tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16355954.post111173567092423585..comments2024-03-28T08:57:53.180+00:00Comments on Darwinian Conservatism by Larry Arnhart: Philippa Foot and the Hypothetical Imperatives of Natural GoodnessLarry Arnharthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14619785331100785170noreply@blogger.comBlogger7125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16355954.post-74144120371955346052011-06-05T10:58:16.206+01:002011-06-05T10:58:16.206+01:00Comparing Aristotle and Hume comes up in chapters ...Comparing Aristotle and Hume comes up in chapters 2 and 4 of DARWINIAN NATURAL RIGHT.Larry Arnharthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14619785331100785170noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16355954.post-61074448863240647842011-06-05T03:11:22.094+01:002011-06-05T03:11:22.094+01:00Foot explains in Natural Goodness that she had sin...Foot explains in <i>Natural Goodness</i> that she had since come to reject the <i>Humean</i> conception of reasons that she held in 'Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives.' You insistently conflate Hume and Aristotle on this point, and seem reluctant to respond to the objections that people have pressed against you. Your ability to use the expression "Aristotelian and Humean conception of the union of reason and desire" without irony or humor suggests, to be quite frank, that you've either misread or not read at all what Hume, Aristotle, or any of the commentators on them have to say about it.<br /><br />You've worked with both Fred Miller and James Murphy. Both of them have written on how Aristotle's theory of practical reason is neither Humean nor Kantian. If you have some reason to believe, against what is now an almost unanimous scholarly view, that Aristotle believed that the good is good <i>because</i> we desire it, that reason is incapable of discovering or evaluating ends that are not mere means or specifications of other ends for which we have brute desires, and that reason is therefore purely instrumental with relation to desire -- these are <i>the</i> Humean claims -- then you should try to show why Miller, Murphy, and most other reputable scholars writing about Aristotle in English for the last 30 years are guilty of misreading Aristotle.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16355954.post-6727240021866077112010-03-18T05:08:49.150+00:002010-03-18T05:08:49.150+00:00Have you ever noticed that the same people who hat...Have you ever noticed that the same people who hate humanity also hate complexity?Troy Camplinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16515578686042143845noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16355954.post-43773123417099885302010-03-17T16:31:24.439+00:002010-03-17T16:31:24.439+00:00I think that the engineering would be guided by ou...I think that the engineering would be guided by our natural desires. The problem is that we as a species are quite poor at predicting what will make our future selves happy. Hence, if radical genetic engineering were possible, I think it would be likely that the children would be miserable in ways that were not foreseen, and that the path traveled once we started down that road would be rather unpredictable. <br /><br />Also, think about communism and other ideologies; at base they really were actual attempts to abolish human nature. It is a well-established part of our nature to want to be something other than what we are. Perhaps you would disagree with this, but I do agree with Nietzsche that humanity itself has a very deep misanthropic streak that has been engendered by its powerlessness over the world, both social and natural. So far as I understand Nietzsche, he wasn't ever looking to some sort of post-human future, but rather just looking for a way to convince thinking misanthropists that they should love humanity. He didn't invent the idea of a "superman" but rather, in his own mind, took most of it from Greek tragedy and philosophy. Which is to say that he borrowed it from the past. <br /><br />Perhaps this is a question that immanent teleology in and of itself can't answer; why should we love humanity instead of hating it? If one ever would hope to convince a misanthropist to change their mind, one must provide an argument that goes beyond species specific teleology. If we do ever gain the ability to radically engineer our genomes, our misanthropy could easily be the end of our species. This misanthropy might also explain why so many people are unwilling to accept immanent teleology as authoritative in human ethics; it is all too human, and they hate humanity so it really doesn't hold much weight for them.Unknownhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03918578746540002029noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16355954.post-36686392196850456232010-03-16T18:55:27.144+00:002010-03-16T18:55:27.144+00:00Paul,
I have tried to answer this question in Cha...Paul,<br /><br />I have tried to answer this question in Chapter 10 of DARWINIAN CONSERVATISM and in my article in THE NEW ATLANTIS. My most recent post on genetic engineering touches on this. But I am still not satisfied that I've answered the question properly.<br /><br />First of all, I am skeptical about the feasibility of a radical genetic engineering that doesn't have undesirable side effects.<br /><br />But even if it is feasible, wouldn't radical human genetic engineering have to be guided by the same natural desires that motivate us now? For example, if parents are genetically altering their offspring, won't they be expressing the same desires for the happiness of their children that parents have always had?<br /><br />If we chose to employ such a power to abolish our human nature, we would in some sense be choosing to commit species-suicide. It's not clear to me why we would intentionally choose that, although it could happen unintentionally by mistake.Larry Arnharthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14619785331100785170noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16355954.post-90533597681875214302010-03-16T18:04:41.222+00:002010-03-16T18:04:41.222+00:00I wonder how we would start to think ethically if ...I wonder how we would start to think ethically if we were ever to gain the ability to choose what species we are? So long as the species is fairly relatively fixed, it makes sense to use some sort of immanent, biologically determined teleology to understand right and wrong for that species. Yet how would we deal with the ability, say, to create humanoid babies with gills so that they could live underwater? I guess I am just curious as to what immanent teleology would have to teach a species that had a radical power to alter itself, and its desires. Perhaps we would have to fall back on some sort of Nietzschean ethics of life as some sort of more general version of immanent, biological teleology?Unknownhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03918578746540002029noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16355954.post-50021730142288653642010-03-15T04:55:42.692+00:002010-03-15T04:55:42.692+00:00An engineer who is good at building bridges is a g...An engineer who is good at building bridges is a good engineer. The steel he uses must be of high enough quality to do the job – it must be good steel. When building begins on the bridge, it can only be done in good weather. A good engineer is good at being an engineer. Good steel is steel that can be depended on to do the job at hand (being dependable to do the job at hand is also a feature of being a good engineer). Good weather is weather that provides favorable conditions for what work the person wants to do – in this definition, rain is good weather for a farmer, but bad for our engineer. A good person is thus a person who is good at being a person. We must work at being good – ethics is work. But ethics is not necessarily what works. One has to keep in mind the end at which one aims. We need an idea of proper ends, a proper target at which to aim. The proper end of our engineer is obvious: to build a bridge that will span the gulf at hand and remain intact. He must design and build a bridge that does the work of a bridge.<br /><br />From the example above, we can now distinguish between bad and evil. A bad engineer is one who is not able to design a bridge that will do the proper work of a bridge. An evil engineer is one who is able to design a bridge that will do the proper work of a bridge but who chooses instead to design a bridge that will not do the proper work of a bridge. For the bad engineer, the destruction caused by his bad bridge is incidental to his inability to design a good bridge. The bad engineer is bad because he is ignorant. He would build a good bridge if he could. For the evil engineer, the destruction caused by his bad bridge comes about because he chose to make a bad bridge so that it would cause destruction. The evil engineer is evil because he knows the right way to build a bridge, but chooses not to do so. He can build a good bridge, but chooses not to.<br /><br />That is my take on ethics. I also happen to agree with a former professor of mine (specifically, he was my dissertation chair), Alex Argyros, who said that it is unethical to reduce the complexity of the universe. That means you have to choose a human over any other form of life -- humans being more complex than any other form of life -- and self-defense is allowed, since you are killing one human to save another's (or others') life.Troy Camplinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16515578686042143845noreply@blogger.com