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Question Why do people say that some things mankind does are unnatural? Isn't every human development natural because we are part of nature?

Accepted:
April 21, 2006

Comments

This is a good question: it's hard to know what people mean when they say that an act is unnatural.

One possibility is to appeal to a distinction between the functions some things have and alternative uses to which they may be put. A desk clock has the function of telling the time; if I use it as a door-stop, that might count as an unnatural act. That's not what clocks are for. Biological traits also have functions. For example, the function of the veins and arteries in your legs are to help to circulate blood down there. But suppose that surgeons translplant pieces of some of those veins or arteries to your uppper body when they are performing heart surgery: that too might count as an unnatural act.

So we may be able to make sense of an unnatural act as the appropriation of something that has one function in order to perform a different function. But people who talk about unnatural acts often claim that those acts are bad, and bad because they are unnatural. The fact that an act is unnatural in my sense gives no reason whatever for supposing that it is bad.

I agree with Peter Lipton that most cases of people associating unnaturalness with badness are cases that provide no such connection. Usually, however, I find in such faulty associations a false conception of what is and is not "natural."

For example, many people have claimed that homosexual sex acts are "unnatural," for the reason that the biological function of sex is reproduction. So homosexual sex acts would be ones, to use Peter Lipton's expression that appropriated "something that has one function [reproduction] in order to perform a different function [giving and receiving pleasure, for example]." While I concede that homosexual sex acts cannot serve the function of reproduction (at least directly--I can come up with cases where it does so indirectly), I do not at all concede the claim that the natural function of sex is reproduction, since plainly that would make most sexual activities unnatural, including (but not limited to) kissing, caressing, oral or manual sex, and most of the rest. Indeed, if reproduction were all that was at stake, rape would be more "natural" than oral sex.

If we do not take such a blinkered conception of what is natural, however, at least some philosophers are actually inclined to think that there is a connection between something being natural and its being good, and accordingly, between being unnatural and its being bad.

Aristotle, for example, famously (in Nicomachean Ethics I.7) that human beings have, as a natural function, the desire to gain eudaimonia, which is variously translated as "happiness," or "well-being," or "flourishing." Now, if we all do, by our very natures wish to flourish, then anything that we do that will lead to the opposite result (wretchedness or misery) will be contrary to our natures. Measured by our shared interest in flourishing, moreover, doing something that will make us more wretched will also be bad, on the ground that what makes something good or bad is just what makes it conducive to flourishing or wretchedness, respectively.

By this measure, notice, homosexual sex will (among eagerly consenting adults and well performed) be both natural and also good, and good because it is natural. That is, consenting adult homosexuals performing well will act in ways that are very much conducive to their own flourishing (as well as to the flourishing of those who care about them). Similarly, all of the other sex acts the narrow reproductive conception of naturalness would condemn also, in this alternative theory, would reasonably be seen as contributing to human flourishing, and thus both natural and good, and good because it is natural. Laws or other restraints on things that are conducive to human flourishing would now be revealed as both unnatural and bad, and bad, again, precisely because they were contrary to our natural human desire to flourish.

I am not claiming that this theory is beyond all criticism, though I admit to finding it an attractive way to connect the natural and the good. But it does seem to me that the sense of natural at work in this view is actually the same sense as the one Peter Lipton was using--that of having a natural function--and it does provide some reason for thinking that good and bad can be understood in terms of something's natural function.

I agree with Nicholas that where we can take natural to mean 'conducive to human flourishing', in Aristotle's sense, there will be a connection between being natural and being good. But there are natural functions that do not carry this meaning. In biological cases, functions often correspond to 'selected effects'. Thus the function of the white fur of a polar bear is camoflage, and that coloration is the result of natural selection. Bears in that environment with white fur did better at reproducing than their more colourful cousins. Selected effects are in that sense natural: they are what the trait is for.

From a moral point of view, however, selected effects may be bad and unselected effects may be good. Thus we may have evolved a tendency to deceive other people in certain circumstances, even if this is not morally decent behaviour, and someone who decently resists this temptation may be bucking that evolved inclination. Selected effects may be conducive to what we might call 'reproductive flourishing', but as Nicholas emphasizes, this is not what Aristotle meant by 'flourishing' and it is not the same as what is morally valuable.

Question Why do people say that some things mankind does are unnatural? Isn't every human development natural because we are part of nature? Accepted:April 21, 2006

Question Why do people say that some things mankind does are unnatural? Isn't every human development natural because we are part of nature?

Accepted:
April 21, 2006