Abstract
In the first part of this paper, I clear the ground from frequent misconceptions of the relationship between fact and value by examining some uses of the adjective “natural” in ethical controversies. Such uses bear evidence to our “natural” tendency to regard nature (considered in a descriptive sense, as the complex of physical and biological regularities) as the source of ethical norms. I then try to account for the origins of this tendency by offering three related explanations, the most important of which is evolutionistic: if any behaviour that favours our equilibrium with the environment is potentially adaptive, nothing can be more effective for this goal than developing an attitude toward the natural world that considers it as a dispenser of sacred norms that must be invariably respected. By referring to the Aristotelian notion of human flourishing illustrated in the first part of the paper, in the second I discuss as a case study some ethical problems raised by mini-chips implantable in our bodies. I conclude by defending their potential beneficial effects of such new technological instruments.
Research for this paper has been supported by the Spanish MINECO grant FFI2011-29834-C03-03. I thank Karim Bschir and Matteo Morganti for comments on a previous version of this manuscript. This paper develops some arguments contained in Dorato (2012).
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Notes
- 1.
Today many more questions are being discussed, but here I refer just to these two traditional issues.
- 2.
The political, economical and social importance of the problem of the relation between pure and applied research depends obviously on the fact that many governments, in periods of economic crisis, tend to cut budgets for research programs that have no immediate applications and are regarded as “pure”.
- 3.
Consider that quantum mechanics is, on its turn, at the basis of most of today’s technology.
- 4.
- 5.
This is my translation of the 29th article of the Italian Constitution.
- 6.
“But in my opinion those who framed the laws are the weaker folk, the majority. And accordingly they frame the laws for themselves and their own advantage, and so too with their approval and censure, and to prevent the stronger who are able to overreach them from gaining the advantage over them, they frighten them by saying that to overreach others is shameful and evil, and injustice consists in seeking the advantage over others. For they are satisfied, I suppose, if being inferior they enjoy equality of status. That is the reason why seeking an advantage over the many is by convention said to be wrong and shameful, and they call it injustice. But in my view nature herself makes it plain that it is right for the better to have the advantage over the worse, the more able over the less. And both among all animals and in entire states and races of mankind it is plain that this is the case – that right is recognized to be the sovereignty and advantage of the stronger over the weaker” (Plato, Gorgias 482e).
- 7.
- 8.
- 9.
I agree that they are commoner in person-in-the-street’s arguments, but this is grist to my mill, because it shows their naturalness in the sense of this section.
- 10.
For a brilliant exception to such a neglect, see Daston (2002, p. 374): “I wish to explore how nature could ever have been endowed with moral authority and why that authority still exerts such a powerful, if covert, pull upon our modern sensibilities, despite innumerable critiques and cautions against conflating “is” and “ought,” against “naturalizing” judgments that are really social and political, and against anthropomorphizing “Nature,” designated with a capital N and often with a feminine pronoun.” See also Daston (2004) in Daston and Vidal (2004).
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Dorato, M. (2015). The Naturalness of the Naturalistic Fallacy and the Ethics of Nanotechnology. In: Hansson, S. (eds) The Role of Technology in Science: Philosophical Perspectives. Philosophy of Engineering and Technology, vol 18. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9762-7_11
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