Abstract
Neo-Aristotelian metaethical naturalism is a modern attempt at naturalizing ethics using ideas from Aristotle’s teleological metaphysics. Proponents of this view argue that moral virtue in human beings is an instance of natural goodness, a kind of goodness supposedly also found in the realm of non-human living things. Many critics question whether neo-Aristotelian naturalism is tenable in light of modern evolutionary biology. Two influential lines of objection have appealed to an evolutionary understanding of human nature and natural teleology to argue against this view. In this paper, I offer a reconstruction of these two seemingly different lines of objection as raising instances of the same dilemma, giving neo-Aristotelians a choice between contradicting our considered moral judgment and abandoning metaethical naturalism. I argue that resolving the dilemma requires showing a particular kind of continuity between the norms of moral virtue and norms that are necessary for understanding non-human living things. I also argue that in order to show such a continuity, neo-Aristotelians need to revise the relationship they adopt with empirical science and acknowledge that the latter is relevant to assessing their central commitments regarding living things. Finally, I argue that to move this debate forward, both neo-Aristotelians and their critics should pay attention to recent work on the concept of organism in evolutionary and developmental biology.
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Notes
- 1.
She says, for instance, that if humans are understood as creatures with an immortal soul or as persons or rational agents, it will not be clear that they are a natural kind of thing.
- 2.
- 3.
Note that on the neo-Aristotelian conception of practical reason, rationality and morality are not at odds but on the same footing. Practical reason involves not just self-interested considerations but moral considerations as well.
- 4.
Note that if the critics were moral skeptics, Lott’s argument which starts from the assumption that there are in fact virtuous people would not convince them.
- 5.
See Lott (2012a, 420) for a rejection of a “two-stage” reading of neo-Aristotelian naturalism.
- 6.
It’s important to note that although there is a logical continuity between the human and non-human case in that they are life -forms and have a natural history , there is also an important difference resulting from the fact that the human life -form is inter alia characterized by practical reason. Because practical reason has practical authority, it also belongs to the human life -form that its bearers characteristically have a sound grasp on practical reason. Thus, there is an important sense in which knowledge of the human life -form has to “come from the inside”. As Hacker-Wright (2013) puts it, human natural goodness depends on our “rational self-interpretation” (92). This difference between humans and non-humans raises an important question about whether the noted logical continuity is enough to meet what I have called the continuity requirement. As Lott (2014) articulates the issue, neo-Aristotelians need to show that their account of practical reason relies on the specifically human life -form and not on some more abstract category like “person” or “rational agent”. In order to do this, neo-Aristotelians have to explain in what way other aspects of the human life -form relate to practical reason and play a constitutive role. This is a question that needs to be addressed before the neo-Aristotelian project can fully succeed, but it doesn’t directly relate to the evolutionary challenge and I must leave it aside here. See Hacker-Wright (2013) for an attempt to address this question.
- 7.
Note, for instance, that it’s not at all obvious that the violent fights of elephant seals are detrimental to their flourishing in the sense of living the characteristic life of their life -form.
- 8.
Fitzpatrick gives the impression that the problem with defining welfare in terms of gene replication is that it would be “a radical departure from intuitive notions of organismic welfare or well-being” (Fitzpatrick, 68). But it’s important to clarify that it is not our intuitions regarding the flourishing of animals like elephant seals that keep us from defining flourishing in genetic terms. The reason has to do with the continuity requirement.
- 9.
Regardless of whether or not these accounts are taken to offer a reduction of the concept of function , the conditions they specify for function ascription are reductive in the sense that they can be understood without making any reference to the concept of function .
- 10.
Note that Fitzpatrick denies that his account of function is a standard etiological theory (Fitzpatrick, 229–46).
- 11.
Another biologically inclined critic, Odenbaugh (2017) seems to makes the same assumption when he claims that the etiological account of function is “the only good theory we have of normative natural functions”. In fact, he goes as far as claiming that because the neo-Aristotelian account of function is not reducible to our best scientific accounts of functions it is not a naturalistic theory, but a form of vitalism.
- 12.
Note that an organism ’s flourishing is given in a system of natural-historical judgments that express the characteristic features that “play a part” in the life of that kind of organism .
- 13.
Another way to explain away the evaluations of natural goodness, particularly in the case of sentient animals, would be to allow that they have a welfare, but only one that is entirely rooted in their desires and their ability to feel pleasure and pain. Note that this concept of welfare doesn’t depend on an organism ’s life -form, but is rather based on the individual’s own psychology. So it is different from the neo-Aristotelian concept of flourishing and thus is not suitable for naturalizing moral virtue.
- 14.
See Thompson’s (2004) vivid discussion of how empirical observations guide us in acquiring knowledge of a novel type of jellyfish.
- 15.
See Klein (2005) for an account of the shifting ontology of chemistry in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
- 16.
See Daniel Nicholson’s remarks on the disappearance of the organism in evolutionary theory (Nicholson 2014, 1–2).
- 17.
Hacker-Wright made similar remarks about the concept of gene in personal communication.
- 18.
When we make a judgment like “cats have four legs” we aren’t primarily concerned with identifying what makes cats living but are simply trying to understand the kind of thing in front of us.
- 19.
See, e.g., how Laubichler and Wagner (2000) argue that taking the concept of organism to be ontologically prior to its functional structures can solve certain problems of mathematical models in biology with character identification.
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Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to Sergio Tenenbaum, Denis Walsh, Philip Clark, and John Hacker-Wright for extensive comments on earlier drafts of this article. I would like to also thank Andrew Sepielli and audiences at The Ethics of Nature—The Nature of Ethics conference at the University of Manchester, the 2015 meeting of the Canadian Philosophical Association in Ottawa, the 2nd annual roundtable in philosophy of science at the University of Toronto, and the 2016 meeting of the Pacific APA in San Francisco for their helpful feedback.
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Moosavi, P. (2018). Neo-Aristotelian Naturalism and the Evolutionary Objection: Rethinking the Relevance of Empirical Science. In: Hacker-Wright, J. (eds) Philippa Foot on Goodness and Virtue. Philosophers in Depth. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91256-1_9
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