In a post over at VFR, Lawrence Auster comments on an essay by Stanley Fish in which Professor Fish remarks on the inability of pure “secular” reason, bereft of normative bedrock in the Divine, to provide any “oughts”. This is catnip to Mr. Auster, who is, despite having various admirable qualities, a crusading anti-Darwinist.

The argument made by both is that if the world is, as secular-humanist types are inclined to suppose, an elaborate causal clockwork and nothing more, then it is inconsistent for us to speak, in any context whatsoever, in normative terms. In their view, if I, a Darwinist, say something like “I really ought to get this sutured up” or “you shouldn’t fire that thing in the house”, I am being dishonest; I am “smuggling” in a teleological stance that is inconsistent with my metaphysics.

What both fail to grasp is that they insist upon a false dichotomy: that teleology either exists in the world absolutely, at the level of metaphysical bedrock, or it doesn’t exist at all. What they cannot, or will not, do is to consider the possibility that purposes can enter the world as an emergent property, or by-product, of living systems. This view is of course unavailable to Mr. Auster, given that the only mechanism yet proposed by which such emergence can occur is the one first described by Darwin — but it should be accessible, I should think, to Dr. Fish.

The problem, really, is definitional: both Auster and Fish will acknowledge that we are obviously motivated by normative dispositions, and will also agree that our artifacts, and indeed even the various parts of the bodies of living things, have purposes. The issue then, is what constitutes a “real” purpose, as opposed to a merely illusory, “smuggled” ascription of purpose. To both men it seems that only a purpose that exists distinctly from, and logically prior to, the purely physical manifestation of the system that acts upon it can be considered genuine. Ultimately any such “real” teleology must either repose, through us, in God, or exist as a brute metaphysical fact — or not exist at all.

But this is a mere convention, a definition, a habit of thought; I think it is what is sometimes called a “frame error”. Why must we accept it? Why insist that purpose must have a grounding, as purpose, prior to the physical systems that instantiate it? Why can it not be an emergent property of systems built out of purposeless components of the world, by purposeless processes, and relevant only to those systems? The objection appears to be that it is just obvious that purposelessness cannot give rise to purpose, that matter cannot give rise to intention. And if we accept that objection, as both Auster and Fish seem to, then indeed we do have only two choices: to deny the existence of all purpose, and to declare any normative assertion a sham and a fraud, or to insist on a transcendent grounding in some metaphysical foundation — either God or brute fact. On this view, when we look at the exquisite “design” of a bird’s wing, we must either say that some intentional artificer brought it into being for the sake of an Aristotelian final cause, or that, despite its many superb optimizations and aerodynamic features, we must not suggest that it is in any sense “for” flying. And because a bird’s wing so obviously is “for” flying, this is often presented, by Auster and others, as a reductio ad absurdum of naturalism, and evidence in favor of this or that metaphysics, usually some sort of theism.

But, as others have pointed out (including me: see, for example, here, here, and here), there is another way we can look at this: that there is a process by which systems can arise that bring into existence their own purposes, purposes that exist only at the level of, and within the scope and context of, the systems themselves. I will not rehearse the arguments here; I’m sure they are familiar enough to readers of this website, and I have examined them in more detail in the links above.

So when a phototropic plant inclines itself toward the sun, it is perfectly sensible to say the plant is doing so for the purpose of gathering more light: despite being a purely physical system, as an evolved, living physical system it is a system that has interests. (Note also that it is not at all necessary for the plant to understand, or even be aware of, those interests; forming such representations is a costly, and largely unnecessary, luxury that only a very few living systems can afford.)

Now you may object by saying “No, that isn’t real purpose, that only looks like purpose!” And I will respond by saying that your intuition misleads you: that purpose like this is as real as it gets, and that your intuitive understanding of what “purpose” must be is at the very least arbitrarily restrictive, and misses what is, most likely, the true nature of all the purpose in the living world.

Simply put, living things are special. By virtue of their being the product of a natural engine of design, they are by their very nature purposeful — even though the process that generates them isn’t.

So where does this leave us in terms of normativity? It means that normative statements have no absolutely objective truth-value; they must be considered within a particular scope. In other words, any normative assertion must be evaluated in terms of the aim and purpose of the object of the assertion. Living things have an interest in survival, which requires feeding; therefore it is coherent to say that a hungry snake within range of a mouse “ought” to strike; it must be borne in mind that this “ought” applies only in the context of a snake that has an interest in surviving. It is what we would think we ought to do if we were in the snake’s position, given what we know about snakes, and about hungry animals generally. The snake need not be aware of any of this, or even conscious at all, but we, given the context, can predict the snake’s behavior because we understand what its interests are. We humans are in a far more complex position: we not only have interests, but we can think about our interests, evaluate and modify them in the light of other interests, and so on. But the principle is the same: any normative assertions we make are comprehensible only within the scope of our own aims and interests, which are in turn the emergent product of the processes that brought us into existence, and to our present situation.

I must make clear that all of this still leaves us a long way from anything resembling moral absolutes: as I have written elsewhere, I don’t think there is any such thing. The closest we can come, I think, is to acknowledge that moral systems are conducive to human flourishing in various ways, that we are by nature moral animals who are predisposed to condition our behavior according to such systems, and that we have no reason to reject this part of our nature. (Whether a naturalistic understanding of the non-transcendent nature of our moral intuitions is corrosive to their expression, however, is another question.)

Finally, it appears — surprisingly — that Dr. Fish overlooks the necessary role of emotion in forming normative valuations, and focuses only on the fact that reason alone cannot tell us what we ought to do. But we’ve had enough for tonight, I think.