Hastings Center Report, November-December 1996

H owever &clus&, I have never quite given up the hope that nature might put in a reappearance in ethics. Un- fortunately, it is hard to think of a

, once-robust tradition-that of natu- ral law or naturalism-that is much more down at the heel. Even pragmatism and stoicism, also long pronounced dead, have staged a recent comeback. Is there any hope that nature can once again serve as a moral guide?

The principal modern obstacle has been, most broadly, the belief that given the human capacity to intervene in and often set aside what was once taken to be fixed and “natural,” nature is much too mal- leable a concept in practice and too opaque in the- ory to tell us much of any value. The narrower ob stacle, much like a hex, has been the intimidating force of the “naturalistic fallacy,” the argument that it is impossible to deduce an “ought” from an “is.” Thus the standard argument the fact that murder leaves people dead does not jusafy concluding that murder ought not to be committed; only the inser- tion of a moral premise somewhere can produce that conclusion.

Should we be intimidated by these obstacles, generally thought insurmountable? Not necessarily, The supposed naturalistic fallacy is, on closer inspec- tion, an odd kind of hUacy. Since “is” is all the uni- verse has to offer, to say that it cannot be the source of an “ought” is tantamount to saying a priori that an ought can have no source at &and to say that is no less than to say there can be no oughts. That cannot be correct, if only because the pervasive feel- ings of moral obligation are themselves a social and psychological fact that people act upon (which is not to say they are necessarily the obligations one ought to have); and because, as H.L.A. Hart has noted in defending a minimal kind of natural law, some moral rules are necessary constitutive ele- ments of any and all societie-is and ought be- come, in effect, conflated; and because people com- mit the fallacy all the time, not because they are too obtuse to recognize that they are doing so, but b e cause it t u r n s out in practice to be next to impos- sible to reason morally at all without committing i t

If, for instance, we say that it is wrong to inflict needless pain on innocent children, that moral con- tention must assume that children do not want to be in pain, as part of their human nature. There is a slide from an is to an ought here, but it would seem bizarre not to make it-and even more bizarre to daim that the fact that children do not like need- lessly inflicted pain does not, by itself and without an additional moral premise, show that the infliction of such pain is morally wrong. I would argue that even a superficial examination of human nature would show why that fact carries its own moral im- plication. I would also note that I have never heard anyone object to the contention that “ought implies can,” where the “can” must be based on an estimate of a generic human capacity to meet a particular

Can Nature a Serve as a

Moral Guide?

moral obligation. Here fact and value become one, and necessarily so.

Quite apart from these philosophical puzzles, it is useful to note that there is now a major field of inquiry and action right under our noses where na- ture is frequently held up-with little objection-as the standard for proper behavior. That field is en- vironmentalism. Its central conviction is that human beings have to respect and live with nature, that na- ture must be our guide in determining how best to avoid the ruination of our environmental habitat It is not necessary, to make that conviction plausible, to hold the view that nature always “knows best” or that nature cannot safely be modified to meet hu- man needs. Obviously that is not true. But it has come to seem wise and prudent to understand the way in which organic nature works, including, most centrally, its evolutionary and adaptive mechanisms. If that does not tell us precisely what we should do as we evaluate human needs and desires, it does helpfully point us in a certain direction and alerts us to dangers to be avoided. That is not a bad start.

Is something similar possible with our own hu- man nature and not just the environment? Yes. We can see in evidence as old as the development of human institution+law, family, norms of honor- and as new as the various declarations of universal human rights, that there are some constitutive Val- ues which help define us as moral agents. They are taken to be basic requirements of individual and communal flourishing. No doubt there are many cases in which paying attention to nature as a bie logical guide wil l drive us in conservative directions. We will see that family integrity, parentchild obliga- tions, and duties toward the old have long been part of that nature. We will thus be suspicious of surro gate parenthood and tinkering with procreation. In- fertility will not be treated as a consummate evil to be overcome. We might also see that the modem war against death, the eradication of lethal disease as a sacred medical mission, is a mistake, just as it is a mistake to want to rid ourselves of the idea Of a premature death, as if that is merely a C d t d

artifact. We will be led to a less ambitiom notion of health than that once posited by the World

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Hasting Center Report, November-December 1996

ern views: that our ieepest values and institutions are nothiig more than social constructs, dissoluble at will. It will help us locate the limits to human plasticity and medical progress. It will underscore the hard-won wisdom that more choice and more autonomy over against the power of nature do not necessarily increase the chances of gaining happi- ness. That is surely as helpful a point of departure as choosing between the fraternal twins of utilitari- anism and deontology, w

Leon R. Kass

Tbe Troubled Dream of Nature as a Moial Guide

nyone who is troubled by the cacoph- ony of contemporary moral discourse A and the cultural rise of moral relativism

is likely to listen sympathetically to Daniel Callahan’s wistful plea for a resurrection of nature as a voice again to be heard on ethical maaers. I myself am more than a sympathetic listener. For almost thirty years, I have been working on this all-but-lostcause, in search of a more natural science that would do justice to life as lived and that might even offer some illustrations of how we can live best’ But though we have been periodically fellow travelers, Dan, ever the pluralist, has in his own work infrequently reflected his professed nostalgia for .natural law-which, I should say, is not my brand of natlll;llism. In the book that launched his career in bioethics, the claims of natural law could not compete with the claims of self-determination and pluralism, as he ar- gued, admittedly with heavy heart, in favor of abor- tion, several years before Roe u Wade

In t h i s symposium, I honor Dan by honoring quite literally his request for disputation. I will dis- pute not only with him, not only (by anticipation) with my fellow panelists, but even somewhat with myself.

In my opinion, Dan has not identitied the big- gest obstacle to taking nature seriously, at least for

,.

thought. Our technical capacity to alter nature, which appears to rob nature of its normative stand- ing, is not philosophically crucial, any more than our ability to kill embarrasses a belief in the natural goodness of life. No, the truly crucial obstacle to taking nature seriously is our intellectual confusion about what nature and human nature truly uw. Whosenature do we wish to bring to the aid of ethics: the nature of Aristotle (purposive) or Lucretius (atomist and hedonic) or Seneca (rationally lawful) or Descartes (rationalistically mathematical) or Hob bes (passionate and dangerous) or Rousseau (boun- tiful and self-lovingly free) or Darwin (historical and competitive) or Nietzsche (will to power) or White head (thoroughly organic)? Which truth is more fundamental about human nature: that we are self- loving beings attached to our own persistence and delectation? that we have free will and the capacity

that we are erotic or reverent beings with transcen- dent longings? that we are curious or aesthetic be- ings with an interest in truth or beauty? or, rather, that we have 7u) fixed nature but only a history?

Regardless of the answer to these philosophical questions, nature in our culture is mainly nature as conceived of by science. And it is a truism that na- ture and human nature as conceived of by modern nature science are virtually useless as moral guides. How could it be otherwise when banished from na- ture as our science sees it are soul, inwardness, and purpose; living things lack not only natural purpose relative to some larger scheme of things but even ends they naturally seek for themselves. The distinc- tion between fact and value, promulgated by mod- ern philosophy, is in fact rooted in the belief that nature is, in truth and not just in our science of na- ture, “objective,” “valuefree,” and indifferent to all human concern with better and worse, or with the good, the just, and the beautiful. From the.point of view of the modem world, nature means science’s nature, and science’s successes in prediction and control have hardly made it more modest about, and us more suspicious of, the deformities inherent in its abstracted and unnatural concepts.

Dan Callahan rightly points out that some sem- blance of Nature as we experience her has snuck back on the stage, as environmentalism is letting Nature speak more for herself, to claim some re- spect and restraint from her human manipulators. This is, indeed, a welcome development for the field of ethics-as my two colleagues on the panel will certainly argue. Those city dwellers whose only brushes with nature are starlings, squirrels, and the abundant soft sidewalk droppings of man’s best friend can only be morally improved if they can ac- quire an attitude of awe and appreciation for our many-splendored world, or if, minially, they could respond with horror, say, at the discovery that the brightest ’(i.e., most luminous) place on the earth as photographed at night by satellite is not New York or Chicago or even the incandescent and fully lit

to exert it, even to alter the rest of our given nature? I

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