There is a widespread belief that the natural discoveries starting with Darwin contributed to the demise of the philosophy of Aristotle. But contrary to this perception, there are good reasons to think that core Aristotelian concepts are necessary to provide evolution with a rational foundation.
The historical person Aristotle needs little introduction. He was by all available accounts a polymath who brought mankind huge insights into fields ranging from ethics and metaphysics to logic, biology and physics. Just as his teacher Plato, He also gave birth to an entire tradition with a distinct way to philosophize, that were to dominate much of intellectual history.
What makes him even more interesting to our purposes, is that Aristotelianism is not merely an activity of rehashing what Aristotle would say, but a living tradition that includes thinkers who keep bringing his ideas to the marketplace and drawing out their logical implications, in live dialogue with new scientific discoveries, evolving political systems, and competing philosophical traditions.
There is little doubt that much of Aristotle’s physics and biology has since been shown to be erroneous and replaced by new insight, even if there have been some attempts to show that his physics were a good pre-scientific approximation to our current state of knowledge (Rovelli, 2015). However, its defenders argue, these outdated features can be disentangled from the fundamental pillars that make up Aristotelian metaphysics, which fits just as neatly together with the findings of modern science of today. Some defenders even argue that core Aristotelian axioms lies at the heart of any possible natural science (Feser, 2019), even though we may be unconscious of it, just as it does to any substantial ethics (Foot, 2001; MacIntyre, 2007).
Still, this preconception of Aristotelianism as scientifically antiquated, is probably a key reason for why many modern thinkers exclude it from their initial scope of viable alternatives. For this reason, we will start by having a look at some popular objections, to evaluate whether an Aristotelian framework is even a feasible option to move forth with.
Nevertheless, we could give many notable examples as to how there is a substantial and seemingly growing interest in an Aristotelian metaphysics, underlying natural philosophy and ethics alike (Cartwright, 1983; 2007; Ellis, 2002; Novák et al, 2012; Takho, 2012; Nagel, 2012; Groff & Greco, 2013; Novotny & Novák, 2013; Austin, 2018; Feser, 2019). Many core Aristotelian notions also crop up around in modern philosophy, though sometimes in revised terms. New theories, like powers ontology and systems biology, can be argued to borrow key features that fits well with them being true heirs of this ancient school of thought.
Here I will focus on concepts such as Aristotle’s four causes, where the often ignored formal and final cause will be central to our analysis. The attack of it being anti-scientific, usually on the grounds of it conflicting with the developments of evolutionary theory of the last centuries, is so widespread and so culturally influential that it is worth addressing. Many of the same elements of these responses could be included in a full-fledged response about its perceived incompatibility with findings in quantum mechanics, chemistry, neuroscience, optics, etc. As we shall see, the move away from Aristotelian ideas might not have come about as the conclusion of scientific findings at all, but could rather be attributed to historical accidents, along with the shifts in attitudes and areas of interest of the day.
Four causes to explain all things
If we are to introduce what makes Aristotelianism distinctive to other schools of thought, we would do wise in starting with the four causes. These lie at the bottom and implies other ideas associated with Aristotelianism, such as act-potency, essentialism, and teleology.
In Metaphysics (2006), Aristotle distinguishes four types of causes, the material, formal, efficient, and final. The material cause gives us the answer to that what out of which a thing is made. Here, Aristotle uses examples such as the bronze of a statue or the letters of a syllable. This is not sufficient, though, as all bronze is not included in statues, and letters can be used in other ways than in a syllable. So, we need to proceed to a formal cause, where we ask what this thing is, which is a structure, pattern, or arrangement of the material, enabling it the matter to have a certain set of properties. This explains why this accumulation of bronze is arranged statue-wise, when it could just as well be turned into a weapon or a piece of jewelry. These two, matter and form, together constitute hylomorphism, from hyle-, meaning matter, and –morphe, which is form. The indispensability of formal causation leads us to essentialism, which we will later recognize as core to an Aristotelian theory of human nature and moral knowledge, and which I argue below is consistent with even the findings of modern biology.
At this point, we probably want to know how this thing we encounter, whether a bronze statue or syllable, came to be. This gives us the efficient cause, that through which this thing was brought into being. A poet could be arranging the syllable, or an artisan could create the bronze statue, as they impose a new form on something that was previously qualitatively different. Last is the final cause. By this, we ask what about this thing is for, which gives us the answer of the end or purpose of a thing (Kenny, 2010; Feser, 2009a).
The end of the bronze statue be of an aesthetic kind, or to portray a leader in order to increase her or his standing, while the syllable can be part of a beautiful work of music, intended to communicate a story or create awe in the listener. These are humanmade artifacts, and therefore have intentions “imposed” on them from the outside. But as we shall see, this is the case even with natural substances, where intentionally is inherent to what it is.
With the observation that there is regularity occurring in nature, Aristotle understands that “when an event takes place always or for the most part, it is not accidental or by chance”, leads him to conclude that finality in that “it is plain then that nature is a cause, a cause that operates for a purpose” (1991, 199b25-26; 199b32).
Of course, there are many more questions that could be asked about a thing, to give us an even fuller explanation, such as how the lump of bronze came to be or the finality of bronze qua metal alloy, but all those would be further instances of investigating material, efficient, formal and final causes.
From the existence of final causation, we get teleology, which is also fundamental to understand ethics for an Aristotelian, through the possibility for natural goodness and human agency. Aquinas concludes: “The Philosopher proves (Phys. ii, 5) that ‘not only mind but also nature acts for an end. I answer that, Every agent, of necessity, acts for an end. For if, in a number of causes ordained to one another, the first be removed, the others must, of necessity, be removed also’” (1948, p. 584).
In one sense, there is a noteworthy difference between Aristotle’s use of the word cause to the modern notion of cause, the latter might sometimes be understood to denote something like relations between events. Therefore, some scholars have even rejected the translation of the Greek aitia into cause. Perhaps we can avoid some misconceptions if we rather speak about explanations or even becauses (Kenny, 2010). The point is that these four principles cumulatively are supposed to give an explanation as to what a thing is.
Aristotelianism and evolution
We knew much less about natural processes as Aristotle wrote his metaphysical treatises, than we do now. One charge against Aristotelianism is that the discovery of the theory of evolution has in particular rendered its worldview, standing on essentialist and teleological pillars, obsolete. Kuhse and Singer is one example. They write:
“Since Darwin, we know that we do not exist for any purpose, but are the result of natural selection operating on random mutations over millions of years. Hence there is no reason to believe that living according to nature will produce a harmonious society, let along the best possible state of affairs for human beings.”
(1999, p. 4).
Another prominent philosopher who shares this view, is the philosopher of mind John Searle. While discussing the need for some account of normativity to make sense of intentionality, he writes:
“(…) Darwin’s major contribution was precisely to remove purpose and teleology from evolution, and substitute for it purely natural forms of selection. Darwin’s account shows that the apparent teleology of biological processes is an illusion. (…) In short, the Darwinian mechanisms and even biological functions themselves are entirely devoid of purpose or teleology. All of the teleological features are entirely in the mind of the observer.”
(1992, p. 51-52)
If teleology of biological processes is apparent though illusional, we might ask what makes it apparent, and what makes it an illusion? As we soon shall see, if we depend to use terminology that imply teleology in describing biological processes for shorthand, we must be able to explain how these really can be traded with purely non-teleological language. If these are purely in the mind of the observer, we might ask why we still make use of them. This process of translation might not be as easy as we would like it to be.
Aristotle might not be the sole victim of Darwin’s discoveries. Daniel Dennett calls the discovery of natural selection for a “universal acid”, an idea that is a liquid “capable of cutting right to the heart of everything in sight” on a universal level, and with it obliterating the traditional concepts of pre-Darwinian philosophy (1995, p. 521).
How can an empirical theory achieve all of this? At this point, there is reasonable doubt as to whether these philosophical conclusions are warranted from the observations by themselves. We are in danger of not leaving evolution to be an empirical theory of how generations of biological organisms evolved with modifications, but quickly turn to make evolution into a cosmology on its own. In the words of Fran O’Rourke:
“Evolution is viewed by some, proponents and opponents alike, as a claim for total explanation, not only of how the living cosmos came to be, but also as an exhaustive account of its ultimate origins and final purpose- or absence thereof. Such a claim is tantamount to a metaphysics of total reality.”
(2004, p. 4)
If we refrain from the temptation to make a theory into a metaphysics, how might we then proceed to evaluate whether there is a conflict between our scientific state and Aristotelianism?
Essence in evolution
Essentialism can be defined as “the nature of a thing, whereby it is what it is”. This term arises from understanding a material thing as a substantial form – a composite of matter and form, where the form can be intellectually grasped to categorize it as one in a kind (Feser, 2013, p. 211).
The notion of a species seems initially to fit neatly with the concept of essence. When we in the animate realm discover several individuals that share a number of properties, it makes sense to characterize them all under one category. Still, the discovery of common descent with mutable species, evolving throughout generations with modifications by random mutations, might present a larger problem. The newfound knowledge that these species can also mutate, go extinct, and that entirely new species can come into existence, where there are groups of borderline individuals between one species and another, so-called vague examples, presents a problem for the essentialist, critics might say.
There are reasons to think that Aristotle himself would have thought the concept of a species to be a fixed and immutable one. If we are to believe the mountains of scientific data, we must conclude beyond reasonable doubt that this has since been refuted. However, as we are not only interested in what Aristotle would think, we can investigate whether these really are conclusions that follow from the principles he sketched out.
For there is prima facie little reason to believe that essentialism of an Aristotelian kind requires fixity of species, or for the set of existing species to be constant. The essentialist can be seen only to be committed to the claim that every species has an essence, whether evolving or not, so that there is a fact of the matter about the kind of species an organism is a member of, with a set of properties flowing from their nature (Feser, 2019).
Another objection to be put forward, is that there is in fact no set of traits common to every member in a given species. Even if most human beings are bipedal and have the capacity to develop the higher-order, abstractive skills of reasoning required for e.g., language, these are not universal capacities among our kind. Humans at an infant stage possess neither the ability to walk or reason. There are multiple examples of people born without legs or the ability to use them, or that lack the ability for language, due to accidents or genetic defects. Human beings come in all shapes and colors, without them losing their humanness because of this.
This objection is already anticipated by the distinction between the essence itself, its proper attributes, and its merely contingent attributes (Ibid). Even though we can learn about what proper attributes ordinarily flows from the essence of a healthy, mature individual of a species, it is fully possible for the development of even proper attributes to be at an early stage – and therefore merely potential – or interfered with, because of lack of nutrition, altered genetic material, irregularities during fetal development, etc. As human beings ordinarily have two legs and ability for sight, we would conclude that this belongs to the norm of a human being. That is why we would recognize it as a lack if a human being only had one leg or was without the ability for sight, rather than vice versa, with all bipedal, seeing human beings being the exceptional specimen to the species.
To use an example from Oderberg, we might even encounter a tiger without well-defined stripes. But as these tigers are usually almost universally characterized by being in bad health, with healthy tigers portraying distinct stripes, we have just the more reason to think that stripes are a proper attribute as understood about the essence of tigers (2007).
Contingent attributes on the other hand are not crucial to the species under investigation. Since color, height, width, etc, are not proper attributes of human beings, we can fully expect human beings to be either light-skinned or dark-skinned. Such facts do not alter our understanding of their humanness.
The fact remains that if the concept of a species is even intelligible, it needs an explanation as to how that could be. How can reality be in such a way, that we constantly rely on dividing it into species? Philosopher Michael Devitt states that “[M]any claims that biologists make day in and day out about the living world require species to have natures that they do not have according to this consensus”. (2008, p. 380).
Biologists still need to group together numbers of individual organisms according to common traits. They need to work in their field as if these groups held some common intrinsic nature, regardless of their views about essentialism as a whole.
Critics could possibly say that yes, they do in fact share common traits, but that is only because they are a vaguely defined group, close enough in hereditary lineage to represent a snapshot, chosen from a (in a cosmic perspective) infinitesimal portion of time, in the continually evolving total set of individuals. They might continue to say that these similarities could merely be understood as something like “clusters of covarying traits” (Okasha, 2002, p. 197), or even in terms of their relations rather than any postulated intrinsic nature, as in the “phylogenetic-cladistic” concept, which defines a species by its evolutionary history and therefore by reference of its relations to other (Feser, 2019).
But as Devitt again shows, making a genealogical point as to how an organism came to belong to a certain group. is still a different question from understanding what a species is, or even a subspecies or genus, so the phylogenetic-cladistic concept does little to address that problem (2008). Why the biological realm in the first place must be described as consisting of more than mere individuals, begs to be explained. Indeed, the mere existence of such clusters could be understood to coincide with the argument for essentialism, as to how that could be.
As for the objection of vagueness, where it is not always certain what kind we are to categorize an individual as, this could admittedly present a problem for the essentialist. However, we would still be hard-pressed to turn this observation into an argument to refute essentialism. To borrow an example from Sober, if we were to transmute a sample of lead into gold, there will be stages in the process where it would seem indeterminate whether the sample belonged to the element of lead or gold, or something else, but this remark by itself does not show that there is no fact of the matter about what the sample is. The perceived vagueness might be epistemic rather than ontological (Sober, 1993).
And there still remains the fact that pointing out that there are indeterminate cases, even seems to presuppose that there also exist determinate ones, which enables us to distinguish them from one another by recognizing the characterizes of the beforementioned one.
The importance of teleology
If the existence of final causes is a correct understanding of the workings of nature, we need to reconceptualize it in teleological terms, where normativity is in some sense inherent to the natural order. This has strong implications for human beings, and therefore for ethics, as we are also an integral part of nature, as we will return to. The main competitor for a teleological worldview is a mechanist one, which gained popularity in correlation with the development of the scientific methods. This mechanist model increased in popularity by ignoring the significance of such notions as the formal and final cause, that did not lend itself easy to the kind of explanations in mathematical terms that were emphasized with the new scientific approaches. What was left, was material and efficient causation.
This understanding of every agent as acting for an end, that originated well before Darwin, was criticized by Kuhse & Singer along with John Searle above. Philosopher of science Michael Ruse, who specializes in the philosophy of biology, would freely volunteer to join that club by reinforcing a common conception about the redundancy of final causes:
“Blind mechanical law can do everything. It is not so much that final-cause type understanding is now gone. Darwin himself happily talked about final causes and he certainly thought that this involved explaining in terms of the future, but that teleology is now subsumed under mechanism.”
(2016, p. 101).
Ruse could be criticized for his faulty mischaracterization of teleology as a “form of explanation that makes reference to causes that can be understood only in terms of the future” (Ibid, p. 101). Final causes are meant to fill an explanatory purpose here and now, regardless of concerns about the future. The current directedness of e.g., the sulfur of a match towards the effect of fire, should not be confused with any dependency that this potential will ever be actualized, but would hold even if the match were to be immersed into water or decomposed. Indeed, the directedness of a substance towards the actualization of certain potentials is a way to make sense of the regularity of causal dispositions wholesale, that have been revitalized in recent times in the terminology of powers (Anjum and Mumford, 2015).
This point needs no fleshing out right now. Examples of dismissive comments like these could be multiplied in large numbers, some high in precision, while others are less relevant. The importance of this shift away from finality should not be neglected. The historical abandonment of final causes could be said to have great implications. Philosopher William Stace, himself no friend of Aristotelians, thought it single-handedly to result in nothing less than moral relativity, the individualization of morality and loss of belief in free will. Writing for The Atlantic, he provided an analysis of the state of man up to the current day in 1948.
“’final causes’ (…) [or] cosmic purposes (…) [belief in which] was not the invention of Christianity [but] was basic to the whole of Western civilization, whether in the ancient pagan world or in Christendom, from the time of Socrates to the rise of science in the seventeenth century. [Galilei, Kepler and Newton] took the revolutionary step of consciously and deliberately expelling the idea of purpose as controlling nature from their new science of nature.
They did this on the ground that inquiry into purposes is useless for what science aims at: namely, the prediction and control of events (…) This, though silent and almost unnoticed, was the greatest revolution in human history, far outweighing in importance any of the political revolutions whose thunder has reverberated through the world. (…) The world, according to this new picture, is purposeless, senseless, meaningless. Nature is nothing but matter in motion. The motions of matter are governed, not by any purpose, but by blind forces and laws.”
(p. 2-3)
Stace characterized this shift, the banishment of teleology and the rise of causal determinism, as the “greatest revolution”, a revolution that went by mostly unnoticed, and even well preceded Darwin. But he also significantly thought this shift to be understood not as the result from any finding of science, but rather a shift in general attitude. The resulting change in outlook for a man without finality was stark. He continues:
“If the scheme of things is purposeless and meaningless, then the life of man is purposeless and meaningless too. Everything is futile, all effort is in the end worthless. A man may, of course, still pursue disconnected ends, money, fame, art, science, and may gain pleasure from them. But his life is hollow at the center. Hence, the dissatisfied, disillusioned, restless, spirit of modern man.
(…) If our moral rules do not proceed from something outside us in the nature of the universe – whether we say it is God or simply the universe itself – then they must be our own inventions. Thus it came to be believed that moral rules must be merely an expression of our own likes and dislikes. But likes and dislikes are notoriously variable. What pleases one man, people, or culture displeases another. Therefore morals are wholly relative.”
(Ibid, p. 3-4)
Whether Stace was entirely correct, remains an open question. But this gives us reason to investigate whether final causes might be worth looking in to, along with the idea to suspect that Darwin might be innocent for their demise in most parts of modern philosophy.
Teleology through evolution
As recently noted, the abandonment of final causes might have little to do with Darwin. Still, there is a widespread conception that any belief about purposes in nature was undermined by the discovery of natural selection, reducing the status of these purposes from real to mere apparent. The idea seems to be that for whatever explanatory power these final causes were meant to have, the same job could be done more elegant and simpler solely with the conjunction of random mutations with vast amounts of iterations through time.
Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini (2011) argues that the explanatory power of these replacement theories might not be that large after all. They give an argument for why an explanation solely in terms of exogeneous factors in natural selection, is insufficient. They liken this to the “black box” of Skinner’s behaviorist model of human psychology, a theory that argues that behavior can be viewed in terms of a set of inputs of behavioral traits, along with reinforcements, which will result in a set of outputs of behavioral traits at a later stage. They note several parallels to the mechanist explanations of natural selection, with input of phenotypic attributes to a population of organisms and their environmental circumstances, which is supposed to give a sufficient explanation for its outputs. In particular, they highlight an indeterminacy problem.
While attempting to explain why frogs evolve to have accurate representational content of bugs, the mechanist might want to stress the importance of counterfactuals. Namely, that the ancestors of the current frog who developed the right kind of causal connections between perceptions of bugs with the response mechanisms for catching those bugs, were favored for by natural selection. But this analysis makes no explanation as to why this representational content should be determinately understood as bugs, rather than just some generic content, like small, moving things.
To borrow one of their other examples, imagine the selection process included in a trait T, that contributes to the fitness of the organism, such as the heart efficiently pumping blood to the varying parts of the body. Now, also consider a trait T’, that is intimately correlated with T, but has the downside of not being a contributive factor to the fitness of the organism, such as a steady beating noise. From the point of view of natural selection alone, both T and T’ will be correlated with fitness, since T per se is correlated with fitness, and T’ is correlated with T.
With the indeterminacy problem, Fodor and Piatelli-Palmarini argues, we have no available options to explain why natural selection can be viewed as selecting for bugs or T, instead of little moving things and T’. We might say that recognizing bugs or efficiently pumping blood is directly correlated with the fitness of their organisms, whereas moving things and beating noises does not. Where we could understand that T would contribute to the fitness of the organism, even without T’, then T’ could never provide fitness without T.
However, that is an explanation that makes sense to us, since we are able to perform a post hoc analysis of them, already presupposing our ability to grasp their semantic content. We need the added information of knowing what makes it the case that e.g., T contributes to fitness whereas T’ does not. But natural selection does not have this luxury. It is not a process that is supposed to be in the business of semantics. And it can even less be capable of selecting between alternatives in accordance with such information, as it is purported to be an entirely “mindless process”, inhabiting no aspects of agency.
Fodor and Piatelli-Palmarini think that Darwin himself, when he famously likened the process of natural selection to selective breeding in On the Origin of Species, engaged in the same kind of category error (Darwin, 2011). Selective breeding is motivated by agency, with human beings that possess intentionality, and can desire to select for an attractive set of properties, as opposed to another. But we are told that nothing similar occurs in nature (Fodor & Piatelli-Palmarini, 2011).
Even with varying attempts as to endow nature with something akin to agency or mental properties, by describing the outcomes of natural selection as what “Mother Nature” intended (Dennett, 1995), by the seeming design of a “blind watchmaker” (Dawkins, 1987), or how they are driven by “selfish genes” (Dawkins, 1989), these are all anthropomorphized metaphors that are invoked in an attempt to bridge this gap. But metaphors are famously inert fictions, until we have a satisfying explanation as to what they are metaphors for. As Fodor and Piattelli-Palmerini humorously summarize these attempts, in that “fictions can’t select things, however hard they try. Nothing cramps one’s causal powers like not existing.” (2011, p. 121)
More objections are given against their claim, trying to find a way around the need to attribute some notion of intentionality to the selection mechanism. One objection that might occur natural to us, is the proposal that if attributes such as T instead of T’ is linked to reproductive success, then that alone will suffice to show that T will be selected for (Godfrey-Smith, 2010; Sober, 2010). Fodor and Piattelli’s response were to say that this assumes what should be proven, as it just stipulates as true by definition that the trait T that will cause increased fitness, also is the one that corresponds to the one being selected for (2011).
Another objection by courtesy of Alex Rosenberg, is that natural selection does not need a notion of “selection for” but only “selection against” (2013). His point is that the selection mechanism does not need to affirm the positive, as long as it eliminates the negative. Fodor in a later interview responds by saying that this response is irrelevant, as it does nothing to solve the problem:
“Since it is tautological that there can’t be selection for/against a neutral trait, it follows that, if there is selection at all, then it is selection for a trait iff it isn’t selection against it. Still, let’s assume, for the sake of argument that whiteness wasn’t selected for in polar bears. What, in that case, was selected against? Being pink? Being green with orange stripes? Do Darwinists believe that there used to be green polar bears with orange stripes, but they all got eaten up by predators? If not, what does Alex think is gained by rejecting selection for in favour of selection against?” (Marshall, 2012).
The purpose of these arguments is notedly not to give any doubts about the legitimacy of the theory of evolution itself, but to highlight the need to include endogenous factors as part of our analysis, which shows why it might be worth reintroducing notions from Aristotle’s toolbox. This gives us room, not only to highlight the importance of formal causation, but also the final causation accompanying it. James Lennox gives us a diametrically opposed view of selection to the staunch mechanists attacked by Fodor and Piattelli-Palmerini above:
“Selection explanations are inherently teleological, in the sense that a value consequence (Darwin most often uses the term ‘advantage’) of a trait explains its increase, or presence, in a population.”
(1993, p. 410)
“Darwin essentially re-invented teleology. (…) The concept of selection permits the extension of the teleology of domestic breeding into the natural domain, without the need of conscious design. As in domestic selection, the good served by a variation continues to be causally relevant to its increasing frequency, or continued presence, in a population – but the causal mechanism, and the locus of goodness, shifts.»
(Ibid, p. 417)
David Depew elaborates upon how a tendency to select for advantageous traits, such as T over T’, can be understood as intrinsic to evolution itself, where the evolutionary process inhabits directedness towards ends, and how this fits with Darwin’s theory.
“Proper final causality is causality that runs through a process whose constituent moments, to the extent that something does not interfere, emerge as they do because they have a a good effect – as in the case of the eye (…) [In] Aristotle’s technical terms Darwinian adaptations do have properly final causes. They reliably have certain effects and they come to be precisely because they have these good effects.»
(2015, p. 126).
This shows that teleology, far from being banished by Darwin, might even be a candidate to solve contemporary issues, such as providing solution for how to make sense of species and the “selection for”-problem. Rather than Darwin’s theory undermining teleology, it could in fact turn out to be presupposing teleology instead, that is even more in line with Darwin’s own descriptions. Indeed, some philosophers go far in the direction of arguing that in order to be a Darwinian, you ought to be an Aristotelian (Gilson, 1984; Lennox, 1993; Feser, 2019).
We could highlight plenty more examples in an attempt to show that we might need to presuppose some notion of teleology, not only to make sense of human action, as discussed in chapter 5, but among processes within the entirety of the animate realm. We can observe that plants grow roots in order for theconsumption of nutrition, gazelles jump in order for the signaling of predators, hearts function in order for the pumping of blood around the vessels of the body, eyeballs work in order for sight. We might grow suspicious only by the fact that we can insert a term such as “in order for” consistently to describe the workings of the biological world, a term that bears resemblance to the physical intentionality or purposiveness that characterizes teleology.
Biologists often help themselves to such language. Although, as David Stove notes, such terminology must come “with an invisible promissory note attached (…) saying something like ‘’To be cashed at a later date in non-teleological terms’” (1995, p. 279). As seen above, this cashing out is not always a straight-forward procedure. There are even questions to be had about whether it is possible at all.
Stove concludes that many of these biologists have “issued so many of these promissory notes, that [they are] no longer conscious of their existence” (Ibid, p. 279) and have “simply forgotten what teleological words mean, or else forgotten the fact that they are not really available to Darwinians engaged in explaining adaptations” (Ibid, p. 279). If many of the experts of biology have similar misconceptions about finality as Michael Ruse, there might be something to this.
We might even proceed to highlight one of the grandest discoveries of modern age, which is the human genome. Biophysicist and Nobel laureate Max Delbrück wrote, that if the Swedish committee handing out the Nobel Prize “had the liberty of giving awards posthumously, I think they should consider Aristotle for the discovery of the principle implied in DNA. (…) I should like to suggest, furthermore, that the reason for the lack of appreciation, among scientists, of Aristotle’s scheme lies in our having been blinded for 300 years by the Newtonian view of the world” (1971, p. 54-55).
The point would be that a DNA embodies the organism with informational content, almost like a formal cause, that displays a certain directedness towards the structure, development and ends for that being.
In these sections, I have tried to establish that although a popular move, it should not be viewed as sufficient to point to the development of evolutionary theory in order to strike a fatal blow to the Aristotelian project. The empirically available data for evolutionary theory could still be understood as distinct from the metaphysical baggage that Singer, Searle, Dawkins, Dennett, and other prominent philosophers want to endow it with.
There is still a live discussion to be had about what kind of framework provides the philosophy of biology with the best metaphysical apparatus moving forward. That is not a discussion for this paper, where we will proceed to focus on matters particularly relevant to ethics. Before we can do that, we need to address some last popular objections to the possibility of an Aristotelian ethics.
The naturalistic fallacy objection
That the elimination of final causes was to produce a skeptic like Hume, might come as no surprise. Efficient causality, isolated from final causality, the Aristotelian would argue, itself becomes mysterious, as it provides the intelligibility for why causes tend towards their distinct effects. He argued that there is nothing in the concept of as cause, that gives us inherent reason to believe that it will produce a certain type of effect.
The naturalistic fallacy was itself coined by G. E. Moore (1903), in the remark that goodness cannot be a natural property, although the same line of thought, that there is a fundamental logical distinction between description and prescription, between fact and value, or an ought and an is, is usually associated with David Hume:
“In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remarked, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surprised to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is, however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, ’tis necessary that (…) a reason should be given, for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from the others, which are entirely different from it” (2017, p. 241).
This argument trades on the logical rule that you cannot insert anything into a conclusion, that was not present in the premises, has become an influential objection to the very possibility of a teleologically based ethics, and if it is successful, then such an ethics never get off the ground.
As Magelssen (2014, p. 70) points out, the proponent of teleology has at least three strategies to respond to this. First, he can attempt to show that what was purported to be a purely factual description already contains normativity. Second, he can deny that the fact/value-distinction can be cogently made. Third, by adopting the whole natural philosophy of the Aristotelian, that already contains essences and final causes, they can show that there is no fallacy involved in moving from an is to an ought.
Ralph McInerny (1980) tries to invalidate the naturalistic fallacy objection by giving counterexamples such as:
P1: Joe weighs two hundred and fifty pounds.
P2: It is not healthy to be overweight.
C: Therefore, Joe ought to go on a diet.
At first glance, one could argue that from a purely logical point of view, this argument is not valid as it stands, as the conclusion does not follow from the premises. McInerny responds that the second premise should be understand as an action-guiding value-premise. But even then, we can ask about how that entails the conclusion.
Either McInerny can proceed by attempting to show something like the term “healthy” already has implicit normativity embedded, or that Joe’s directedness towards his health, as a core ingredient of human flourishing, is already “built in” to our understanding of the natural order, or even that a missing premise can be inferred as “Joe ought to pursue his health”. If the latter, the natural follow-up question of the sort of why “Joe ought to pursue his health”, then this would demand for further premises, perhaps continuing ad infinitum.
However, if normativity is “built in” to the order of nature, such as the proponent of teleology suggests, it can be understood as a first principle. If successful, that enables us to embed it into premises without the need to rely on further premises. At the very bottom of such a natural order, there is no sharp distinction between fact and value since the proposition “all things act towards an end” is naturally followed by “all things ought to act towards an end”. In the next chapter we will turn to the question of whether ethics can be based on actual knowledge, more specifically whether we can learn about goodness from observing the order of nature. If this is at all possible, Hume’s dichotomy seems to break down, as nothing new is introduced in conclusion that was not latently present in the premises.
David Oderberg opts for something more akin to Magelssen’s first and second alternative, by arguing that Hume’s conclusion presupposes that we subscribe to his empiricist epistemology, where the only thing that could count as facts are “observable elements of concrete reality” (Oderberg, 2000, p. 11). Of course, if we presuppose that all facts need to be observable elements of empirical reality and require that moral facts need to oblige to our view, even though it only allows for a merely descriptive explanation, then moral facts are excluded from the outset.
But then, the empiricist has also begged the question in assuming that his basic approach to epistemology is a correct one. Oderberg proposes the more neutral alternative of describing facts as true propositions, where facts are that to which propositions correspond. Then we can allow for the possibility for value-laden propositions to be true, such as “Joe ought to pursue health”, even though this could never be inferred from a description purely based on “observable elements of concrete reality”.
This distinction need not remove us from relying on empirical reality. On the contrary, it provides a wider range of options for how to describe it. Philippa Foot (2001) uses similar examples to show that there is no neat distinction between fact and value, proposing that it is impossible to learn about the nature of plants, animals or human beings, without at the very same time learning about conditions for what constitutes goods for these organisms.
We can observe a plant and conclude that it is better for it to have access for pure water and sunrays, rather than being placed in a basement and served whiskey. In the same manner, we can study the muscle structure, indigestion system, claws and teeth of lions, and conclude that they inhabit a directedness qua lion towards being a predator, rather than being put in small pastures and being fed the diet of an oxen. In a similar fashion, studying the functions of a heart might inform us about something regarding its normativity, along with the ability to distinguish between the importance of its ability to pump blood for the fitness of an organism, as opposed to just making noises, which teaches us about how this trait was selected for during evolution. The naturalistic fallacy quickly forces our attention to underlying matters of ontology and epistemology, but where there are several options available to respond to the naturalistic fallacy, where one or multiple can be open to us.
References
Anjum, R. L. & Mumford, S. (2015). Getting Causes from Powers. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Aquinas, T. (1948). Summa Theologica. Translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province. New York: Benziger Bros.
Aristotle. (1991). The Complete Works of Aristotle: Physics. Translated by J. Barnes. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
Aristotle. (2016). Metaphysics. Translated by W. D. Ross. Createspace Independent Publishing Platform.
Austin, C. J. (2018). Essense in the Age of Evolution: A New Theory of Natural Kinds. London: Routledge.
Cartwright, N. (1983). How the Laws of Physics Lie. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cartwright, N. (2007). Causal powers: what are they? why do we need them? what can be done with them and what cannot?. Contingency and Dissent in Science, (07).
Darwin, C. (2011). On the Origin of Species. Edited by A. M. Goldstein. The American Museum of National History. Retrieved from http://darwin.amnh.org/files/images/pdfs/e83461.pdf
Dennett, D. (1995). Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. Simon and Schuster: New York.
Devitt, M. (2008). Resurrecting Biological Essentialism, Philosophy of Science, 75, 344-382.
Ellis, B. (2002). The Philosophy of Nature: A Guide to the New Essentialism. Chesham: Acumen.
Feser, E. (2009a). Aquinas. London. Oneworld Publications.
Feser, E. (2014). Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction. Heusenstamm: Editiones Scholasticae.
Feser, E. (2019). Aristotle’s Revenge: The Metaphysical Foundations of Physical and Biological Science. Heusenstamm: Editiones Scholasticae.
Fodor, J., & Piattelli-Palmarini, M. (2011). What Darwin Got Wrong. New York: Picador.
Foot, P. (2001). Natural Goodness. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gilson, E. (1984). From Aristotle to Darwin and Back Again. London: Sheed and Ward.
Kenny, A. (2010). A New History of Western Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lennox, J. (1993). Darwin was a Teleologist. Biology and Philosophy. Biology and Philosophy, 8, 409-421.
MacIntyre, A. (2007). After Virtue, 3rd ed. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press.
Marshall, R. (2012). Meaningful Words Without Sense, & Other Revolutions. 3:AM Magazine. Retrieved from https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2012/11/meaningful-words-without-sense-other-revolutions.html
Novák, L., Novotný, D., Sousedik, D., & Svoboda, D. (Eds). (2012). Metaphysics: Aristotelian, Scholastic, Analytics. Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag.
Oderberg, D. (2000). Moral Theory: A Non-Consequentialist Approach, 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
Oderberg, D. (2007). Real Essentialism. London: Routledge.
Okasha, S. (2002). Darwinian Metaphysics: Species and the Question of Essentialism, Synthese 131, 191-213.
Rosenberg, A. (2013). How Jerry Fodor Slid Down the Slippery Slope to Anti-Darwinism, and How We Can Avoid the Same Fate. European Journal for Philosophy of Science, 3, 1-17.
Rovelli, C. (2015). Aristotle’s Physics: A Physicist’s look. Journal of the American Philosophical Association, 1, 23-40.
Ruse, M. (2016). Evolutionary biology and the question of teleology. Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 58, 100-106.
Searle, J. (1992). The Rediscovery of the Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Sober, E. (2010). Natural Selection, Causality, and Laws: What Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini Got Wrong. Philosophy of Science 77, 594-607.
Stace, W. (1948). Man Against Darkness. The Atlantic Monthly, v. 182(3).
Takho, T. (Ed.). (2012). Contemporary Aristotelian Metaphysics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.