CULTURE, VALUE AND MEANING OF LIFE

VALUE OF NATURE AND

HUMAN LIFE

Dr Alexandra Cook

Questions to think about during the lecture:

What feelings/impressions do you experience when you hear the word ‘Nature’?

What is your concept of the good life and is nature part of it?

LECTURE OUTLINEI. Nature’s instrumental value: Bacon, Descartes and Locke (17th cent.) E.O. Wilson (20th-21st century)II. Nature’s intrinsic value: Aristotle (4th century Greece BCE) Rousseau & Kant (18th century Europe) Leopold (20th century U.S.)III. Nature the enemy? IV. Further reading

I. Nature’s instrumental value

Bacon, Descartes, Locke and Wilson

What is instrumental value?

The worth of something is based on its ability to help us secure something we want, e.g. health or wealth.

Francis Bacon (17th c.)

Bacon envisions a utopian state which uses bio-engineering and other technologies to achieve material prosperity and political apathy.

Therefore: he looks at nature “under constraint and vexed…forced out of her natural state” to achieve the “relief of man’s estate…” (Great Instauration and Advancement of Learning, 1627).

What is ‘man’s estate’? Brutal and hard, full of toil, disease and death.

René Descartes (17th cent.):More struggles against nature; the medical

imperative to exploit nature:We should “make ourselves masters and

possessors of nature…to enable us to enjoy without pain the fruits of the earth and all the goods one finds in it, but also principally for the maintenance of health, which unquestionably is the first good and the foundation of all the other goods of this life…” (emph. added; Discourse on Method, pt. 6).

John Locke (17th cent):

“…of the products of the earth useful to…man nine-tenths [9/10] are the effects of labour…in most of them ninety-nine hundredths are wholly to be put on the account of labour” (emph. original; Second Treatise of Government, ¶ 40, 1688).

Earth’s value = 1%! Life is a struggle; people must toil hard to

extract their living from the soil.

E.O. Wilson (b. 1929), Harvard entomologist:

“Biodiversity is our most valuable but least appreciated resource.”

“Few are aware of how much we already depend on wild organisms for medicine….In the United States a quarter of all prescriptions…are substances extracted from plants. Another 13 percent come from microorganisms and another 3 percent more from animals….these materials are only a tiny fraction of the multitude available” (The Diversity of Life, 1992, 281, 283).

Nature’s creativity:divine or evolutionary?

“Organisms are superb chemists…they are collectively better than all the world’s chemists at synthesizing organic molecules of practical use. Through millions of generations each kind of plant, animal, and microorganism has experimented with chemical substances to meet its special needs. Each species has experienced astronomical numbers of mutations and genetic recombinations…The experimental products thus produced have been tested by the unyielding forces of natural selection…” (Wilson, DL, 285).

Common drugsDrug Plant source Use

Aspirin Meadowsweet

(Filipendula ulmaria)Analgesic

Bromelain Pineapple

(Ananas comosus)Anti-inflammatory

Caffeine Tea

(Camellia sinensis)

Stimulant

Codeine Opium poppy

(Papaver somniferum)Analgesic

Camphor Camphor tree(Cinnamomum camphora)

Rubefacient

Chinese medicine Drugs sourced from plants and animals; Many still prefer natural sources, e.g. bear

bile instead of a synthetic or herbal substitute;

What about species extinction? Or cruelty? E.g. extraction of bear bile Can these practices be justified in the age of

synthetic drugs?

II. Nature’s intrinsic value: good in itself, not as a means

Aristotle, Rousseau and Kant

Aristotle (4th cent. BCE):

Contemplation of nature part of good or philosophic life:

 “…nature…offers immeasurable pleasures …to those who can learn the causes and are naturally lovers of wisdom…in all natural things there is something wonderful” (emph. added; Parts of Animals, 645a10-20).

This idea inseparable from that of telos.

Aristotle: the idea of Telos Design, purpose (telos), order in nature:

“…the non-random, the for-something’s-sake, is present in the works of nature most of all, and the end for which they have been composed or have come to be occupies the place of the beautiful” (Parts of Animals, 645a25-30, 4th cent.).

Example of telos: -we posit that one of the purposes of the plant is to perpetuate the

species;-the reproductive organs (next slide) enable the plant to do this;

these organs are purposive, and not just random body parts.A key problem with teleology: humans decide what the telos is.

This may work for the narrow example given above, but what answers can we give to the question: what are species for?

Camellia sinensis(what is it?)

The Argument from DesignThe orderliness or design in living things is proof of a divine

creator, e.g. the Christian God; Consider the work of Fibonacci (12th cent.), who discovered a

number series that describes many natural phenomena:-1,2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377…(e.g. rabbit population increase)-The ratio of successive terms yields the ‘Golden Section’, .618034, or phi; - phi describes such phenomena as phyllotaxis, or the angle of arrangement of seeds, petals and leaves in plants;-An angle of phi provides optimal light and rain exposure.

‘Intelligent design’ theory uses such information to support a modernized version of the argument from design.

Order in Nature ‘There are two sets of

`clockwise’ and two sets of `anti-clockwise’ spirals. The number of outer clockwise spirals is 55. The number of spirals in each of the other sets is a Fibonacci number’ (courtesy, Professor Laurence Goldstein).

J.-J. Rousseau (1712-1778):

“…earth in the harmony of her three kingdoms offers man a living, fascinating and enchanting spectacle, the only one of which his eyes and his heart can never grow weary.”

“At such times [the observer’s] senses are possessed by a deep and delightful reverie, and in a state of blissful self-abandonment he loses himself in the immensity of this beautiful order” (emph. added; pt. 7, Reveries of the Solitary Walker, 1782).

Immanuel Kant (18th cent.):

“…to take an immediate interest in the beauty of nature…is always a mark of a good soul; and…it is at least indicative of a temper of mind favourable to the moral feeling that it should readily associate itself with the contemplation of nature” (emph. original; Critique of Judgement, ¶ 42, 1790).

Why do we take this interest? Form or pattern in nature (Fibonacci) Independence of wild things from human

intervention; Their spontaneity: “They are simply there…

indifferent to human desires or artifice”; Distinct from civilization (lit. life in cities). See Simonsen, “The Value of Wildness”.

Reasons for our interest, cont. Inaccessibility Grandeur Uniqueness Beauty (order, harmony) Kant summarized all of this with the

term ‘sublime’.

Wild nature

Evolution rejects Intelligent Design

Charles Darwin (19th cent.) replaced purposeful design with his theory of evolution;

Evolution holds that the way organisms are organized arises from natural selection over generations of a species (see Wilson, above);

Natural selection favors those organisms/species most adapted to their environments; less well-adapted organisms/species tend to die out;

There is no divine Creation, no higher purpose for nature; it has no purpose at all, and hence no telos.

III. Nature the age-old enemy?

The Tsunami, Katrina, SARS,

bird flu…

Unwelcome Occurrences

SARS, AIDS and avian flu can all be fatal to humans; Does that mean that nature is our enemy? Is it ever valid to speak of such events without considering

human actions? Some examples: mangrove swamps protect coastlines during

storms and tidal waves, but people have destroyed them in many places;

Current human dietary preferences involve raising enormous populations of poultry, among which a disease such as flu can rapidly spread.

Is there some ‘nature’ acting separately from humans?

Two Philosophers’ Views

Aldo Leopold (1887-1948)

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)

Leopold and RousseauLeopold: ‘an ecological interpretation

of history” shows “[t]hat man is only a member of a biotic team….Many historical events, hitherto explained solely in terms of human enterprise, were actually biotic interactions between people and land [‘land’=soil, water, plants, animals] (‘The Land Ethic,’ 1949).

Rousseau on the Lisbon earthquake of 1755:

‘the majority of our ills are our own work….nature would never have placed together twenty thousand houses of six or seven stories, and if the inhabitants of this huge city had been more equally dispersed and better accommodated, the damage would have been much less, and perhaps none at all’ (Letter to Voltaire, 18 August 1756).

VI. Further reading Bacon, New Atlantis, pp. 71-83. Descartes, René. “Discourse on Method,” Pts. 5

and 6, in Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy. Trans. D.A. Cress. 3rd ed. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993.

Wilson, E.O. “Unmined Riches,” in The Diversity of Life. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992.

Leopold, Aldo. “The Land Ethic,” in A Sand County Almanac. New York: Oxford UP, 1989 [1949].

Kenneth H. Simonsen, The Value of Wildness,” Environmental Ethics Vol. 3, no. 3 (Fall 1981): 259-63.