[lit-ideas] Re: The meaning of life
- From: Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 9 Dec 2008 17:10:44 +0000 (GMT)
--- On Mon, 8/12/08, wokshevs@xxxxxx <wokshevs@xxxxxx> wrote:
> I believe it is instructive to consider whether
> "accordance with nature" may
> operate validly as a criterion of moral rightness and/or
> political legitimacy
> in democratic states. I doubt that it can. The expression
> would appear to be
> the remnant of a culture innocent of radical cultural
> pluralism of the kind we
> find today and innocent as well of the ideals of the
> Enlightenment we continue
> to struggle to promote.
Perhaps, at least in part: but the problem with predicating morals or
legitimacy on 'nature' goes deeper:- there is the fundamental issue of whether
we ought to predicate an 'ought' on an 'is' [the 'is' of nature]; but even
leaving that aside, there is the problem that either we deploy the concept
nature in a sense sufficiently wide that anything that exists as a natural
phenomenon must be taken as in "accordance with nature", so that crime, drug
abuse and sexual abuse would be in "accordance with nature" - at least in the
sense that they are 'phenomena' in the natural [as opposed to supernatural]
world and nature does not prohibit them; or we deploy a restrictive conception
of 'nature', restricted to reflect as 'natural' the moral prescriptions we
smuggle in on the back of this restricted concept, in which case we may decry
as 'unnatural' many human practices - for example, homosexual practices or
heterosexual ones that deviate from the missionary
position or having connection through a hole in a cloth. A third difficulty is
that such views fail to distinguish properly between 'natural laws' such as
e=mc2and man-made 'laws', the latter being changeable conventions; and failure
to clearly draw this distinction may lie at the root of the influence of
'nature' as a concept underpinning moral and political claims as to what is
legitimate. It may be that another root is our inclination towards
'authoritarian' modes of thought and social practice - we look to ground our
morals etc. in an authority and this may be God, his representatives on earth,
or it may be taken as 'nature' however we wish to view it.
> I find that claims regarding what is "natual" or
> "non-natural" in moral and
> political contexts typically express naught but the values
> and traditions of
> particular persons and those of the tribes into which they
> have been
> socialized. There doesn't seem to be anything
> universalizable about appeals to
> the natural.
It is unclear to me why we could predicate something 'universalisable' on
'nature'.
>(Is "survival of the fittest" a
> universalizabale maxim?)
It can be treated as such, though I think it best to treat it as a claim that
is strictly false as a universal claim that 'only the fittest survive', though
containing a surprising amount of truth if understood as the claim 'many
adaptations aid survival'.
Donal
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