology to fall back upon vague notions of nature in pressing forward a distinction that comes to judge and critique that which is considered artificial. As the example of genetic engineering discussed by Smith above demonstrates, the issue of artificiality in the theological context of creation raises the matter of human activity, which has already been suggested is largely sited at the borderline between natural and unnatural, or, to borrow the language of Wirzba, between gardens and shopping centers (respectively) (2015, 104). Smith’s phrasing and choice of terms gives the impression that humans are struggling against natural orderings and locations of genes to make products for their own ends, thus emphasizing human activity, even while noting the ‘random’ places where these genes are transposed. This point can be accentuated by comparing this conscious manipulation of genetic material using technological means with changes to genetic data that are not consciously made by humans, and that are ongoing over vast stretches of time, namely, evolution and its associated processes. Here, the label “natural selection,” popularized by Charles Darwin, 13 is even applied to convey that it is significantly not humans who are steering the ongoing development process—but this then raises the question of (1) who does steer it, and (2) what humans’ role in that process in fact is. Particularly in the light of the discussion here about nature and creation, these are important points and each shall be addressed in turn. Taking the question about who steers so-called “natural” selection (1) first, the term implies that there is a semiautonomous process attributed to nature that evolves beings by principles of competition and perfection by degree (Darwin, 1964 [1859], 472). Indeed, Darwin’s explication of natural selection makes it plain that, as a principle, it is presented in contrast to human selection (Darwin, 1964 [1859], 61), which might be considered as unnatural or artificial by extension, resulting in the unnatural products of GM crops and Frankenfood, for example, as mentioned above. The governing hand of nature in natural selection is presented as abstract and somewhat detached from the individual lives of creatures, and interestingly, it is this abstraction of the principle that facilitates AL insofar as it can be programmed and replicated as a “functional property” (Manson, 2004, 258). 14 The recognition of this principle of nature confirms the view in Laudato Si that nature is “a system which can be studied, understood and controlled” (2015, 56), but it is notably humans that are central in all of these aspects. There is a commonality between the modeled animats and wider nature in the form of human decision and activity, and so it may be the case that the distinction between human and natural selection artificially masks deeper continuities as well as constructions of the human as central and significant. Steve Fuller gestures something to this end in claiming that, in spite of our

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efforts to distinguish “natural,” “artificial,” (and “divine”), 15 they refer ultimately to the same process (2011, 226). Put differently, what I am suggesting is that the use of technologies to approach and appropriate nature is not itself unnatural or artificial; technologies are already a part of that rational way of perceiving and existing in the world. This is perhaps what Pope Francis is alluding to in his observation that “many of the problems of today’s world stem from the tendency, at times unconscious, to make the method and aims of science and technology an epistemological paradigm which shapes the lives and the workings of society” (Laudato Si, 2015, 80). Technology becomes the framework that determines our view of nature (rather than the reverse which we might assume to be the case in using nature to assess technology), and we see this notably with Darwinism, which has provided a deeply influential scientific paradigm (Darwin, 1964 [1859], 490). 16 While this may not entirely resolve the question of “who” steers the evolutionary trajectory, it suggests a bringing together of humans, technology, and nature into a common attitude where the principles of competition are made paramount. In this sense, to respond to the question about the role of humans in evolutionary processes (2), it must be the case that we are always involved in some way, and so the distinction between natural and artificial selection begins to seem much less convincing. To explain this point in further detail, as noted above, Darwin’s account of natural selection is established in contrast from human selection. Here, human decision is seen as artificially controlling the developmental trajectory of various species, typically at a comparably faster pace than that which is offered by nature, and for humanocentric ends (Darwin, 1964 [1859], 83). There is a clear division between humans and nature established here, but almost paradoxically, this division for Darwin is itself natural: “We have seen that man by selection can certainly produce great results, and can adapt organic beings to his own uses, through the accumulation of slight but useful variations, given to him by the hand of Nature” (1964 [1859], 61; my emphasis). What this means is that the sense of division between humans and nature is undercut, and along with this, given the continuity between humans and technology in terms of artificial selection, technologies become part of this “nature.” An objection to this would be that humans elevate themselves above nature in artificial selection, but my point here is that this activity cannot be isolated as “artificial” against “natural” selection because there are no concrete grounds to make this separation. Even where the human is elevated above so-called nature, the Darwinian model of competition and evolution still applies to the human, and so it does not stand outside of what are perceived to be these fundamental principles. 17 There is evidence of this continuity (rather than distinction) recognised in Darwin’s work where he refers in particular to the many species that have been “naturalized through man’s agency” and have since “spread with astonishing rapidity over new

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countries” (1964 [1859], 402) in a dynamic interaction between different agents and processes in evolution. In terms of cause and effect, it is difficult to neatly discern where the boundaries between natural selection and human/ artificial selection are located. ARTIFICIAL CREATIONS, ARTIFICIALLY CREATING? That artificiality and naturalness are so deeply and messily intertwined in spite of our best efforts at separating them, then, has much to do with how we seek to view the world and our place within it. The construction of artificiality and naturalness as both continuous and discontinuous ultimately corresponds to a centrality of the human, who, to return to the dictionary definition of artificiality, is the one who is positioned between that which is ‘natural’ and ‘artificial.’ If artificiality is to do with human fabrication, then the social construction of the notion of nature (cf. Bohannon, 2014, 4) itself must be revealed as artificial. Where does that leave us? At the start of the previous section, I noted two ways that Frankenstein’s monster, which can be taken as a fictional archetype of biotechnological posthumanism, can be regarded as threatening. Appeals to its nature as a monstrous assemblage of different parts largely fail, I have argued, because nature and artificiality are not as distinct as we need them to be in order to support such claims. Alternatively, let us now consider the second threat that comes in the form of what the creature learns from humans. Humans were repulsed at the sight of the creature and, presumably reverting back to fears of monstrosity relating to the artificial nature—or rather the unnaturalness— of the creature, attempted to destroy it, thereby prompting a vengeful rage in the creature’s heart (Shelley, 2008 [1818], 110–11). This is the imposition of a humanocentric ordering of the world again, suggesting a right to not only create but also to destroy that the creature learns and mimics. Is this a desirable or ethical model for co-living? Deane-Drummond has already brought into question the post-animat that, like Frankenstein’s monster, is created and destroyed for human ends. It is here not the technology itself but the use of it, or rather the relation to it, that is harmful, both to the creature and to the wider creation, which, according to Pope Francis, “can only be understood as a gift from the outstretched hand of the Father of all, and as a reality illuminated by the love which calls us together into universal communion” (Laudato Si, 2015, 56). It is this communion, I want to propose, that should be appealed to rather than divisive models that artificially make humans the center of creation, particularly when looking ahead to the creation of allegedly artificial biotechnological posthumans. It is through experiences of communion and sociality, not divisiveness, that represent the best cases of hope in Mary Shelley’s infamous novel—for example, where the creature dis-

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cusses his learning from his “beloved cottagers” about “the views of social life [ . . . ], to admire their virtues, and to deprecate the vices of mankind” (Shelley, 2008 [1818], 102). What I am proposing to this end is an incorporation of biotechnology as biotechnology within discussions of creatureliness, rather than only permitting the biological parts, and discriminating against the technological parts in accordance with some ideal notion of nature to which neither we nor the posthumanist creatures belong to. This kind of approach demands an openness to a range of forms and expressions of creatureliness, including from biotechnological creatures and critters such as animats and post-animals. Certain practices involving biotechnologies may still be condemned in this perspective, such as those that detriment the welfare of animals in farm industries and elsewhere, but the point is that it is not necessarily the biotechnologies that brought them into being, or the creatures themselves, that are inherently rendered as artificial. Biotechnological posthumans do not exist in a world totally detached or isolated from ours; they are not merely artificial or models but are creatures for us to relate to, to learn from, and to exist alongside. More attention to this as an extended creatureliness, rather than returns to divisions between nature and artificiality, that are anyway not as distinct as we consider them to be, can be a useful way to decenter ourselves and, perhaps ironically, place ourselves firmly back in creation. To be sure, I am not here advocating a utopian posthumanist worldview that overlooks the politics of creation, where necessary investigation, including from theological anthropology, 18 is still ongoing, 19 but I am rather proposing that an alternative framework is needed to highlight some of the shortcomings of our present nature/artifice model, and to counterbalance how this model uncritically deprecates the posthuman in its various forms. CONCLUSION: DIFFERENCES AND CONTINUITIES It is a fundamentally difficult task to challenge our existing conceptions and categorizations of the world and our places within it, and yet this is the task that is now more than ever demanded of us. Technologies strain our models at the same time that we almost paradoxically use them to generate new models; we seek to use models to simplify, explain, and rationalize the world, yet they contribute to its complexity with multiple and infolding layers. In this context, it is understandably tempting to continue to reaffirm differences, particularly under the guise of “artificiality,” but, as a critical and theological analysis of this concept and its opposites in nature and creation has shown, these boundaries will be increasingly difficult to police. Theories that can help us to recognize continuities—while we must remain wary of them to an extent (for example, I do not want to suggest that “conti-

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nuities” are synonymous with “homogeneities”)—can be a powerful accomplice in navigating and constructing this complex technological world, and I have proposed posthumanism as one such partner—or, rather, many such partners—here. Posthumanism cannot be reduced to one singular figure, notion, or attitude, and in that might be one of its greatest strengths in illuminating the non-reducibility of other ideas, too, including of (human) nature. Posthuman figures have the ability to exemplify or challenge our assumptions about the lines that we draw to classify and conquer. Most importantly, if we seek to learn from these biotechnological posthumans rather than to solely control them (as is the case with the post-animal, for example), we may have the most to lose, but also the most to gain. Thinking alongside biotechnologies can introduce us to a world that is neither natural nor unnatural; and yet that experiences creation in its richness—this is at multiple levels that we can begin to address and reflect on as firmly embedded in a number of them simultaneously. REFERENCES Bakkum, D. J., Potter, S. M., et al. “Removing Some ‘A’ from AI: Embodied Cultured Networks.” In Embodied Artificial Intelligence, edited by F. Iida, R. Pfeifer, L. Steels, and Y. Kuniyoshi, 130–45. Berlin/Heidelberg/New York: Springer, 2004. Bell, M. “Pope Francis Sounds the Alarm on the Environment and He Wants Everyone to Listen.” PRI’s The World, last modified June 18, 2015. Accessed November 5, 2015, http:// www.pri.org/stories/2015–06–18/pope-francis-sounds-alarm-environment-and-he-wantseveryone-listen. Binder, M. D., N. Hirokawa, and U. Windhorst. Encyclopedia of Neuroscience. Berlin/Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, 2009. Bohannon, R., ed. Religions and Environments: A Reader in Religion, Nature and Ecology. London/New York: Bloomsbury, 2014. Broadhurst-Dixon, J., and E. J. Cassidy, eds. Virtual Futures: Cyberontics, Technology and Post-Human Pragmatism. London/New York: Routledge, 1998. Brooks, R. R. Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us. New York: Pantheon Books, 2003. Bullock, S. “In Defence of the Abstracted Animat.” Adaptive Behaviour 17, No. 4 (2009): 303–5. Curtis, N. “How London’s New Underground Farms Will Revolutionise the Way We Source Our Food.” Evening Standard, last modified June 9, 2016. Accessed June 29, 2016, http:// www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/esmagazine/how-londons-new-underground-farms-willrevolutionise-the-way-we-source-our-food-a3267221.html. Darwin, C. On the Origin of Species. Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press, 1964 [1859]. ———. The Descent of Man. London: Penguin Classics, 2004 [1879]. Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion. New York: Bantam Press, 2006. Deane-Drummond, C. “The Technologisation of Life.” In Technofutures, Nature and the Sacred: Transdisciplinary Perspectives, edited by C. Deane-Drummond, S. Bergmann, and B. Szerszynski, 139–58. London/New York: Routledge, 2016. DeMarse, T. B., D. A. Wagenaar, A. W. Blau, and S. M. Potter. 2001. “The Neurally Controlled Animat: Biological Brains Acting with Simulated Bodies.” Autonomous Robots 11 (2001): 305–10.

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Dinello, D. Technophobia! Science Fiction Visions of Posthuman Technology. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006. Ellul, J. The Technological Society. New York: Vintage Books, 1964 [1954]. Pope Francis. Laudato Si’ of the Holy Father Francis on Care for our Common Home, May 24, 2015. Accessed October 15, 2015, http://w2.vatican.va/content/dam/francesco/pdf/ encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si_en.pdf. Fuller, S. Humanity 2.0: What It Means to Be Human Past, Present and Future. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Graham, E. “Cyborgs or Goddesses? Becoming Divine in a Cyberfeminist Age.” Information, Communication and Society 2, No. 4 (1999): 419–38. Gray, J. Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals. London: Granta Books, 2002. Hamilton, C. “The Sacrament of Creation: What Can We Expect from Pope Francis’ Ecological Encyclical?” ABC Religion and Ethics, March 4, 2015. Accessed November 6, 2015, http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2015/03/03/4190521.htm. Haraway, D. The Haraway Reader. New York/London: Routledge, 2004. Kaufman, G. “Ecological Consciousness and the Symbol ‘God.’” Buddhist-Christian Studies 20 (2000): 3–22. Lawrence, Jerome, and Robert Lee. Inherit the Wind. New York: Ballantine Books, 2003. Long, J. Darwin’s Devices: What Evolving Robots Can Teach Us about the History of Life and the Future of Technology. New York: Basic Books, 2012. Manson, N. C. “Brains, Vats, and Neurally-Controlled Animats.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 35 (2004): 249–68. Marks, P. “Rise of the Rat-Brained Robots.” New Scientist. August 13, 2008. Accessed June 20, 2016, https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19926696–100-rise-of-the-rat-brainedrobots/. McKibben, B. “Pope Francis: The Cry of the Earth.” The New York Review of Books, June 18, 2015. Accessed November 5, 2015, http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2015/jun/18/ pope-francis-encyclical-cry-of-earth. More, M., and N. Vita-More, eds. The Transhumanist Reader: Classical and Contemporary Essays on the Science, Technology, and Philosophy of the Human Future. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013. Neurolab: Georgia Tech, Emory University. Neurally Controlled Animats, no date. Accessed June 19, 2016, https://neurolab.gatech.edu/labs/potter/animat. Potter, S. “Better Minds: Cognitive Enhancement in the 21st Century.” In Evolution Haute Couture: Art and Science in the Post-Biological Age, Part 2—Theory, edited by D. Bulatov, 304–19. Kalingrad: National Center for Contemporary Arts, 2013. Potter, S., et al. 2004. “Hybrots: Hybrids of Living Neurons and Robots for Studying Neural Computation.” Proceedings of Brain Inspired Cognitive Systems, August 29–September 1, 2004. Accessed June 20, 2016, http://www.cs.stir.ac.uk/~lss/BICS2004/CD/papers/1094. pdf. Shelley, M. Frankenstein—or The Modern Prometheus. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008 [1818]. Smith, J. M. Genetic Roulette: The Documented Health Risks of Genetically Engineered Foods. Fairfield, IA: Yes! Books, 2007. Kindle edition. Wagner, S. The Scientist as God: A Typological Study of a Literary Motif. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter Heidelberg, 2012. Webb, B. “Animals versus Animats: Or Why Not Model the Real Iguana?” Adaptive Behaviour 17, No. 4 (2009): 269–86. Wirzba, N. From Nature to Creation: A Christian Vision for Understanding and Loving Our World. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2015.

NOTES 1. Daniel Dinello (2006) skillfully discusses and analyses a range of these posthuman figures in sci-fi such as robots and cyborgs.

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2. Roy Ascott, on this point, asks “how is that the most advanced technologies, electronic and molecular, the very epitome of the artificial, could bring us back to nature” (in More and Vita-More, 2013, 440; my emphasis). This aptly demonstrates the assumed artificiality of technologies (including molecular biotechnologies) and their distance from nature, although I am less convinced of Ascott’s proposal to establish “Nature II,” as will become clear in this chapter (see section III). 3. To be sure, Brooks does recognize a strong link between robots and organisms insofar as “mankind has always used the technology of the day to make images of animals, real and imagined, and of people,” and robots are thereby modeled on existing examples, but Brooks foregrounds robots’ mechanical and artificial nature in order to make clear their distinction from animals and people (2003, 12–13). The issue of modeling will be picked up on here, in relation to the notion of nature and unnaturalness (see Section II). 4. Definition: “Artificial,” Oxford Dictionaries, www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/ english/artificial (accessed: January 7, 2016). 5. For Ascott, “nothing impedes the subtle integration of human, natural, and artificial systems more than the present crudity of our technological interfaces” (in More and Vita-More, 2013, 444). While Ascott presents the technology as obtrusive here, in this chapter I slightly rework this position to suggest that it might have more to do with our own deeper attitudes and conceptions that construct the division, and use technology to fulfil it, in the first place. 6. Webb also adds that it is “equally mistaken to argue that because a system is an instantiation, it is therefore not a model” (2009, 276), but the point, relevant to my argument here, about a more complicated relationship between the natural and artificial is nonetheless raised. 7. One way to explore these points further still would be to compare the simulated, virtual body of an animat to the robotic body of the hybrot (Potter, 2013). Both are controlled by the same neural material and components, but does the re-embodied hybrot make it more difficult to identify artificiality? If so, what does this say about corporeality and artificiality? 8. Interestingly, this is the only place in the encyclical where the notion of “artifice” or “artificiality” is directly cited, which suggests that the term is more complex than might first appear (as, for example, antithetical to “nature”), thus furthering the case for its deeper critical and theological exploration as is advocated in this chapter. 9. The repeated line about the goodness observed by God of His creation, presented in Genesis 1, might be instructive here. 10. For Wirzba, the proposal that humans should learn to live appropriately and ethically as gardeners demonstrates something of our special status within the garden, as well as our duties to it performed and realized through relationships (2015, 99–100; 107). 11. See footnote 10. 12. The ironies and limits of this label are touched on in a recent newspaper article: “When Steven Dring tells ordinary punters what he does, ‘they all think it’s about genetic modification, or Frankenfood,’ unaware that most rural growers use industrial techniques far removed from traditional ideas of farming” (Curtis, 2016). 13. I accept that natural selection wasn’t the sole focus of Darwin’s work, but it was a nonetheless significant component and with a notable and lasting legacy to address. (Cf. Moore and Desmond, in Darwin, 2004, xlv, lii.) 14. Manson goes on to say that “the neurally-controlled animat does not seem to have any goals or needs,” which further supports my point here about the abstract principle of natural selection as somewhat detached from creatures. Of course, this point should not be overstated or should be made with caution; Manson notes to this end that the animat also does not “seem to exhibit any adaptive behaviour, within the confines of this experiment.” This returns to the issue of modeling regarding animats, but Manson does not rule adaptive behavior out as a future possibility, were a “richer functional context” to be developed (2004, 261). 15. Fuller includes “divine” here as part of his critique of “playing God,” but this is a separate issue that is tangential to the present argument. 16. One might consider here Darwin’s legacy and influence on eugenics, transhumanism (Armstrong, in More and Vita-More, 2013, 100), meme theory (Dawkins, 2006, 91–201), and even the value of openness to science itself (Inherit the Wind, 2003 [1955]).

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17. Many transhumanists might well argue against this, including Max More, who, in an open letter to Mother Nature, suggests a strong disjunction between humans and nature in reaffirming something of Darwin’s distinction between natural and human selection that culminates in the phrase “we have reached our childhood’s end” in declaring a shift to a posthuman and postnatural existence. Yet, in spite of his claims, More does not stray far from Darwin’s emphasis on the principles of adaptation and survival in pursuit of “new forms of excellence” rather than perfection, and it is this resonance that I emphasize here (More, in More and VitaMore, 2013, 449–50; Darwin, 1964 [1859], 201). 18. Discussions of imago dei and critiques of “playing God” exemplify efforts in this direction, and this analysis may supplement some of these. 19. A useful nontheological example of this might be Donna Haraway’s discussion of the OncoMouse™, a murine biotechnological subject that was also the world’s first patented animal. Arguably meeting the criteria of post-animals, this creature is not inherently artificial but is a figure to represent “the grammar of a mutated experimental way of life” (Haraway, 2004, 245) that is not dissimilar to what I propose here in lieu of a nature-artifice distinction.

Chapter Seven

An Ethics of Fidelity Luther, Hauerwas, and Environmental Activism Benjamin J. Wood

INTRODUCTION: DO WE ACT IN VAIN? In a darkly comic scene in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (1977), the young Alvin is slumped in a chair in the doctor’s office, beside his anxious mother. “The universe is expanding,” Alvin explains brokenly. “The universe is everything, and if it’s expanding, someday it will break apart and that will be the end of everything.” His mother looks at her son with dismay. “He's even stopped doing his homework.” “What’s the point?” Alvin replies. “What has the universe got to do with it?” his mother retorts. “You’re here in Brooklyn. Brooklyn is not expanding!” Alvin’s dilemma may seem exaggerated, yet it encapsulates many of the challenges faced by contemporary environmental activists. Why act to preserve the world if it is all going to end in rupture and void? Of course, we don’t need to think in these starkly cosmological terms to experience an acute sense of powerlessness. Consideration of the future of the planet is enough to find ourselves caught in a state of hopelessness. In relation to climate change, such paralysis is severe, manifesting as a profound fatalism on the part of some members of the public as well as politicians. Why attempt to preserve biological diversity when death is the inevitable destiny of all life? Such an attitude of resignation gains all the more traction when one considers the contemporary environmental crisis in the context of geological time. We may be seeing the diminishment of species at an alarming rate, yet such diminishment has happened before. Indeed, as the evolutionary biologist Stephen J. Gould soberly reminds us:

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Benjamin J. Wood About 225 million years ago at the end of the Perminian period, fully half the families of marine organisms died out during a short span of a few million years—a prodigious amount of time by most standards, but mere minutes for a geologist. The victims of this mass extinction included all surviving trilolites, all ancient corals, all but one lineage of ammonites and most bryozoans, brachiopods and crinoids. (Gould, 2007, 286)

Humanity is a key driver in the newest wave of mass extinctions, yet as Gould points out, the earth has experienced a long chain of such biological ruptures. The second largest of these events (the Cretaceous extinction) destroyed 25 percent of all life on earth and opened the way “for the eventual evolution of man” (Gould, 2007, 286). The lesson of our biological history is that death is an essential engine of life, and that mass extinction has occurred and will continue to occur, with or without us. If we stand between extinctions, why should we act to avoid extinctions in the present? Yet, there is something unsatisfactory about this line of reasoning, even for those of us who only give the environment a cursory thought. When we see places beloved of our imagination and habitation scarred by deforestation or urbanism, there are few of us who are not stirred to sorrow. Rachel Carson’s moving admonition at the beginning of Silent Spring, of a world devoid of birdsong, speaks of a pressing responsibility that we cannot simply ignore. To see the world we have known and been nurtured by pass away into disorder, inevitably provokes lament. Yet, what is the next step after lament? Can we act to hold on to what we love despite the seeming inevitability of its loss? The following chapter attempts to discern renewed foundations for environmental activism through a constructive dialogue between Luther’s Theologia Crucis and Stanley Hauerwas’s theological ethics. At the heart of this discussion is the suggestion that the Pauline declaration of the “foolishness” of the cross provide the basis for an ethic of environmental concern which confronts the reality of life’s finitude, without succumbing to inaction. According to such an ethic, Christians must exist in a continual state of tension. They must act in the name of the solidarity enacted by Christ, yet they must not expect to achieve their object as the world understands achievement. By relating Paul’s declaration of “Christ crucified” (1 Cor. 1:23) to environmental praxis, I suggest that Christians must do their utmost to work for the preservation of life without being fixated on notions of “final” destiny. We must give up such a fixation, offering up our actions to “the grace” of God. How should such a position of tension be conceptualized? We begin this discussion with an analysis of Luther’s approach to the cross, as outlined in the Heidelberg Disputation (1518). In particular I will focus on Luther’s notion of the “hidden God” and ask what resources this concept may have for Christians seeking justification for contemporary environmental protection.

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While secular environmentalists seek points of security in practices of sustainability or conservation, Luther’s claim that the truth of the world is revealed in the desolation of the cross, is suggestive that such points of stability are nothing but illusionary and potentially idolatrous expressions of our desire for self-glorification. What might this mean for contemporary environmental advocacy? In the second part of the chapter we consider the philosophical frameworks adopted by contemporary environmental activists. Acknowledging the widespread influence of utilitarian and deontological theories on the moral formations of Western Christians, I suggest that neither appeals to the greatest good nor to duty are sufficient to dislodge an atmosphere of fatalism. Any moral system based upon plea to consequence will always be open to the charge of cosmological futility. In an effort to construct a viable alternative, we turn to the narrative ethics of Stanley Hauerwas, and in particular his theological commitment to nonviolence. Like Luther, Hauerwas is suspicious of modes of ethics based upon a sense of control and effectiveness. Indeed, to worship Christ crucified, he suggests, requires that we actively relinquish our desire to control our circumstances. Nonviolence in this respect is a mark of faithfulness, not merely to Christ’s own sacrificial resignation, but an indication of a life given over to the will of God, rather than to the machinations of the ego. Such a posture is particularly potent when translated into the realm of environmental ethics, since it frees ecological movements from the charge that their actions do not matter. By fusing Luther’s formulation of the “hidden God” with the Hauerwasian imperative of relinquishment, the cross can be seen as a valuable tool for placing environmental activism on firm ethical and theological foundations. According to such a cruciform ethic, we must forgo any suggestion that following a particular prescription or fostering a particular intent will either guarantee the fruition or make certain the rightness of a given act. Instead, environmental activism should be prized not because of what it can do for the biosphere, but what it reveals about the work of God in us. By finding ways of putting off the inevitable, we make space for solidarity with a creation that is suffering, and foster the hope of final restoration. The activist, who works for sustainability, while believing sustainability impossible, learns anew what it means to trust, despite the perennial reality of failure. THEOLOGIA CRUCIS: THE CENTRALITY OF ACTION IN SUFFERING How do we discern the will of God in a world full of suffering and desolation? How do we act, given such a reality? When Luther presented his theological propositions to assembled scholars at Heidelberg in 1518, he seemed

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to have been painfully aware that old answers to such questions of theodicy were no longer tenable. Divine justice or appeals to providence no longer appeared capable of silencing accusations of meaningless suffering. This is not at all surprising. The previous century had seen the devastation of much of Europe at the hands of the bubonic plague. The indiscriminate deaths of tens of thousands of people had rendered God not merely capricious, but darkly horrific. As Rowan Williams notes of Luther’s early conception of deity, “The God who presides over this appalling world is a God who asks for the impossible and punishes savagely if it is not realised—punishes here as well as hereafter” (Williams, 1979, 144). Given the terror induced by such a vision of judgment, it was a common temptation to seek a counterbalancing mysticism. In place of the God who stands in perpetual judgment over us, one could search instead for an inward God—beyond the tarnishes of pain and death. Yet such a deity of the interior realm held no strong attraction for Luther, since as he reflected in his earlier Commentary on Romans (1516), [There] are indeed still many who honour God, not as he demands this, but according to their speculations concerning Him. The proof for this is supplied by the strange superstitious customs (prevalent today) which are as stupid as it can be. It certainly means to change the glory of God into a figment when men neglect what He demands and honour Him by works which they have chosen themselves, thinking that He follows them and their wishes, just as though He was different to the way in which He has revealed Himself in His Word. (Luther, 1976, 45)

To escape from this theological trap, Luther claimed that one must desist in making excuses for a God who actively insulted our conventional visions of justice. Instead, Luther urges that one should accept the actions of a God who revealed Himself publically in the anguish of the Crucified Christ. The Heavenly Father whom Scripture reveals will not spare us from suffering, and moreover, will accomplish his ultimate purposes in and through the bitterness of defeat. As the Heidelberg Disputation expresses this thorny fact, “Although the works of God are always unattractive and appear evil, they are nevertheless really eternal merits” (HD Thesis 4) (Luther, 1997, 30). Thus, the crucified God is always in some sense a subtle actor. He generates a world which appears forsaken, yet in reality is under the sovereignty of a loving God. In an effort to express the intractable nature of this paradox, Luther sometimes spoke of deity as consisting of two wills (Tipson, 2015, 125)—one full of mercy and grace, and the other full of torture and terror. While the world reflected a nature of unbridled vindictiveness, the ground of God is always love and mercy. As Luther thus expresses this doctrine: “Why does God do this to me? Why not to others who are worse than I am?” Faith does not despair of God who sends trouble. Faith does not consider God

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angry and an enemy as the flesh, the world and the devil strongly suggest. Faith rises above all this and sees God’s fatherly heart behind God’s unfriendly face. (Luther, 2007, 209)

If God’s true operation is shrouded in the cloak of suffering, what shall we make of human judgments regarding what is good and evil? Luther’s answer hinges upon the Pauline dichotomy between the glory of the cross (Gal. 6:14) and the glory of the world. While the world defines “glory” in relation to personal satisfaction, safety, and self-sufficiency, God reveals an absurdity through the death of His Son: “For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will save it” (New International Version [NIV], Lk. 9:24). Through this lens, the temporary “goods” of daily life appear flimsy and ephemeral, compared to the deeper intention of God. To be a Christian means to accept suffering. This all sounds deeply shocking, and Luther is intent that it should be. As the Heidelberg Disputation summarizes this crucial move, “A theology of glory calls evil good and good evil. A theology of the cross calls the thing what it actually is” (Thesis 21) (Luther, 1997, 81). If we believe we are acting rightly or are morally justified, Luther is keen that his hearers feel themselves on unstable ground. 1 What do such moral inversions mean for environmental ethics? In the first place, Luther’s approach appears to rule out a number of attractive theological options which contemporary Christians might adopt. At its sharpest, Luther’s Theologia Crucis necessarily dismisses any crude anthropocentrism which might make humans the pinnacle of the present created order or otherwise explain away the suffering of life through an appeal to some grand teleology. In the face of the metaphysical scheme of Teilhard de Chardin in the Phenomenon of Man, Luther might reply that this heady fusion of theological speculation and evolutionary theory is just that; speculation. Teilhard’s suggestion that “man is . . . an object of study of unique value” and represents an advanced state of cosmic transformation (Teilhard, 1955, 282) must confront the pessimistic practicality of Luther: “When God speaks, man,—a worm of the earth,—ought to listen with fear: when He commands, this worm ought to obey” (Vincent, 1841, 413). In contrast to Teilhard’s sublime future (the promised Omega Point) (1955, 281) in the illumination of the cross, we become aware of our unbearable infinitude. If the cross demands anything, it is that we see ourselves as we truly are; not living through the lens of hope or fantasy, but as living in that slim interim between life and death—with the latter on our trail. Given this grim reality, we should desist from all appeals to consoling cosmologies and instead pray that we shall we saved from death and desolation at the last. What of the contemporary theological claim that humans can be copartners in God’s task of healing creation? While this claim is certainly more modest than the evolutionary cosmology offered by Teilhard, we should be

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equally resistant to the claim that human agency (aided by God) will initiate any kind of eschatological rescue to extricate us from our multiple environmental quagmires. Luther of course affirms the ultimate transformation of Easter. Creation is not merely groaning for transformation, but is having its suffering relieved by the Spirit. Yet, in spite of these points of resolution, the systems of the fallen world will remain for the foreseeable future. Christ’s cross illustrates that divine intervention in the world does not radically reorder the frame of human experience for those born after it. To adopt a contemporary idiom, we might say that for Luther, diseases continue to wipe out infants, species go extinct, and stars continue to explode. The notion of environmental activism as either “partnership” or “realized eschatology” runs the serious risk of obscuring the true scandal of the cross: that God can really withdraw his presence from us. Christ’s cry on the cross of “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matt. 27:46) in this context can be understood as a poignant reminder that in serving God’s interests, we have no right to succeed or prosper in our own terms. We must rather be conformed to God’s purpose which may well revolt our human and partial moral coordinates. If we are not exceedingly careful, models of coredemption between God and humanity might lead us to think that our wishes and God’s are concurrent. We must consider the possibility that God wills that our planet continues to suffer and that our activism will come to nothing. If Luther is right that talking about the world always means talking about the cross, one would expect nothing less than the radical fragility and contingency of all life. Yet, this raises the uncomfortable specters of fatalism or masochism. If failure and destruction are real and perhaps unavoidable features of the path to salvation, would Luther have us seek out more suffering so we can better accomplish God’s purpose? While Luther is clear that we should not expect a reprieve from our suffering, we should not be fatalistic. Should coal-fired power stations stay open, or should toxic waste continue to be jettisoned in our own oceans, so that we might better observe the working out of the cross? A negative answer to this question can be constructed by considering Luther’s interlocking attitudes toward disease, medicine, and suicide. While Luther believed that disease was a part of the fallen world, he did not believe that this robbed humans of all responsibility to abstain from actions which kept it at bay. Not only should Christians make use of the arts of medicine, they should avoid contact with victims of disease if it is clear that nothing can be done for those who are suffering. As Luther remarks in a 1527 tract, Whether One May Flee from the Deadly Plague: [Let] him who has strong faith wait for his death, but he should not condemn those who take flight. By such reasoning when a house is on fire, no one should run outside or rush to help because such a fire is also a punishment from God. Anyone who falls into deep water dare not save himself by swim-

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ming, but must surrender to the water as to a divine punishment. Very well, do so if you can, but do not tempt God and allow others to do as much as they are capable of doing. Likewise, if someone breaks a leg, is wounded or bitten, he should not seek medical aid but say, “It is God’s punishment. I should bear it until it heals by itself.” . . . This is not trusting in God but tempting him. God has created medicines and provided us with intelligence to guard and take good care of the body so that we can live in good health. (Luther, 2012, 209–10)

To throw one’s life away in futile or dangerous behavior is nothing less than flirting with suicide, which for Luther is nothing less than a great sin. At root of Luther’s concern was one shared by the medieval moralists, that a suicidal mentality may well reflect the grievous sin of despairing of life (Rix, 1983, 150). Luther’s point is that although we are sinful creatures and our acts are always compromised, this does not entitle us to opt out of acting. Sartre’s existential dictum, “You are condemned to choose” is particularly appropriate here. Whatever the stoical pretentions which are evidently implied by Luther’s Theologia Crucis, it does not include the total abandonment of oneself. The cross, as well as being a symbol of brokenness, is also the mark of the radical solidarity of God with us, and our mutual solidarity toward each other. Indeed, recent theological appraisals of Luther’s Theologia Crucis have recognized that it is both a method of practical theological ethics— an “epistemological instrument”—(Bradbury, 2011, 19) rather than a metaphysical construction. Its chief object is to root theology, not in some ontological realm of perfect truth, but rather in the difficult, messy, and fundamentally ambiguous realm of experience. Such rootedness does not mean locking oneself into the Kantian domain of pure phenomena, but realizing where glimpses of the noumenon (the thing-in-itself) can be found. To declare with Paul that “the Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation” (Col. 1:15) is to claim that knowledge is to be discerned, not through a modus operandi of the theologian’s own choosing, but instead through the tortured and dying Christ. This is at the very heart of the theological methodology of the Heidelberg Disputation that “That person deserves to be called a theologian, however, who comprehends the visible and manifest things of God seen through suffering and the cross” (HD Theo Thesis 20) (Luther, 1997, 77). This requires the fostering of a general and developed attitude of solidarity in which the Christian is always open to the continual and undefined demands of service. As Arata Miyamoto expresses such an ethic, in the light of the cross, people are encouraged “to see their suffering as it is, to confront injustice and to seek solidarity with others working for liberation” (2010, 4). Any gestures of pure fatalism (including Luther’s own condemnation of peasant discontent with their feudal masters [Marcuse, 1972, 12–34] can be deemed a violation of the spirit of the Theologia Crucis.

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BEYOND DUTY AND UTILITY: HAUERWAS AND LUTHER IN CONVERSATION The fact is, Christ is not love, least of all in the human sense; he is truth, truth absolutely; that is why not only could he defend their action but had to let men become guilty of his death: i.e. reveal truth to the uttermost degree. —Kierkegaard

If Luther’s Theologia Crucis demands the embrace of a paradox—namely that Christians act without any expectation of success—how should we judge the worth of particular actions? Moreover, if what “the world” regards a great evil could be part of the invisible workings of God, who are we to make judgments not merely regarding earthquakes or famines, but the progress of anthropogenic climate change? As we have seen, Luther disallows fatalism by condemning those who “tempt God,” yet does such condemnation offer a strong enough reason for acting in spite of our circumstances? For most of us, ethics (at least in its garden variety) refers to those practices and emotional dispositions we apply to daily situations in order to achieve intelligible and beneficial ends such as social order or justice. While people may hold all manner of private moral principles, few actually believe that such convictions are wholly disconnected from the object of achieving some practical results. Few believe that their private morals are wholly private. The uniting assumption of both hedonist and puritan alike is that their philosophical model offers the keys to a better way of living. Whether we regard our moral imperative as one based upon notions of duty or utility, the object of both justifications is to accomplish some notable alteration of behavior, character, or social structure. Luther drives a theological juggernaut through such consensus by suggesting to us that the cross illustrates that our moral assumptions may be (a) faulty and (b) futile. If we are going to act at all, we should do so in a way which refuses the logic of a consequentialist moral framework (Doherty, 2014, 57). How should we make sense of this? In the following discussion, I suggest that a close dialogue between Luther’s Theologia Crucis and the work of the contemporary Methodist theologian Stanley Hauerwas can assist us in conceptualizing ethics beyond the limitations of consequence. By focusing particularly on the Hauerwasian insistence that Christian ethics is principally concerned with moral formation through discipleship, I attempt to make Luther’s cruciform ethics operable and comprehensible in the context of climate activism. At first glance, Luther and Hauerwas hardly seem compatible dialogue partners for a moral scheme beyond the many modes of contemporary consequentialism. The key dividing-line appears to be the role both assign to habit and virtue in the moral life. One of the most striking aspects of Luther’s

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reconversion through Paul was his eventual rejection of the Scholastic reliance on the cultivation of virtuous habit. Thomas Aquinas had set the tone of Catholic Christendom by following Aristotle in defining ethics as concerned with both habit and practice—with the one perfecting the other (Peterson, 2008, 231). Humans could acquire virtues by rational deliberation but these always found themselves perfected by God: Gratia non tollit naturam, sed perficit. Thus, for Aquinas moral power is always natural in the sense that a desire for the good is implanted in the human being, yet divine assistance is required for this capacity to come to fullness. In contrast, Luther regarded “good works” not as generated by a discerning and concerted habit of the agent, but by God’s grace alone. Habit, insofar as it could assist human wellbeing, was always introduced by God and needed prior to the performance of virtuous action. In this mode, moral action is not something directed by the person doing the act, but by the work of Christ within the self (Herdt, 2008, 187–88). Such a rejection of the Thomist insistence upon the language of virtue might lead some to suppose that there can be little concord between Luther and Hauerwas. After all, much of Hauerwas’s theological work has concerned itself with the resources of virtue-ethics. As Hauerwas sets out this agenda in his early work A Community of Character: To be a person of virtue . . . involves acquiring the linguistic, emotional and rational skills that gives us strength to make our decisions and our lives our own. The individual virtues are specific skills required to live faithful to a tradition’s understanding of the moral project in which its adherents participate. Like any skills the virtues must be learnt and coordinated in an individual’s life, as a master craftsman has learned to blend the many skills necessary for the exercise of any complex craft. (Hauerwas, 1986, 115)

This sense that virtue requires individual learning is central to the Hauerwasian understanding of both Christian ethics and ecclesiology. Indeed, as Hauerwas expresses this moral dictum in a later book, The Peaceable Kingdom, “The Christian claim that life is a pilgrimage is a way of indicating the necessary and never-ending growth of the self in learning to live into the story of Christ” (Hauerwas, 2003, 95). Yet in surveying which sentiments, suggestive as they are of personal transformation, we should not be misled into thinking that Hauerwas affirms naively that ethics is not solely about effective action, nor can individuals acquire the skills of virtue on their own. Indeed, a close reading of the structure of Hauerwasian ethics reveals that he is eager to sever any link between himself and common modes of conventionalism—whether utilitarian or deontological in tone (Hauerwas, 2003, 125). Evidence of such dissent can be found in Hauerwas’s statement that “‘What ought I to be?’ precedes the question, ‘what ought I to do?’”(2003, 125). Through this reversal of moral priorities, Hauerwas attempts to suggest that the point of ethics is not to offer us simplistic choices between positive

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or nefarious results, but to induct individuals into a communal narrative, which in turn has the ability to shape the kind of persons we can become. The goal of being imbibed with narrative ethics, says Hauerwas, is not the erasing of ambiguities, difficulties, and mistakes, but to reveal to us our true status as frail and needful creatures, living in relation to a graceful God. Much as Luther insists that moral decrees merely show us that “He is not righteous who works much, but he who, without work believes much in Christ” (1997, 103). Hauerwas suggests to us that being part of the story of Christ confronts us with our inability to be wholly morally competent on our own. Consequently, such transformation is not the product of some latent human power, but must be found outside oneself. For Christians, such transformation is mediated by the Church and its sacramental life. In this vein, Hauerwas has argued that liturgy, baptism, and Eucharist all serve to introduce new possibilities and capacities, which we can understand under the headings of character (2003, 33) and discipline (Hauerwas and Willimon, 1989, 78). Yet, if these skills are not our own, and working on them is to no avail, how should we understand the purpose of virtue? The answer can be discerned if we return to the theological methodology of the Theologia Crucis itself. As we observed earlier, the goal of Luther’s insistence on the cross is not part of some scholastic supratheology, but rather is intended to reveal the truth of the human situation to us. Its goal is fundamentally epistemological rather than metaphysical in nature. In the light of this cruciform imperative, ethical deliberation is not a technique of “moral purity” (2003, 94), but rather a manifestation of our acceptance of the truth of our situation. As Hauerwas and Willimon reflect on this Christian formulation of ethics as truth: The Christian claim is not that we as individuals should be based in a community because life is better together rather than alone. The Christian claim is that life is better lived in the church because the church, according to our story, just happens to be true. The church is the only community formed around the truth, which is Jesus Christ, who is the way, the truth and the life. Only on the basis of his story, which reveals to us who we are and what has happened in the world, is true community possible. (1989, 77)

Thus, to speak of ethics is not to refer to a given set of actions designed to achieve particular ends, but rather constitutes the enactment of a particular kind of fidelity; a fidelity to the story of Jesus; a fidelity to the meaning of his life, death, and resurrection. This is the import of the peculiar phrase ethics beyond consequences. To live in a state of fidelity to the Christian story means to transcend the various moral slogans of either utilitarian or deontological camps. Viewed through the lens of the cross we have no utilitarian ‘right to happiness’ and security, or at least we cannot conceive of these things as separate from the paradox of the cross; that our ultimate fulfilment

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will come through instruments of desolation and brokenness. Nor can Christians conceive of duty in the abstract without considering the mode of radical solidarity represented by the suffering Christ. We might say that the chief task of Christian ethics in this mold revolves around the issue of integrity. To what extent have we surrendered our actions to the logic of Scripture and in particular, to the suffering of Christ? Are we still locked into our own desire to act? Or do our habits emerge from the recognition of our failures and our limits? Of course, such is the logic of the cross, mere recognition of failure does not wipe failure away, nor does it suddenly render us potent moral agents in the eyes of the world. Instead of speaking of the work of Christ within the self as wholeness or reunification, Luther preferred to talk of such an ethic of recognition in roundly dialectical terms. To be under the reality of the cross necessarily brings to the fore the fundamental contradictions of being a creature. The chief contradiction of creatureliness as Luther saw it was the manifest tension between the sublime status of the original creature and its present degeneration. This strain becomes all the more severe in the life of the convinced Christian. Just as Jesus stands condemned by the law, yet innocent; the suffering of Christ reveals the Christian moral agent as both in a state of “sin” and “righteousness” (Pereira, 2013, 380). As Luther elucidates this point in his commentary on Romans: The saints (believers) are at the same time sinners while they are righteous. They are righteous because they believe in Christ, whose righteousness covers them and is imputed in them. But they are sinners insomuch as they do fulfil the Law, and still have sinful lust. They are like sick people who are being treated by a physician. They are sick people but hope and are beginning to get well. (Luther, 1954, 1976)

According to this scheme, sin keeps us trapped in our own egotism; in our belief that by effort, we, and not God, possess the power to change the course of the world. Yet righteousness—that “alien” quality (McCormack, 2006, 77) which Luther says comes from Christ alone (1997, 110)—is that motor which keeps us acting, loving, and healing, despite the insular egotism from which we cannot escape. This double aspect of the redeemed and justified person (inducted into the story of Christ) brings us to the essence of this discussion. The problem with Woody Allen’s Alvin is not that he stares into the world’s finitude. The problem, in the terms sketched here, is that he flinches from it. In sum, he lacks a particular virtue belonging to the narrative of Jesus—namely courage. This not the courage of Aristotle (andreia) shot through with military valor or victory in war—rather Christ-shaped courage is rooted in the radical self-emptying (knosis) of the Philippian hymn— “(Christ) . . . being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage” (NIV, Phil. 2:6). Here courage consists of humilitas and fide. By humbling oneself in faith before the awful

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power of God, courage is transmuted from mere self-will to an act of trust. To be fully human in the way gestured at by the cross is to continue onward, despite the barriers of despair, decay, and death, or in Paul Tillich’s terms, “Courage is the power of life to affirm in despite of . . . ambiguity” (Tillich, 1972, 37). How might one translate such courage into the language of environmental activism? In what way might such an activism differ from its secular counterparts? In the final part of this chapter I will suggest that a useful model for such self-emptying activism is provided by a close attentiveness to Hauerwas’s reflections on the moral rationale for Christian postures of nonviolence. THE SHIFT TO SEMIOTIC ETHICS What are the key features of this theological activism? In an intriguing passage in The Peaceable Kingdom, Hauerwas offers us this illuminating claim: [Christians] must acquire a spirituality which will make them capable of being faithful in the face of the inexorable tragedies their convictions entail. A spirituality which acknowledges the tragic is one that is schooled in patience . . . Yet such a waiting must resist the temptation to cynicism, conservatism or false utopianism that assumes that the process of history will result in “everything coming out alright.” For Christian’s, hope is not in “the process of history,” but in the God in whom we believe has already determined the end of history in the cross and resurrection of Jesus. (2003, 145)

While Hauerwas expresses these sentiments in relation to political violence and national militarism, they are equally applicable in relation to Christian responses to environmental degradation. In a world where deforestation and species extinction exists alongside the human traumas of “the bomb in Hiroshima and the firebombing of Dresden, not to mention Vietnam” (Hauerwas and Willimon, 1989, 43) we are called to affirm that our ecological as well as our social histories are absorbed and bound up in the tortured and restored body of Jesus Christ. Thus, for both Luther and Hauerwas, there is a radical sense in which the ultimate status of these realities has already been settled. Moreover, the chief bar we face in appreciating this fact is to be found in the chatter of our fragile ego and its insistence that “we must do something.” As Luther expresses this difficult truth in the Heidelberg Disputation: “The law says ‘do this’ and it is never done. Grace says ‘believe in this,’ and everything is already done” (1997, 107). Yet since such grace is mediated by the suffering of the cross, the activity of grace is never analogous to a stoic fatalism, but draws us into relation to a creation which is suffering. The object of such relation does not involve us adding to what has already been done in Christ, but rather involves the act of symbolically

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bearing witness to the “new life” brought into the world via the paradox of the cross. A useful exposition of this shift from ethics as rule to ethics as illustrative is provided by Rowan Williams in this deeply perceptive excavation of the problematic nature of moral agency: So long as we are, so to speak, polishing the image of the agent, what our actions show is a successful will; the meaning of the actions terminates in the will’s success. If we let go of that image, the meaning of what is done is grounded in God, the act shows more than the action of the agent; it shows the character of the creator. But to get to that point, the discipline that the agent has to undergo is attention not performance but to an interiority that is not to be possessed. It is visible and judgeable only by God. . . . Externally focused morality is not unacceptable because it encourages insincerity but because it is in grave danger of always terminating in itself, in the successful will, not in the life of the creator. (Williams, 2007, 261)

Behind this conception, claims Williams, is the Messiah—the great enactor and producer of meaningful symbols (2000, 215). Yet, as Williams makes clear (mirroring a theological method found in both Luther and Hauerwas), such symbols are always disconnected or radically at odds with external circumstances. As Williams reflects on the problematic nature of Jesus’s kingdom-language: Jesus acts for a community that does not yet exist, the Kingdom of God; he chooses rabbis and judges for the twelve tribes of the future, he heals and forgives, he takes authority to take the outcasts of Israel into this new world by sharing their tables. His strange isolation, his suspicion and incomprehension he meets, have to do with the fact that his acts are signs of a form of human life yet to be realized and standing at odds with the political and cultic status quo. (2003, 203)

We can enact this symbolic ethic in a variety of ways: not merely at the Eucharistic table (that sign of Jesus’s hospitable community) but through acts of environmental conservation and concern. We might witness the horizon of the Kingdom by saving woodland, by refusing meat, or by campaigning for a cap on carbon emissions. The important point is not “effectiveness” or “impact” as understood by the consequentialist, but in giving space for our allegiance to God’s promises. Ethics in this mold is semiotic, its primary task being to mediate by constant repetition what Christ has done in one’s life and the life of others. By showing fidelity to the earth as “creation,” we remind ourselves of God’s fidelity to what is temporal—however long it lasts. To a technological culture entangled in its sense of control and results-mentality this response appears to be a strange affront. Here Christians appear as a peculiar and bumbling people, who care little about the environment but more about preserving their own symbolic practices. Yet, such an insular

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interpretation represents a fundamental misreading of this chapter’s notion of ethics divorced from consequence. Relinquishment of “our role” (or the sense that we are in control) is not a passive action, but a profoundly active one. By affirming the unity of history in the suffering of the cross, we give all our actions meaning, regardless of whether anything is ever actually saved. Such a practice not only offers Christians good reasons for engaging with environmental ethics on their own terms, but also circumvents the limitations of the consequentialist position. Because the Christian is not concerned with utility but the enactment of a kind of theological aesthetic, there is no creature it is senseless to save, no matter how feeble its survival prospects. Nor can any being be compressed into what is useful to humanity. Rather, we should act to save ailing ecosystems as a mark of our faith that every creature will find its life and purpose in the life of God. The language of duty is equally inadequate in the face of this expansive symbolic conception. While duty ethicists continue to debate the basis and extent of our obligations toward nonhuman animals, a Christ-shaped ethic cuts through diverse Gordian knots of this kind. In place of the contested notions of responsibility and rights, Hauerwas and Luther provide us with an alternative rationale. We should care for other creatures not because we have tried and tested criteria for including them under our moral radar, but because doing so expresses the kind of care which God has shown us in Jesus. Indeed as Andrew Linzey puts it, “If it is believed, in fidelity to the Gospel story that God truly enters into creaturely suffering, then there can be no good reason for excluding God’s suffering presence from the realm of the nonhuman creation as well” (Linzey, 1994, 52). How then might such a semiotic conception of ethics assist Christians in confronting the charge that the labors of environmental activism are ultimately performed in vain? Chiefly, an environmental ethic estranged from consequence unfetters us from the logic of catastrophic urgency and doom-laden rhetoric which animates so much of contemporary ecological advocacy. While the secular turn to the apocalyptic tells us that we must place the fate of the world upon our own shoulders, an activism of grace permits us to live in a manner which is unburdened by final results. As Hauerwas expresses this attitude: “We discover that the patient hope that requires us to wait in the face of violence is not some means to a greater good, but the good itself. Such a patience is less something we do or accomplish, than it is our recognition of what God has made possible in our lives” (Hauerwas, 2003, 146). In activist terms, the implications of Hauerwas’s attitude are clear. Instead of hurrying toward uncertain, and perhaps futile goals, a Christian formed by the tension and paradox of the cross may perform acts of preservation and healing in expectation rather than fear. In place of the language of the environmental “doomsday clock” or the “ticking time-bomb,” the language of “present goods” helps us to recover a Scriptural understanding of the apoca-

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lyptic—where “the end of the world” does not concern finality, but rather is focused on the unveiling of the “end” or telos of the present order (something we can know and experience in the present). In this resolutely theological frame we can discover new depths for Christ’s gentle advice, even in an age of calamitous climate change: “[Do] not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own” (Matt. 6:34). We refuse to worry because we know and have internalized the paradox that loss is the road to reconciliation. We should not expend our moral energy by speculating on the future rather focus our attention on our present conditions: finding new and enriching settings in which to enact the reality revealed to us in Christ. By campaigning, caring, and conserving, we find new ways of emptying ourselves of our narrow priorities and preoccupations, making space for the “mind of Christ” within ourselves (Phil 2:5). CONCLUSION: NEW DIRECTIONS FOR THEO-ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS This chapter has suggested that a close comparative reading of the theology of Martin Luther and Stanley Hauerwas provides a renewed basis for environmental activism among contemporary Christians. While fatalism is a pervasive reflex in current debates regarding the future of the biosphere, the discussion has illustrated that attentiveness to Luther’s Theologia Crucis offers a radical antidote to personal and cosmological pessimism. By embracing the paradoxical logic of glorification through desolation, Christian environmental ethics can move beyond the limitations of both utilitarian and deontological approaches. Key to Luther’s theology is the claim that Christians must always work out their ethical practice in the shadow of likely failure. Yet, it is in catastrophe, says Luther, and not in achieving our moral objective, that we come closest to the structure of reality. The point then of Christian ethics is to be operative but to be faithful to the worldly failure and humility of Christ. In an effort to dig down into the roots of this ethical alternative, the discussion moved to a consideration of the virtue-ethics of Hauerwas. By drawing out the similarities between Luther’s cruciform ethic and Hauerwas’s radical commitment to peace, it has been argued that the cross is central in the formation of an ethic which refuses either the restrictive lure of effectiveness, or complex consoling theological schemes. In place of these modes of moral discernment, we can draw into a rich symbolic order, in which our actions are giving their coherence, yet not through their result, but through their courage. Let the last word go to the Lutheran tradition. Two centuries after Luther’s death a charming tale began to circulate. In the story, Luther was asked what he would if the world were to end tomorrow. Luther replied: “Plant a tree today.” The predicament this story evokes

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for us today is clear; can we look squarely at the end of all things and still act for the future? Luther’s answer is affirmative, but any future we might claim for ourselves will not be easy and will certainly not come without failure or risk. REFERENCES Bradbury, R. Cross Theology: The Classical Theologia Crucis and Karl Barth’s Modern Theology of the Cross. Cambridge: James Clarke & Co., 2011. Doherty, S. Theology and Economic Ethics: Martin Luther and Arthur Rich in Dialogue. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Gould, S. J. The Richness of Life: A Stephen J. Gould Reader. New York: Vintage, 2007. Hauerwas, S. A Community of Character: Towards a Constructive Christian Social Ethic. Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1981 [1986]. ———. The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics. London: SCM, 1983 [2003]. Hauerwas, S. and W. H. Willimon. Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony. Nashville: Abington Press, 1989. Herdt, J. A. Putting On Virtue: The Legacy of the Splendid Vices. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Linzey, A. Animal Theology. Champaign: Illinois University Press, 1994. Luther, M. Commentary on Romans. Translated by J. Theodore Mueller. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing, 1954 [1976]. ———. “Heidelberg Disputation.” Quoted in On Being a Theologian of the Cross: Reflecting on Luther’s Heidelberg Disputation, by Gerhard O. Forde. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1997. ———. Luther’s Spirituality, edited by Philip D. Krey and Peter D. S. Krey. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2007. ———. “Whether One May Flee from the Deadly Plague.” In Disability in the Christian Tradition: A Reader, translated by C. J. Schinder, edited by Brian Brock and John Swinton. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2012. Peterson, J. Aquinas: A New Introduction. New York: University of America, 2008. Marcuse, H. A Study of Authority. London: Verso, 1972 [2008]. McCormack, B. L. Justification in Perspective: Historical Developments and Contemporary Challenges. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2006. Miyamoto, A. Embodied Cross: Intercontextual Reading of Theologia Crucis. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2010. Pereira, J. L. Augustine of Hippo and Martin Luther on Original Sin and Justification of the Sinner. Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013. Rix, H. D. Martin Luther: The Man and the Image. New York: Irvington Publishers, 1983. Teilhard de Chardin, P. Phenomenon of Man. London: Collins, 1955. Tillich, P. The Courage to Be. London: Nesbit & Co, 1972. Vincent, J. M. History of the Life, Writings, and Doctrines of Martin Luther. Philadelphia: Michael Kelly, 1841. Williams, Rowan. Anglican Identities. Cambridge, MA: Cowley, 2003. ———. On Christian Theology. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2000. ———. The Wound of Knowledge: Christian Spirituality from the New Testament to John of the Cross. Cambridge, MA: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1979. ———. Tokens of Trust: An Introduction to Christian Belief. Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2007.

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NOTE 1. Instead of falling into an “environmental Pelagianism” (in which the world generates its own salvation), Luther’s Theologia Crucis invites us to acknowledge the genuine fragility of life and that no certain rescue is possible. The God who was veiled but is revealed in Jesus Christ scandalizes us because he offers us no easy escape from the prospect of suffering. We must, says Luther, trust in God’s promises without outward evidence (Heb. 11:1)—and it is in this act of trust that we find the will to continue. This, for Luther, is what is ultimately meant by the thorny scriptural dictum: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me” (Matt 16:24).

Chapter Eight

The Ethics of Atmosfear Communicating the Effects of Climate Change on Extreme Weather Vladimir Jankovic and David M. Schultz

Anthropogenic climate change—in its historical, scientific, political, legal, and socioeconomic contexts—is framed and reproduced in terms of values, goals, and choices for which climate science and modeling alone cannot provide sufficient guidance in decision making. 1 Commentators, activists, and policymakers regularly ground their claims and motives in terms of values and choices which they see as contributing to a better climatic future, arguing that their proposals are better informed, fairer, or more altruistic than those of their opponents (Lee 2014). But outside the explicit calls to consider moral values in making climate-relevant decisions, there is a level at which moral values enter into the discussion without being recognized as such. In this chapter, we look at the assumptions, mostly implicit or unstated, that embody ethical norms and expectations about the relationship between social responsibility and the ontology of climate change. In particular, we look at the representation of climate change as that of a physical entity or agency responsible for increasing the socioeconomic and environmental impacts of future weather events. We argue that this representation has an intrinsic moral quality that its champions—scientists, the public, analysts, and politicians—use as a framework within which to justify their ethical and political choices and especially the role that extreme weather can (or should) play in climate change policy. One of the predicted impacts of climate change is expected to be an increase in occurrence, frequency, and severity of certain extreme weather events (e.g., tornadoes, tropical cyclones, heat waves, floods). A recent state121

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ment by the Climate Communication staff, which among its members has a lead author from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), reads: Recent weather events such as deadly heat waves and devastating floods [ . . . ] are part of a new pattern of more extreme weather across the globe, shaped in part by human-induced climate change. As the climate has warmed, some types of extreme weather have become more frequent and severe in recent decades, with increases in extreme heat, intense precipitation, and drought. [ . . . ] Death, disease, displacement, and economic hardship may follow, as we have seen with recent hurricanes, floods, heat waves, and droughts. (climatecommunication.org 2011)

IPCC itself claims that “there is evidence that some extremes have changed as a result of anthropogenic influences, including increases in atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases.” Yet, it adds that “attribution of single extreme events to anthropogenic climate change is challenging” (IPCC Summary for Policymakers 2012, 9). If attribution of single events to climate change remains difficult to maintain, why are scientists (as witnessed above) implying this attribution in their public appearances? What, in other words, are the pragmatics of extreme weather attribution and extreme weather intensification? What are the motivations, assumptions, and implications of attribution claim making—and in particular its effects on current climate policy? We start by observing that the last decade has witnessed a substantial support for attributing extreme weather events to anthropogenic climate change. Some of the attribution claims are related to specific examples of extreme weather. Media proclaim that Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy were exacerbated by climate change (e.g., New York Times 2012; Emanuel, Washington Post 2015). Last year’s extreme colds (associated with the mediaoverhyped term polar vortex) in North America have been attributed to a slowing down of the jet stream caused by the (likely) man-made driven melting of the Arctic (Rutgers Today 2014). Even more of an indication with which attribution has reached a comfortable place among science is the three year-end summaries published by the American Meteorological Society in its high-impact (2014 impact factor of 11.8) Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (Peterson et al. 2012, 2013; Herring et al. 2014). These three reports summarize the past years’ extremes and conduct attribution studies to determine whether these events can be “explained from a climate perspective.” These studies are motivated by the hope that they would “stimulate the development of attribution science” (Stott et al. 2012, 1042). The tone of these and other similar reports exudes cautious enthusiasm for the possibility of discovering the causal or probabilistic correlation between the atmospheric greenhouse and the intensity and magnitude of severe weather events. Thompson and Otto (2015) for example write that “if harm-

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ful weather extremes can be attributed to anthropogenic climate change, this could bring a lot of needed attention to the severity and danger associated with humanity’s unfolding climate crisis.” Vanderheidein (2008, xii) argued that “[a]lthough any single climate-related catastrophe cannot with any certainty be definitively attributed to anthropogenic climate change, [ . . . ], what is certain is that as long as such weather events continue to wreak their destructive force upon human settlements and populations, global climate change will remain on the public agenda.” From the climate policy perspective, as these citations imply, attribution represents welcome evidence for the need for institutionalized action on climate change, and any effort to provide a demonstrable proof of the correlation between severe weather and climate change would be considered highly valuable in the political and public arenas. This enthusiasm has important implications for the practice and public perception of climate science. The attribution of weather events to anthropogenic drivers can no more be a mere scientific result, but is also a perlocutionary act that—in addition to its formal meaning—has the potential to persuade, convince, warn, command, inspire, or entail forms of action not implied in its formal meaning. As John Austin explained, “[s]aying something will often, or even normally, produce certain consequential effects upon the feelings, thoughts, or actions of the audience, or of the speaker, or of other persons: and it may be done with the design, intention, or purpose of producing them” (Austin 1962). Applying this recognition to the present context, we may argue that any statement affirming the correlation between extreme weather and climate change would also have an effect on how the listener perceives and thinks about climate policy. While the effect of such a statement on the listener’s values would normally take place regardless of the motivations behind the statement, the perceived policy importance of the correlation depends in large measure on its desired perlocutionary effect. In other words, attribution science is driven by its expected policy outcomes, and this significantly tilts the value of invested intellectual work in the direction of a positive correlation. Indeed, the result showing a negative correlation would have a null effect on the support for climate policy. Yet, if experts admit to the virtual impossibility of reaching the positive correlation, isn’t the attribution science patently demagogic? THE ETHICS OF ATMOSFEAR Hulme (2014) has identified four motivations why the attribution of severe weather events plays a role in current climate science and policy: scientific curiosity, adaptation guidance, liability for damages, and the visualization of

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climate change. To these, we add atmosfear as composite motivation based on two elements: the need to accelerate the implementation of climate policy and the moral responsibility to counteract the acts committed against the “natural” climate. In 1989, Stephen Schneider, one of the lead twentiethcentury climate scientists, summarized the need for this particular form of scientific-cum-moral double engagement in the following terms: On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but—which means that we must include all doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climate change. To do that we need to get some broad based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, means getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This “double ethical bind” we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both. (Schneider 1988, p. 113–15)

We use Schneider’s confession as a point of departure in our analysis of the moral underpinnings of attribution science and of those underwriting current climate policy arguments. We claim that these arguments rely on assumptions, routinely taken as self-evident, that require careful deconstruction and a full disclosure of their unstated premise, all in the interest of reaching a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between climate, climate change, severe weather. What follows is a list of key findings that, in their seeming obviousness, seemed to have escaped the attention of climate policy scholars. We’ve chosen to limit the discussion to three premises that speak to the issue of atmosfear, but which also reveal biases of the climate policy more generally: responsibility, natural climate, as well as nature’s benignity and the mitigation imperative. Responsibility Schneider’s call for simplified, dramatic statements made in the name of a good cause testifies to an overriding concern that the discovery of man-made changes in the climate system mandates a responsibility to act. Building atmosfear as a communication strategy is in this context justified as a means to bring about a heightened sense of that responsibility. Indeed, contemporary climate policies share this broad underlying sense of responsibility: the responsibility for humanity’s past and present environmental actions, responsibility for intergenerational justice, responsibility for the innocent victims of

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global warming, responsibility for the future of nonhuman world, and, in most general terms, a responsibility to clean up one’s own mess. The “Natural” Climate This brings us to our second, rather uncontroversial assumption, namely that of a presumably moral or a merely pragmatic obligation to leave climate alone. Ideally, this means that society should desire the climate to return to its preindustrial or its preanthropogenic state—and this we can label a call to help restore a natural climate system, which is the benchmark of any good climate policy. This desire refers, however, not to a particular state of the climate system that meets a set of specifiable criteria, but simply a system representing the behavior of a nonanthropogenic atmosphere. In such a system, as currently assumed, climatic variability does not pose risk of the kind associated with the behavior of the anthropogenic atmosphere. There are, however, difficulties with the “return” to a natural state of climate as a state experienced by preindustrial civilization. Specifically, were all current greenhouse gas emissions to be stopped tomorrow, climate model simulations suggest that the Earth would not return to its preindustrial state (e.g., Armour and Roe 2011). Instead, the globally averaged temperature would stabilize at or just below its present value. Even if society waited the hundreds of years for the climate to return to its nominal natural state, external forcing on the climate and internal climate variability might challenge the definition of “balance.” But there is another issue here. If mitigation indeed reduces emissions to preindustrial levels, then the natural climate is back and the job is done. Strikingly, such a success would not of itself bring about the reduction of damages created by extreme weather events—precisely one of the reasons why the policy has been implemented in the first place. This is so for two reasons. First, even the natural climate experienced extreme weather. Second, mitigation cannot address the non-atmospheric sources of social vulnerability to climate impact, and the processes that work to increase exposure to risk. Climate implies interaction between atmospheric and social environments. The idea of a natural state of climate has other implications. In the context of the severe weather attribution discussions, it is presumed that in a “natural” (preindustrial) state of climate, life would be exempt from the effects of the anthropogenic “slice” of climate brutality. While natural weather disasters would continue, they would be merely the unstoppable acts of god—as they are referred to in the legal terminology of delay claims—and thus would not be of concern for climate policy makers. In such a case, it would be possible, if such a distinction could be made, that a category-4 natural hurricane could cause less policy concern than a category-3 anthropogenic hurricane. This means that, on the one hand, attempts to reduce the magnitude of

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“natural extremes” do not belong to climate policy but rather to the infrastructural and socioeconomic planning and development, warning systems, and risk assessment procedures—in other words, building a better shelter. On the other hand, current assumptions about the relationship between climate change and severe weather mean that the ultimate goal of a climate mitigation policy would result in a reduction of the absolute magnitude and force of severe weather events, as if this alone would suffice to minimize future climate risks. Nature’s Benignity and the Mitigation Imperative Another way to look at this, our third assumption, is that the popularity of atmosfear in large degree derives from the notion that a balanced, natural climate is (more) benign than an anthropogenically influenced climate. Yet there are at least two issues that complicate this assumption. First, it does not account for the fact that the impact of severe hydro-meteorological events does not depend solely on their atmospheric force but also on the environmental resilience and overall robustness of societies. Secondly, this assumption implies the false conclusion that reducing carbon emissions would automatically mitigate against weather-related impacts (e.g., Schultz and Janković 2014). The success of climate policy thinking is currently measured against the benchmark of “nature”—that is, against how much we meet our obligation to return climate to its natural state, how much we clean up our mess. The ideology of a natural climatic state is thus of necessity related to ‘mitigation’ as the only genuine approach to preventing further denaturalization of the atmosphere and one helping us avoid ‘bad futures’ associated with extreme weather events and other long-term devastations. In practical terms, this means reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. CLIMATE AS AGENCY These carbon-driven policies command respect because they reflect the scientific understanding of climate as a chemical, carbon-driven entity endowed with an independent causal agency that can alter social life and the natural environment (Fleming and Janković 2011; Hulme 2015). This means that climate—or climate change—is not understood only as a descriptive marker of a state of meteorological affairs in a given region over a given period of time, but rather as an entity that shapes welfare, agriculture, customs, racial relations, health, and economic output. As a result, we witness a linguistic inversion of common sense: instead of seeing “climate” or “climate change” as a description of the changing atmospheric trends, “climate change” is represented as the very cause of these

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trends. Climate change is said to impact economy, affect societies, harm national security, hurt the world’s poor, and lead to global conflicts. The United Nations’ Human Development Programme (Chachibaia 2014) thus calls for a “fight against climate change,” whereas Defra speaks of “tackling climate change” (Defra 2013). Speaking in Jakarta on February 16, 2014, US Secretary of State John Kerry described climate change as “perhaps the world’s most fearsome weapon of mass destruction” (Reuters 2014), while US Admiral Samuel Locklear of the Pacific Command has identified climate change as the largest US security concern (MSNBC 2015). Of course, climate change is not an entity. It has no physical powers associated with it. No one can fight it, let alone win a war against it. Climate change is an indication of atmospheric trends usually manifested in weather extremes and longer-term trends that, in combination with the socioeconomic conditions on the ground, may or may not result in short-term devastation and long-term environmental damage. But as extreme weather events recur with or without the greenhouse effect, solely reducing their impact through mitigation would not reduce the socioeconomic vulnerability of regions that stand to be affected by extremes. This is to say that climate change is a relational, rather than a physico-chemical process. IPCC is aware of this. It states that “it is well known that the frequency and intensity of extreme weather and climate events are only one factor that affects risks, as changes in population, exposure of people and assets, and vulnerability determine loss potentials” (e.g., Morss et al. 2011). It is increasingly recognized that economies grow more weather sensitive as they increase in complexity, interconnectedness, technological dependency, and economic developments such as area-focused manufacturing, centralized distribution, reduction of supplier base, and the globalization of supply chains (Home Office 2002). The shift toward leaner supply systems, for example, makes the economic system more vulnerable as there is less inventory to buffer any disruptions caused by bad weather. The risks increase with inadequate warning systems, deregulated development, lack of planning, aging infrastructures, and migration toward vulnerable areas (Kunkel et al. 1999). Many world areas have inherited vulnerabilities due to colonization, conflict, and other forms of compound injustices (Gardiner 2011, 119). Thus weather sensitivity increases impact regardless of the success of mitigation policy. “Fighting climate change” the way currently constructed has little to say about these growing infrastructural triggers of future damages. Thus, climate policy aimed at reducing future high-impact weather events through mitigation only would not address the infrastructural realities because they are carbon-based realities. These cannot be rectified through new energy technologies, emission cuts, or even the adaptation strategies to amortize “unavoided impacts” (Gardiner 2012).

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There is an additional irony to this. Mitigation policies—crucial as they are to any climate policy—may even work to diminish the relative importance of (and resources otherwise available for) addressing the social causes of weather exposure and the protection of ordinary extremes (Schultz and Janković 2014). Currently, there is a tendency to privilege the representation of climate as a carbon-driven entity pushed out of natural balance, as we discuss above. Consider the claim that implies two different kinds of extreme weather events, and two different kinds of responsibility. Because money is on the table, it is suddenly going to be in everyone’s interest to be a victim of climate change. So we need urgently to develop the science base to be able to distinguish genuine impacts of climate change from unfortunate consequences of bad weather. (Gillis 2011)

Hulme (2014) has pointed out that distinguishing weather into “human caused” and “tough luck” weather raises ethical concerns about any investment allocations which may exclude the victims of “tough-luck weather” from benefiting from allocated funds. Such dedicated funds would not be available for addressing the real and potentially rising exposure to weather risks due to the changes in social, political, demographic, and economic structures. To summarize, this bias toward mitigation reflects the scientific representation of climate change as an entity working through atmospheric anomalies for which we have a responsibility to return it to its preanthropogenic, natural state. This naïve naturalist premise of responsibility to clean up our mess has in reality proved powerless to bring about tangible emission cuts. To the contrary, “policies to address loss and damage are far more likely to be influenced by the prospects of reducing vulnerability and increasing coping capacities than by whether or not the meteorological component of a disaster can be attributed to human agency” (Klein and Mohner 2011, quoted in Hulme 2014). CONCLUSION Determining the influence of anthropogenic drivers on individual weather events is a matter involving methodological difficulties. Not all extreme weather events will change, nor will some of the changes—if they even occur—be detectable amid the large interannual variability of events (IPCC 2012; Kunkel et al. 2013). Some of these changes have already been observed, and others have not been detected (e.g., King et al. 2015). Some extreme events are expected to become less frequent, but become more intense (e.g., IPCC 2012). Some areas of the globe will benefit; others stand to lose. Thus, reducing the complexity of climate change (as if a single outcome

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were known) into the soundbite of “climate change means more extreme weather” is a massive oversimplification—if not misstatement—of the true state of the science. Furthermore, no estimate about the relative contribution of greenhouse drivers to future weather extremes could quantitatively disaggregate meteorological from social causes of damages. Future socioeconomic developments in vulnerable areas, such as Asian and African megacities and coastal settlements, are likely to lead to an increase in infrastructural damage, social vulnerability and loss of life even during “normal” weather extremes. Attributing such increases to only anthropogenic drivers, masks the social causes of hazard and, consequently, fetishises climate change into a sole source of danger and a sole target of climate policy. An important corollary of this is that such policy fixates on exogenous sources of risk, such as extremes, and leaves socioeconomic triggers of risk to conventional welfare policies and emergency protocols. The disconnect may result in a complete failure to prevent mounting damages. Ironically, the qualitative measures needed for planning against the “weather on steroids” (UCAR 2012) would turn out to be the same as those used in planning for the “natural” severe events: building stronger communities, better levees and seawalls, more effective emergency services and evacuation planning, and any other initiatives aimed at reducing socioenvironmental injustice and selfinflicted sources of risk (e.g., Schultz and Janković 2014). We suspect that the importance of such measures would even eclipse any measures that would result in the wake of attribution science. A world in which endogenous (socially constructed) sources of risk are their minimum is the world in which the exogenous (climate-driven) sources are at a minimum as well. The success of policy on climate change does not seem to depend on images of future weather disasters designed to inspire urgent action to implement massive mitigation policies. It has been suggested that the bias toward the only right solution—emission reductions—has in fact helped the world reach the current stalemate in commitments to reduce disaster losses (Schultz and Janković 2014). An illustration of such a claim was apparent in President Obama’s $1 billion Climate Resiliency Fund (White House 2014), obviously couched in terms of climate resiliency rather than weather resiliency. There is a need to change the view that mitigation and adaptation cannot be part of the same solution. Mitigation policy is the key to enabling the world to avoid the possibility of irreversible changes that might result in irreversible damages to the world’s societies. However, the insistence on linking extreme weather to climate change reduces the political will to deal with real problems and endogenous sources of climate vulnerability. Recognizing that climate is relational, not ontological, would allow for a less naïve concept of moral responsibility—not for preserving a pristine balance that never was, but a responsibility for understanding the realities behind the

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different values that frustrate the success of any “environmental” approach to addressing the problem of climate change. The frustration comes from unresolved conflicts between environmental ethics, politics of resource economics, and rights to livelihood and security. REFERENCES Armour, K. C., and G. H. Roe. “Climate Commitment in an Uncertain World.” Geophysical Research Letters 38 (2011): L01707. doi: 10.1029/2010GL045850. Austin, J. How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962. Chachibaia, K. “Against All Odds: Egypt’s Fight against Climate Change.” United Nations Development Programme. Last modified November 26, 2014. Accessed September 14, 2015, http://www.undp.org/content/undp/en/home/blog/2014/11/26/Against-All-OddsEgypt-s-fight-against-Climate-Change.html. Climatecommunication.org. “Overview.” No date. Accessed September 14, 2015, https://www. climatecommunication.org/new/features/extreme-weather/overview/. Defra 2013. “How Is Defra Tackling Climate Change? Defra Science Notes 2.” No date. Accessed September 15, 2015, http://uk-air.defra.gov.uk/assets/documents/ozone-uv/ Tackling_Climate_Change_defra.pdf. Emanuel, K. “What We’ve Learned about Hurricanes and Climate Change since Katrina.” Washington Post, last modified August 26, 2015, accessed September 14, 2015, https:// www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/08/26/what-weve-learned-abouthurricanes-and-climate-change-since-katrina/. Fleming, J., and V. Janković. “Klima.” Osiris 26 (2011): 1–15. Gardiner, S. M. A Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Gillis, J. “Study Links Rise in Rain and Snow to Human Actions.” New York Times. Last modified February 17, 2011. Accessed September 15, 2015, http://www.ndtv.com/article/ world/study-links-rise-in-rain-and-snow-to-human-actions-86118. Herring, S., M. P. Hoerling, T. C. Peterson, and P. A. Stott, eds. “Explaining Extreme Events of 2012 from a Climate Perspective.” Bulletin of American Meteorological Society 95 (2014): S1–S96. Home Office. “Supply Chain Vulnerability: Executive Report on Behalf of Department for Transport, Local Government and the Regions.” Cranfield University School of Management. Last modified January 2002. Accessed May 22, 2015, http://www.som.cranfield.ac. uk/som/dinamic-content/research/lscm/downloads/Vulnerability_report.pdf. Hulme, M. “Attributing Weather Extremes to ‘Climate Change’: A Review.” Progress in Physical Geography 38 (2014): 499–511. ———. “Climate and Its Changes: A Cultural Appraisal.” Geography and Environment (2015). DOI: 10.1002/geo2.5. IPCC. “Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Summary for Policy Makers.” 2012. Accessed August 1, 2015, https://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/special-reports/srex/SREX_FD_SPM_ final.pdf. ———. Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation: Summary for Policymakers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. King et al. “National Oceanography Centre Cruise Report No. 35.” National Oceanography Center. 2015. http://www.nora.nerc.ac.uk/512587/. Klein, R. J. T., and A. Möhner. “The Political Dimension of Vulnerability: Implications for the Green Climate Fund.” IDS Bulletin 42 (2011): 15–22. Kunkel, K. E., R. A. Pielke, Jr., and S. A. Changnon. “Temporal Fluctuations in Weather and Climate Extremes that Cause Economic and Human Health Impacts: A Review.” Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 80 (1999): 1077–98. Kunkel, K. E., et al. “Monitoring and Understanding Trends in Extreme Storms: State of Knowledge.” Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 94 (2013): 499–513.

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Lee, P. Ethics and Climate Change Policy. The Global Warming Policy Foundation, GSPF Essay 2, 2014. Mohammed, A. “Kerry Calls Climate Change ‘Weapon of Mass Destruction.’” Reuters. Last modified February 16, 2014. Accessed September 14, 2015, http://www.reuters.com/article/ us-kerry-climate-idUSBREA1F0BP20140216. Morss, R. E., O. V. Wilhelmi, G. A. Meehl, and L. Dilling. “Improving Societal Outcomes of Extreme Weather in a Changing Climate: An Integrated Perspective.” Annual Review of Environment and Resources 36 (2011): 1–25. MSNBC. “When Climate Change Attacks.” Last modified September 2, 2015, accessed September 14, 2015, http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/when-climate-change-attacks. New York Times Editorial. “Worrying Beyond Hurricane Sandy.” Last modified November 1, 2012. Accessed September 14, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/01/opinion/ worrying-beyond-hurricane-sandy.html. Peterson, T. C., P. A. Stott, and S. Herring, eds. “Explaining Extreme Events of 2011 from a Climate Perspective.” Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 93 (2012): 1041–67. ———. “Explaining Extreme Events of 2012 from a Climate Perspective.” Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 94 (2013): S1–S71. Rutgers Today. “Is Global Warming behind the Polar Vortex?” Last modified January 30, 2014. Accessed September 14, 2015, http://news.rutgers.edu/hot-topic/global-warmingbehind-polar-vortex/20140129. Schneider, S. “The Greenhouse Effect and the U.S. Summer of 1988: Cause and Effect or a Media Event? An Editorial.” Climatic Change 13 (1988): 113–15. Schultz, D. M., and V. Janković. “Climate Change and Resilience to Weather Events.” Weather, Climate, and Society 6 (2014): 157–59. Stott, P. A., T. C. Peterson, and S. Herring, 2012 “Explaining Extreme Events of 2011 from a Climate Perspective: Introduction.” Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 93 (2012): 1041–43. Thompson, A., and F. E. L. Otto. “Ethical and Normative Implications of Weather Event Attribution for Policy Discussions Concerning Loss and Damage.” Climatic Change, (2015). doi: 10.1007/s10584–015–1433-z. UCAR. “Steroids, Baseball, and Climate Change: What Do Home Runs and Weather Extremes Have in Common?” 2012. Accessed September 14, 2015, https://www2.ucar.edu/ atmosnews/attribution/steroids-baseball-climate-change. Vanderheidein, S. Atmospheric Justice: A Political Theory of Climate Change. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. 304. The White House. “Fact Sheet: President Obama Leading Administration-wide Drought Response.” Office of the Press Secretary. Last modified February 14, 2014, accessed September 14, 2015, https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/02/14/fact-sheet-presidentobama-leading-administration-wide-drought-response.

NOTE 1. Acknowledgments: Schultz is partially funded by the UK Natural Environment Research Council through grants NE/H008225/1, NE/I005234/1, NE/I024984–1, and NE/N003918/1, and the Research Prediction Initiative.

Chapter Nine

Hegel, Nature, and Ethics Alison Stone

INTRODUCTION In this chapter I introduce Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature and explore its implications regarding the ethics of human relations with the nonhuman natural world. 1 In section I, I explain how the Philosophy of Nature fits into Hegel’s mature philosophical system and how he approaches the relation between philosophy and empirical science: namely, he constructs his account of nature by first learning from the empirical sciences then reconstructing on a priori grounds how the various natural forms identified by scientists fit together into an ordered whole. In section II, I reconstruct Hegel’s actual account of the ordered whole of nature: he treats its component forms as a hierarchy progressing from the most mechanical kinds of entity to the most organic. For Hegel, this is equally a progression in which the material parts of natural entities become increasingly organized by their conceptual forms. Even the most mechanical entities, though, exhibit self-organization to a minimal degree for Hegel: nature’s hierarchy is one of increasing self-organization, eventually reaching up to the level of free self-determination that characterizes human agents. With this theoretical background established, I turn in section III to the ethical questions. We might expect that because Hegel regards all natural beings as being self-organizing to at least some degree, he would conclude that we should give these beings moral consideration on that account, just as, he believes, we should respect other human agents on account of their capacity for self-determination. Yet Hegel instead maintains in his political philosophy that human agents can and indeed should transform natural beings at will, in the context of appropriating these beings as private property, an institution that Hegel considers to be necessary to realize human freedom. I 133

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argue that Hegel is inconsistent here. Regarding other human agents he holds that we must learn to respect their freedom alongside our own, a respect that limits and complicates the initial setting of unbridled appropriation. Consistently, he should say something similar of nature: that we should learn to temper our interest in realizing our own freedom in view of the self-organizing powers of natural beings and processes. Indeed, Hegel had ample scope to accommodate such an ethical position within the structure of his sociopolitical theory as presented in the Elements of the Philosophy of Right. He failed to develop the intellectual resources provided by his own philosophy; fortunately, however, those resources remain available to us today. NATURE, SCIENCE, AND PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE The Philosophy of Nature is the second part of Hegel’s mature system of philosophy, which he published in outline form as the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, initially in 1817 and then in revised versions in 1827 and 1830. The treatment of nature lies between the system’s first part, the Logic, and its final part, the Philosophy of Mind. Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature is the part of his system that has received least discussion from Hegel scholars, as well as incurring a good deal of criticism from many readers (Compton, 1984, 37). 2 Some of those critical readers have thought—wrongly—that Hegel was trying to produce his own theory of nature to rival or replace empirical scientific knowledge. Actually, Hegel’s theory of nature is heavily informed by the empirical science of his own time—science that he assesses, reinterprets, and reconstructs. Unfortunately, in the process Hegel sometimes rejects particular scientific hypotheses that have since become well established, such as evolutionary theory; and he sometimes defends hypotheses that have been discredited, such as Goethe’s anti-Newtonian account of color. Ultimately, though, these details of Hegel’s approach to nature do not matter. What matters is the overall metaphysics of nature in light of which Hegel reconstructs and reinterprets scientific hypotheses. It is on the level of this metaphysics that Hegel’s view of nature acquires ethical implications that make his view relevant in light of the imminent environmental crisis. Introducing his philosophy of nature, Hegel writes that “to determine what the Philosophy of Nature is, our best method is to separate it off from the subject-matter with which it is contrasted; . . . natural science in general” (EN 2). 3 What features “separate” philosophy of nature from natural science? Hegel tells us: Physics and natural history are called empirical sciences par excellence, and they profess to belong entirely to the sphere of perception and experience, and

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in this way to be opposed to the Philosophy of Nature, i.e. to a knowledge of nature from thought. (EN 3)

We note that here Hegel is telling us how physics and natural history, and the natural sciences in general, were widely regarded in his time: namely, that they were seen as purely empirical disciplines. That is, their methods were thought to be those of observation and experiment and of gathering, collating, and comparing data about what had been observed. Hegel does not endorse this view. He objects that natural scientific inquiry is not purely empirical: it does not remain with the collection of endless observed facts. Rather, he says, scientists draw general conclusions from their data, generalizing from repeated occurrences to universal laws and classifying phenomena under natural kinds (EN 3). Hegel therefore says that science involves thought—about universals—as well as observation. Sometimes, though, it seems that for Hegel science involves thought insofar as scientists derive generalizations from observations—presumably by induction and/or inference to the laws that best explain the observed facts. In saying this, Hegel seems to accept that the scientific method is to make observations then to generalize from them by induction. Yet elsewhere he maintains that theoretical understanding always precedes observation. In the “sense-certainty” chapter of his Phenomenology of Spirit, he argues that sense-perception is always informed by categories of thought (PhG, 58–66). To be consistent, in his Philosophy of Nature Hegel should have said that science involves thought in that theories and theoretical categories always inform the observations that scientists make and the experiments they conduct. Nonetheless, he should have said, science remains empirical because it tests these theories and categories against observations and experimental results. Still, it is the empirical dimension of science that for Hegel distinguishes science from philosophy of nature. Hegel explains that philosophers of nature start by taking up each “universal” that scientists have already identified and conceptualized. That is, philosophers take up the laws and natural kinds that scientists have identified. Philosophers then reconstruct on rational grounds how each of these “universals”—laws, kinds, forces, etc.—derives from the others and fits together with them into an organized whole. So, Hegel says, in its origin and formation philosophy of nature depends on empirical science, but it then reconstructs scientific findings on a new basis. This basis is “the necessity of the concept”: The Philosophy of Nature takes up the material which physics has prepared for it empirically, at the point to which physics has brought it, and reconstitutes it, so that experience is not its final warrant and base. Physics must therefore work into the hands of philosophy, in order that the latter may translate into the Notion the abstract universal transmitted to it, by showing how this univer-

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An example may help to explain what Hegel means by saying that philosophers “translate” the universals provided by scientists into “the Notion,” or, more accurately, “the concept.” Hegel begins his Philosophy of Nature by discussing space and time. He takes up accounts of space and time given by scientists and, drawing on these accounts, Hegel tries to show space and time fit together by tracing how time derives from space. In this case, though, the “scientists” in question include Euclid and Aristotle, and we might be surprised to think of them under this heading. But we should remember that it is only in the modern period that a firm divide between science and philosophy has emerged. Consequently when Hegel draws on accounts of natural phenomena provided by premodern thinkers, those thinkers will not necessarily be “scientists” in the narrower modern-day sense. As to how Hegel traces the derivation of time from space, he does this by identifying a contradiction within the structure of space as scientists have understood it. Space is divisible into a manifold of points. As such space is partes extra partes—it consists of parts outside other parts. Yet these parts of space have no qualities by which they can be individuated from one another. There is nothing to differentiate these parts from one another, and so they prove after all to be identical with each other. Space is self-contradictory: it is pure difference and pure lack of difference. For Hegel, time embodies a step toward resolving this contradiction within space. Basing his account of time on that of Aristotle, Hegel maintains that time consists of a series of moments—an unending stream of “nows,” each existing only momentarily. As each “now” momentarily stands out into existence, it divides the past from the future (EN 33–34, §257). Yet each moment disappears immediately it has come into existence. Hegel concludes that temporal moments are nothing more than a manifestation of negating force, a power to negate the past and future. Once that negation is done, there is nothing more to the moment and it disappears. Nonetheless, moments differ from one another more fully than spatial points do. For moments at least set themselves against everything else, albeit only momentarily. For Hegel, then, time embodies an advance toward resolution of the contradiction within space. Peculiar as this view of space and time may seem, we can now clarify what method Hegel has followed in constructing it. He began by taking up accounts of space and time given by Euclid, Aristotle, and others. On the basis of these accounts, Hegel then finds a way to understand time as deriving from space. In doing this, Hegel is reconstructing how time derives from space on an a priori basis. By reconstructing along the same lines how each

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natural form derives from another, Hegel assembles all these forms into a chain in which each resolves contradictions within the forms that precede it. As the example of space and time shows, in reconstructing how natural forms derive from one another, Hegel regularly reinterprets these forms. He starts from scientific accounts of these forms, but he then modifies those accounts, for instance by reinterpreting temporal moments in terms of negating force. As he puts it, the philosopher: [I]ntroduces, into these [scientific] categories, other ones, and gives them validity. . . . it preserves the same forms of thought, laws, and objects, but at the same time it gives them further formation and reshapes them with further categories. (EL 33, §9R)

Hegel also excludes some scientific accounts when he cannot integrate the entities with which they deal into his chain of natural forms. This is why he rejects Newton’s account of light and color in favor of Goethe’s—Hegel cannot incorporate Newton’s account into his philosophy of nature as he can with Goethe’s. In such cases, a particular scientific account fails to find any place in the philosophy of nature, and so Hegel rejects it. By thus finding ways in which each natural form derives from the others, the Hegelian philosopher of nature builds up an overall theory of the natural world. Let me now introduce this theory. THE HIERARCHY OF NATURE: MECHANICS, PHYSICS, ORGANICS Hegel connects and reinterprets scientific accounts so as to build up a particular conception of the natural world. On this conception, nature is the realm in which matter gradually comes to be shaped and organized by what Hegel calls “the concept.” Nature advances in this way through a “series of stages consisting of many moments, the exposition of which constitutes the philosophy of nature” (EM 13, §381A). What, according to Hegel, are these stages? In its first stage, nature exists in the shape of units of matter with little or no unifying organization to tie them together. Hegel examines these stages in the first part of his Philosophy of Nature, the “Mechanics.” In this mechanical region of nature, all that exists is “singular individual” entities. They have “the determination”—that is, the defining attribute—of “asunderness or mutual outsideness” (Außereinander): being-outside-one-another (EN 25, §252). This is the realm of matter as bare partes extra partes. At first, these parts-outside-parts exist as space. Here, as we have seen, Hegel believes that spatial parts both differ and fail to differ from one another. Temporal moments also fail, insofar as they only attain differentiated existence for fleeting moments. After space and time Hegel discusses materi-

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al bodies, in the subsection “Finite Mechanics.” Each material body achieves a level of difference from all other material bodies, by having a particular mass that distinguishes it. This mass is comprised of a particular quantity of spatial parts. So, Hegel writes: “Matter [now] has . . . a quantitative difference, and is particularized into different quanta or masses” (EN 47, §263). However, Hegel continues, material bodies are still not adequately differentiated from one another. This is because the units of space that bodies possess so as to achieve difference remain self-contradictory entities that are not genuinely different from one another. Bodies, as it were, are attempting to achieve difference by using lower-level entities—spatial parts—that are not themselves differentiated, and this cannot work. The contradiction of space instead infects material bodies. As a result, Hegel claims, these bodies collapse back into identity with one another. That is, the tendency of material bodies to collapse together takes the form of their being attracted toward one another. “The separated parts . . . are only a One [Eins], many Ones [Eins]; each is what the other is. The One [Eins] repels itself only from itself; this is the sublating [i.e., overcoming] of the separation of what is for itself: attraction” (EN 46, §262A). Broadly, this is how Hegel reinterprets Newton’s account of the subjection of material bodies to gravity. As Hegel puts matters in his philosophy of history: “Matter possesses gravity in so far as the drive towards a middle point is in it; it is essentially composite, and consists of sheer singular parts which all strive for the middle point. . . . [it] seeks its unity” (RH 47–48). Insofar as material bodies nonetheless have achieved a level of difference—albeit imperfectly so—these bodies do not simply coalesce together but also repel one another. In turn, in that bodies are therefore subject to both attraction and repulsion, they revolve around a center into which they strive to, but cannot, unite. This gives us the solar system as a system of bodies organized in motion around their center the sun, which Hegel discusses in the “Absolute Mechanics,” the final subsection of the “Mechanics.” Hegel now moves on to the second main natural stage, that of “Physical Nature” (as he calls it). Here nature has the form of material items that are partly, but still only incompletely, integrated together in systematic relations to one another. We have already seen in the solar system a first such case. Here we have material bodies (the planets) integrated into a system by their shared orientation around a center (the sun). The transition to the solar system had therefore already brought us to the cusp of the next stage of nature. As this Physical stage now unfolds, we encounter sets of material items that become integrated together at increasingly deep levels. We begin with what Hegel calls “immediate physical qualities”—light and darkness, density and cohesion, sound, and heat. What unites these phenomena is that they exist insofar as the mass of material bodies acquires particular qualities (of density, degree of heat, etc.), through which these

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bodies become more firmly differentiated from one another. Why does this happen? Hegel’s initial thought is that within the solar system, different bodies acquire different qualities because of their places within that system. Location within a system causes bodies to occupy distinct roles within that system, and their matter acquires corresponding qualities (for instance, that of pure light in the case of the sun, Hegel maintains). The same applies to material bodies within the earth, for by being integrated as a planet, the earth is now the system of all the material bodies that comprise it. These bodies, then, begin to acquire distinct qualities too. Hegel now proceeds to three kinds of relational process amongst bodies: magnetism, electricity, and chemistry. In all these processes, different bodies are drawn to coalesce together. For they have acquired distinct qualities, and yet these qualifications are imposed on the more basic quantities of mass that bodies possess. These differences of mass, as we saw, are unstable and not fully established. To that extent, bodies are still not properly differentiated from one another, and they coalesce together. Once again, however, bodies do not entirely lack difference, so they not only coalesce but also repel one another, and regenerate their differences after having combined. The paradigm of that dynamic is the chemical process, in which two substances (two bodies with different qualities) react together (combine) to produce new substances as a result (difference is regenerated). However, this process has an important result. Through it, what emerges is a set of bodies with different qualities, bodies that have assumed these qualities that differentiate them through their interaction, their uniting and then separating. The bodies have taken up their different qualities in relation to one another. That is, body A has acquired quality C and body B has acquired quality D because A and B have been subjected together to a chemical process within which they have come to occupy different roles. In effect, these bodies have come to be differentiated by virtue of occupying distinct places within an organized system (Goethe, 2008). 4 This brings us to the third and final main sphere of nature, that of organic life, described by Hegel in the section “Organic Physics.” According to him, this sphere contains organic beings—plants and animals—the material parts of which are completely pervaded and organized by the forms that unify them. As a result, the material parts of these beings are completely integrated together with one another. Hegel is relying on the hugely influential account of organisms that Kant had given in his Critique of Judgment, first published in 1790. Here Kant argues that living organisms must be regarded as having two distinguishing characteristics. First, within any organism all its parts are reciprocally means and ends for one another: each organ functions in ways that enable the others to function, those in turn enabling the first organ as well as one another to function. Second, in enabling each other to exist and operate in this way, the parts belong within an organized system that effec-

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tively assigns roles to each of them, so that the whole has organizing power with respect to its parts (Kant, 1987). However, for Kant, we must understand and approach organisms in this way, but we cannot know whether this is their real nature. Hegel drops this restriction on knowledge: for him, organisms really do organize all their parts, and we can know this. 5 In an organism, then, each part is as it is because of its place within the whole—so Hegel takes it. Its place completely shapes the part’s character, so that if removed from the whole, it would cease to exist: The single members of the body are what they are only through their unity and in relation to it. So, for instance, a hand that has been hewn from the body is a hand in name only, but not in actual fact, as Aristotle has already remarked. (EL 291, §216A)

Indeed, this means that the parts of a living body are not rightly described as mere parts; their character is rather that of limbs and organs, fully integrated members of an organized system. Having said this, Hegel believes that only animal organisms fully realize this character of living wholes. But the first organic form that he considers is the earth as an integrated totality of magnetically, electrically, and chemically interacting constituents. Yet the earth is not alive properly speaking: rather, it has brought us to the brink of life. The second organic form, plants, are genuinely alive, yet they are deficient in that their organs can, if cut from the whole, assume new functions and thereby generate new plants (as happens when we take cuttings). Thus the organs of a plant are still not so fully governed by the whole as those of an animal. The animal, then, brings the chain of natural progression to its summit and completion. To sum up: for Hegel, nature has the initial form of matter that is not organized by any unifying form but comprises mere partes extra partes. Nature then advances to the form of material bodies that are located in systems of relations to one another, and yet still retain an aspect of bare mass, bare material parts-outside-parts. Finally, nature progresses to the form of the organic body, the material parts of which are completely shaped by their places in the whole. Matter has gone from being unshaped by any form, to being partially shaped by organizing form, to being completely shaped by organic form. What does Hegel mean by claiming that nature progresses through these stages? He interprets nature as a hierarchy: its most advanced forms, the organic ones, are the most perfect. This indicates the nature of the progression: the most perfect natural forms are so because they best succeed at resolving the contradictions that (Hegel thinks) obtained in nature in its earliest stages. In turn, those earliest stages are the earliest in the chain of natural

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progression because they are least perfect: least successful at resolving those same contradictions. Take space, the very first natural form. As we saw, for Hegel space embodies a contradiction between difference and lack of difference. Time is more advanced—more perfect—than space, since time advances toward resolving this contradiction, in that temporal moments achieve greater difference from one another than spatial parts did. But the improvement made here is small, since temporal moments are only transitory. In the rest of mechanical nature, the parts of matter cohere into material bodies that achieve greater difference from one another by virtue of their distinguishing quantities of mass. Here we see an advance toward resolution of the contradiction from which space initially suffered. The further we advance toward complete resolution of the contradiction, the more perfect are the kinds of natural form that we get. Nature does not progress temporally, then, but in what Hegel calls a “logical” sense, under which natural forms count as more advanced the less internally contradictory they are. (Moreover, the contradictions in question really exist in the natural world, for Hegel. Space as it really exists has antithetical features, so that it is objectively internally contradictory. 6) Hegel also regards nature as progressing from pure matter to its final existence as matter fully organized by “the concept” (der Begriff). While the concept is also a technical term in Hegel’s Logic, in the context of his Philosophy of Nature he understands the concept as follows. This concept is not an idea in the mind; it is something existing, external to our minds, really embodied in the material natural world. Its character can best be understood with reference to living organisms. As we have seen, for Hegel, the parts of an organism are shaped by the whole and its purposes. For Hegel these are above all the purposes of sensation, irritability (the power to react to external stimulants), and reproduction. The whole and its purposes are not directly material entities, but they shape how the matter of an organism develops. They organize matter and are embodied in it, but they are not material themselves. Insofar as the whole and its purposes are not material, they can be described instead as conceptual. In the same way, for Hegel, whatever shapes and organises a whole set of material items counts as conceptual, or as a concept. Thus as nature advances to forms of matter that are more and more systematically organized and integrated, its matter is becoming more and more pervaded by “the concept.” Overall, then, Hegel conceives of nature as the realm in which matter gradually becomes shaped and organized by the concept, becoming organic in the process. We can now turn to the ethical implications of this account.

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HEGEL AND THE ETHICS OF HUMAN-NATURE RELATIONS What remains of interest in Hegel’s theory of nature, plausibly, is not the substantial details of his accounts of various particular natural phenomena. Rather, what remains of interest is twofold: (a) His overall interpretation of what nature essentially is, an interpretation that cuts across all the specific details of his theory; and (b) the ethical consequences that flow out of this interpretation. In Hegel’s interpretation, nature is a hierarchical order of forms ranging from most to least contradictory, and from the most purely material through to the most organic and conceptually organized. This bears on the environmental crisis, if we take it that one causal factor behind this crisis is the new way of thinking about nature that took hold during the scientific revolution in the seventeenth century (Merchant, 1980). This was the mechanistic view of nature—pioneered by Descartes amongst others—as a set of units of matter interacting causally with one another. On this view, no natural beings have any real inner purposes or life; even complex forms such as organisms can be reduced to sets of mechanical interactions. This is why, infamously, Descartes found vivisection morally unproblematic: after all, for him, animals are mere mechanisms. This case exemplifies how the mechanistic view of nature has tended to support and fuel human efforts to control interactions within nature for our own benefit. For if natural beings have no real purposes of their own, then we human beings need not disregard or restrict our own needs and purposes for the sake of allowing natural beings to fulfil their purposes: after all, they don’t have any. The mechanistic assumptions that informed the scientific revolution, then, contributed to making the use of nature for human benefit into an entrenched part of modern life. To be sure, few scientists today would straightforwardly accept a mechanistic view of nature in the particular way that that was construed in the seventeenth century. Yet the broader idea that the behavior of natural beings is to be understood in terms of interactions amongst their smallest-level component parts remains widespread—as when the behavior of biological organisms is explained reductively in terms of their genes, for example. Likewise the use of nature for human purposes, without regard to any purposes that nature itself may have, remains fundamental to industrialized society, which—at least as it has existed so far—depends upon the ruthless exploitation of natural resources. In these respects the mechanistic view remains embedded in our form of social life. Hegel’s view of nature challenges the mechanistic one. For him, only the lowest-level aspects of nature operate in purely mechanical ways. Living organisms of all kinds are not mere mechanisms; they have their own guiding purposes. Even chemical, electrical, and magnetic processes are not merely

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mechanical; they already have a level of systematic self-organization that places them midway between organism and mechanism. To understand nature properly, Hegel believes, we must recognize that virtually all the concrete natural bodies and processes that surround us have at least some aspects of purposive self-organization. Even those natural beings that come the closest to being mechanical—bodies with mass in gravitational relations to one another—still in fact have to be understood in relation to other more selforganized natural forms of which they are a precursor. Bare mechanism is the minimum case of self-organization, rather than self-organization being reducible to bare mechanism. What follows from this view, ethically? Well, we might think: surely it follows from Hegel’s view that we ought to act toward natural bodies and processes in ways that recognize their self-organizing aspects. That is not to say that we should always put the purposes of natural beings above our own. But we should take their purposes into consideration in deciding what to do and how to live. In many cases, this will mean finding trade-offs between our own purposes and those of other natural beings. This conclusion—that the purposes of natural beings merit consideration—properly follows from Hegel’s interpretation of nature, or so we might readily conclude. Matters are complicated, though, by the fact that Hegel draws no such conclusion himself. In his Philosophy of Nature he doesn’t say anything explicit about our treatment of natural beings from an ethical point of view, but he does talk about this in his Elements of the Philosophy of Right, originally published in 1821—the work in which he outlines his social and political philosophy. Hegel discusses human treatment of natural beings within his account of private property which is near the start of the Philosophy of Right, after Hegel has introduced free will at the very beginning of the text. Hegel remarks here that free will is a datum that is familiar to each of us from our own experience (PR 37, §4). But what does “free will” mean? Schematically, Hegel claims that free will can be initially taken to be the ability to choose which to pursue from the set of one’s individual desires or of the available courses of action (PR 45, §11). Ultimately, Hegel will argue across the course of the Philosophy of Right that this is an inadequate understanding of free will, to which he proposes successive revisions and refinements. Nonetheless, these refinements incorporate the initial understanding of free will rather than rejecting it absolutely. Thus, for Hegel, free will in the sense of free choice remains a necessary aspect of freedom, although only an aspect that should not be mistakenly equated with the whole. Now, the condition of an individual’s exercising this ability to choose amongst her desires or possible courses of action, for Hegel, is that she own private property—enjoying rights over a range of material objects with respect to which she can embody and realize her freedom of choice. I need to be surrounded by a domain of objects that provide tangible evidence of my

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freedom and in which “I regard myself as free” (LNR §18, 224). My ownership of these objects means that I can mold, use, and mark them in ways that I freely choose, so that these objects then give me back signs of the freedom that I have exercised with respect to them. But property-ownership is only possible if different individuals recognize and respect one another’s property (PR §71, 102). In turn, this mutual recognition and respect amongst propertyowners can only reliably be achieved if they respect one another not merely when it benefits them to do so but out of genuine respect for the rights of others—this being necessary to avert the otherwise ever-imminent prospect of crime. That step takes Hegel from property (or “abstract right”) to morality, and from there he will move on to morality made concrete in ethical life. Nature figures into “abstract right” because Hegel maintains that private property requires that individuals exercise and realize their freedom by taking possession of natural objects and then using, marking, and transforming them. By transforming something I put my will into it—I make it into something that manifests my freedom in that it is visibly the way it is because of my free actions upon it. This manifestation of my will within the thing, Hegel says, “occurs through my conferring upon the thing a purpose other than that which it immediately possessed . . . a soul other than that which it previously had” (PR §44A, 76). In place of the object’s own “soul,” my soul is implanted into it. Hegel specifies that it is wrong to treat other human individuals in this way—as objects that I treat as my private property. This wrong has been committed at times—notably in the institution of slavery—but that occurred in times, as Hegel puts it, when a wrong was still regarded as being right (PR §57A, 88). Basically, Hegel takes it along broadly Kantian lines, human agents are ends in themselves: their free agency deserves to be recognized and respected. This is not the case, Hegel believes, for natural beings. Indeed, for Hegel, it’s not merely the case that we are free to transform natural beings as we please; more strongly, we ought to so transform them in order to give reality to our freedom, and because we are under this obligation, we must have the right to act so as to fulfil it. Hence the “absolute right of appropriation which human beings have over all things” (PR §44, 75). We might think that these claims of Hegel’s are in tension with the implications of his theory of nature. For on that theory all natural beings exhibit at least some level of self-organization, that is, they shape themselves in light of their own purposes. It is this same self-shaping capacity which ultimately becomes developed to a higher and fuller degree in human selfdetermination—as Hegel portrays matters in the Philosophy of Mind, in which he treats human agency as a higher-level development of the approximations to that agency that already exist in the natural world. The human capacity for self-determination is so important, Hegel takes it, that each of us not only can but also ought to transform natural beings so as to realize this capacity. But if self-determination has this importance in human beings, then

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mustn’t its approximate natural form as self-organization also have a level of importance, such that the purposes of natural beings deserve to receive at least some moral consideration? Hegel doesn’t draw that conclusion. Here there is a marked difference from what he says about the necessity of each individual property-owner coming to recognize and respect other human agents. Initially, he maintains, we are liable in the name of realizing our own individual freedom to try to steal other agents’ property, the things that they have already appropriated for their own. But we must come to recognize that such behavior is wrong— not merely on the grounds that I need others to recognize my property, which they can only do if I recognize them to be property-owners in turn. That is part of the story for Hegel, but only part; if I remained at that standpoint, I would still be recognizing others only as an indirect way of furthering my individual self-interest. I need to come to recognize that others in their own right deserve to own property—hence Hegel proceeds from property to a treatment of morality in a fairly Kantian sense, as involving amongst other things the recognition of other human agents as ends in themselves. Although he subsequently maintains that this Kantian kind of standpoint too has limitations and must be superseded, it isn’t abandoned, but rather incorporated into the higher level of “ethical life.” Hegel sums up this difference in the respective standpoints that we should take toward human agents and natural beings by saying that nature does not “have the end in itself in such a way that we have to respect it, as the individual human has this end in himself and hence is to be respected” (LHP vol. 3, 185). When it comes to natural beings, then, Hegel could have said that we start off with an inadequate standpoint in which we try to use and transform natural things so as to manifest our individual freedom in them. But, his reasoning might have continued, actually those things have purposes of their own, and we need to come to recognize the validity of these things pursuing their purposes. We therefore need to learn to limit our pursuit of our own individual freedom, he could have concluded, and to balance our concern for this freedom with recognition of the independent purposes of natural beings. Then—Hegel could have said in turn—our coming to learn this lesson requires us to be situated within social institutions that educate us in this lesson and in acting in the ways that embody and instill it. That would be parallel to the way that we must be situated within the institutions of ethical life so that we can be educated in acting morally toward other human individuals—so that moral action becomes second nature to us and does not remain a burdensome imposition. Hegel did not say any of these things. But his Philosophy of Right provides a framework within which he could have made these claims, by unfolding a series of arguments regarding human-nature relations which parallel those that he does in fact advance regarding interhuman relations.

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Moreover, he should have unfolded those arguments to be faithful to the implications of his own account of nature. REFERENCES Bates, J. A. “Hegel and the Concept of Extinction.” Philosophy Compass 9, No. 4 (2014): 238–52. Compton, J. “A Comment on Buchdahl’s ‘Conceptual Analysis and Scientific Theory in Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature.’” In Hegel and the Sciences, edited by Robert S. Cohen and Marx W. Wartofsky. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Reidel, 1984. Goethe, J. W. V. Elective Affinities. Translated by David Constantine. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Hegel, G. W. F. Philosophy of Nature. Translated by A. V. Miller. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970. ———. Philosophy of Mind. Translated by W. Wallace. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. ———. Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A. V. Miller. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. ———. Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: Introduction: Reason in History. Translated by H. B. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975. ———. Encyclopedia Logic. Translated by T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting, and H. S. Harris. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1991. ———. 1991. Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. H B Nisbet, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. Lectures on the History of Philosophy. Translated by E. S. Haldane. 3 vols. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995. ———. Lectures on Natural Right and Political Science: The First Philosophy of Right, Heidelberg 1817–1819, with Additions from the Lectures of 1818–1819. Translated by J. Michael Stewart and P. C. Hodgson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Houlgate, S., ed. Hegel and the Philosophy of Nature. Albany: SUNY Press, 1998. Kant, I. Critique of Judgement. Translated by Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1987. Kisner, W. “A Species-Based Environmental Ethic in Hegel’s Logic of Life.” In The Owl of Minerva 40, No. 1 (2009): 1–68. Merchant, C. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution. New York: Harper and Row, 1980. Mowad, N. “The Natural World of Spirit: Hegel on the Value of Nature.” Environmental Philosophy 9, No. 2 (2012): 47–66. Rand, S. 2007. “The Importance and Relevance of Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature.” Review of Metaphysics 61, No. 2 (2007): 379–400. Stone, A. Petrified Intelligence: Nature in Hegel’s Philosophy. Albany: SUNY Press, 2004. ———. “Philosophy of Nature.” In The Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-Century German Philosophy, edited by Kristin Gjesdal and Michael Forster. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.

NOTES 1. Other accounts of Hegel’s philosophy of nature include those in Stephen Houlgate, ed., Hegel and the Philosophy of Nature (Albany: SUNY Press, 1998) and those of Sebastian Rand, “The Importance and Relevance of Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature,” in Review of Metaphysics, Vol. 61, No. 2 (December 2007), 379–400; and Alison Stone, Petrified Intelligence: Nature in Hegel’s Philosophy (Albany: SUNY Press, 2004). The bearing of Hegel’s philosophy of nature on the ethics of human-nature relations was for a long time a topic rather neglected by scholars (as, indeed, was Hegel’s philosophy of nature as a whole). But recently there has been growing attention to the former issue: for example, Nicholas Mowad, “The Natural World of Spirit:

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Hegel on the Value of Nature,” in Environmental Philosophy Volume 9, Issue 2 (Fall 2012), 47–66; Wendell Kisner, “A Species-Based Environmental Ethic in Hegel’s Logic of Life,” in The Owl of Minerva, Vol. 40, part 1 (2009): 1–68; and Jennifer Ann Bates, “Hegel and the Concept of Extinction,” Philosophy Compass 9, Issue 4 (April 2014): 238–52. 2. As John J. Compton points out, “hallowed misunderstandings . . . have Hegel either totally ignoring empirical facts and regularities or else claiming somehow to derive them deductively from the notion of nature.” 3. When citing Hegel’s works (in English translation) I use the following abbreviations, all these works being cited by page number as well as paragraph number when the latter applies: EN = Philosophy of Nature, trans. A. V. Miller, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970. EM = Philosophy of Mind, trans. W. Wallace, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. PhG = Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. RH = Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: Introduction: Reason in History, trans. H. B. Nisbet, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975. EL = Encyclopedia Logic, trans. T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting, and H. S. Harris, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1991. PR = Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. H B Nisbet, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. LHP = Lectures on the History of Philosophy, trans. E. S. Haldane, 3 vols., Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995. LNR = Lectures on Natural Right and Political Science: The First Philosophy of Right, Heidelberg 1817–1819, with Additions from the Lectures of 1818–1819, trans. J. Michael Stewart and P. C. Hodgson, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. In all cases Hegel’s “remarks” to paragraphs are indicated “R,” “additions” “A.” 4. My formulation is indebted to Goethe’s 1809 novel Elective Affinities (Die Wahlverwandtschaften) in which the married couple Eduard (A) and Charlotte (B) as an experiment invite Ottilie (C) and the Captain (D) to visit them; the result is that Eduard and Ottilie form a relationship as do Charlotte and the Captain. 5. For a good reconstruction of Kant’s reasons for imposing this restriction upon our knowledge, see Daniel Dahlstrom, “Hegel’s Appropriation of Kant’s Account of Teleology in Nature” (in Stephen Houlgate, ed., Hegel and the Philosophy of Nature, Albany: SUNY Press, 1998). In rejecting the restriction, Hegel followed a path first carved out by his erstwhile collaborator Schelling; see Alison Stone, “Philosophy of Nature” (in The Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-Century German Philosophy, eds. Kristin Gjesdal and Michael Forster, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). In brief, Schelling argued that human freedom is real and can be explained only if there is real self-organization in natural organisms, of which human freedom is a further development. Kant had held that human freedom can only be assumed to obtain, not known, but Schelling replied that to explain moral action and knowledge human freedom must really exist, and we can know that it exists because moral action and knowledge exist also. 6. Hegel’s idea that natural entities contain real contradictions is puzzling because it is not clear how something that is internally contradictory can possibly exist. One solution is to interpret Hegel as often speaking of “contradiction” to mean merely tension or conflict.

Index

altruism, 30 anthropocentrism, 107 anthropogenic climate change, 110, 121, 122–123 Aquinas, St Thomas, 72, 74, 111 atmospheric, 122, 125, 126, 127, 128 axiological, 67 baptism, 112 benevolence, 48, 76 biotechnology, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 93, 96, 97 Consciousness, xi, 15, 23, 32, 35n14, 72, 83, 99 Consequentialism, 34n6, 110 Cosmology, 107 Creatureliness, 97, 113 Cruciform, 105, 110, 112, 117 Darwin, Charles, 94, 95 Darwinism, x, 21, 31, 32, 33, 33n2, 33n3, 47, 48, 49, 50, 75, 95 Dawkins, Richard, 27, 28, 32, 44, 100n16, 151 Deane-Drummond, Celia, 91, 92, 96, 98 Descartes, René, 142 Design, 29, 50n5, 90, 123 Determinism, 34n7 Earthquakes, 110

Ecclesiology, 111 Egalitarianism, 28, 29, 31, 33n3 Emissions, 115, 125, 126 Eschatology, 107 Euclid, 136 Existentialism, 73, 81 Falsification, 23 Fictionalism, 22, 24, 33n4 Floods, 121, 122 Foot, Phillipa, x, 32, 34n6, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 48, 50, 50n4, 51n9, 55, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 82, 83, 83n2, 83n4, 84n8, 84n10, 100n11 Freud, Sigmund, ix, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 17, 18n3, 18n4, 18n6, 19n8, 19n9, 19n12, 20n15, 20n16, 23, 71, 81 Germany, 54 GM, 23, 25, 26, 27, 30, 34n9, 34n11, 35n12, 35n13 Gould, Stephen Jay, 44, 47, 50, 103, 104, 118 Hauerwas, Stanley, xi, 89, 104, 105, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118 Hegel, xi, 53, 123, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 146n1, 147n2, 147n3, 147n4, 147n5, 147n6 Hiroshima, 114 149

150

Index

Individualism, 43 Jesus, 55, 68n9, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 119n1 Kant, 5, 12, 13, 14, 17, 20n16, 32, 53, 54, 109, 139, 146, 147n5 Kaufman, Gordon, 87–99 Kierkegaard, Soren, 54, 62, 68, 110 Kitcher, Philip, 25, 32, 34n10 Laudato Si, viii, xi, 90, 91, 92, 94, 95, 96, 99 Lewontin, Richard, 44, 45, 46, 47, 50 Løgstrup, K. E., x, 53, 68, 69n18, 69n21, 130 Luther, Martin, xi, 89, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119n1 Metaphysics, xi, 33n1, 37, 39, 44, 54, 68, 73, 82, 83, 134, 146, 146n1 Murdoch, Iris, x, 55, 71, 72, 73, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84n9, 84n11, 84n13 Mysticism, 77, 78, 106 Narcissism, 5, 6, 7, 8, 17, 19n9, 20n15 Naturalism, x, 32, 33n1, 37, 38, 39, 41, 44, 48, 49, 50, 72, 73, 74, 77, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 83n4, 84n13 Neo-Darwinism, x, 21, 33n2 Neuroscience, 26, 32, 98 Newton, Isaac, 137, 138 Nietzsche, Friedrich, x, 6, 17, 18n4, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32,

33, 33n1, 33n2, 33n3, 33n4, 34n5, 34n6, 34n7, 34n9, 34n10, 34n11, 35n12, 35n13, 35n14 Nihilism, 22 Nozick, Robert, 60, 68 Obama, Barack, 129 Pelagianism, 119n1 Perfectionism, 10, 20n15 Pope Francis, viii, 90, 95, 96, 98, 99 Posthumans, 87, 88, 96, 97 Pragmatism, 98 Rationalism, ix, 3, 5, 12 Rawls, John, 60 Realism, 16, 33n4, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84n11 Reductionism, 33n1, 75, 82 Reductionist, 72, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82 Religion, viii, 17, 54, 68, 98, 99, 151, 153 Robots, xi, 98, 99, 99n1, 100n3 Scripture, 106, 113 Secular, viii, 53, 54, 57, 58, 59, 61, 63, 64, 65, 69n10, 104, 113, 116 Soul, 4, 11, 13, 17, 18n5, 19n11, 19n12, 32, 144 Spinoza, 53 Spirituality, 114, 118 Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre, 107, 118 Teleology, 38, 40, 41, 42, 47, 48, 50, 107, 147n5

About the Editor

Dr. Gary Keogh is a former lecturer in religions and theology at the University of Manchester, United Kingdom. He is the author of Reading Richard Dawkins (Fortress Press, 2014) and The Evolution of Hope (Peeters Publishers, 2015) as well as numerous publications in journals such as Zygon and New Blackfriars. He contributes regularly to the popular newspaper The Journal.ie and features often as a guest on Irish radio. He currently teaches theology and religious students at All Hallows College in Cheshire, United Kingdom.

151

List of Contributors

Gary Keogh Lecturer in religions and theology at the University of Manchester, UK Robert Stern Professor of philosophy at the University of Sheffield, UK Isabel Kaeslin PhD candidate at Columbia University, New York Scott M. James and Matthew C. Eshleman Lecturers in Philosophy at the University of North Carolina Parisa Moosavi PhD candidate in philosophy, University of Toronto, Canada Maria Silvia Vaccarezza Postdoctoral fellow in moral philosophy, University of Genoa, Italy Scott Midson Postdoctoral research associate at the Lincoln Theological Institute, University of Manchester, UK Benjamin J. Wood Visiting lecturer in theology at the University of Chester, UK

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List of Contributors

Vladimir Jankovic and David M. Schultz David M. Schultz, environmental sciences, and Vladimir Janković, Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester, UK Alison Stone Professor of philosophy at Lancaster University, UK