NATURE

Thinking about science, technology, and ethics easily raises questions about nature. Science considers whether and how nature can be understood. Technology considers whether and how humans can control nature. Ethics considers whether and how science and technology can be guided by standards of right and wrong that might be rooted in nature. One of the most common objections to science and technology is to argue that they go against nature, just as one of the strongest defenses is to present them as eminently natural.

Nature and Reason

The English word nature is derived from the Latin word natura, which is related to the verb nasci (to be born) and the noun natus (birth). The Latin natura corresponds to the Greek phusis, of which the root is phu (growing, becoming, being). Nature is the original birth or coming into being of something. More generally, nature is concerned with the "first things," the origins of things.

The idea of nature seems to have been discovered or invented first by ancient Greek philosophers and scientists. Aristotle (384–322 b.c.e.) identified the "first philosophers" as "humans who spoke about nature" in looking for the "principles" or "beginnings" of all things (Metaphysics 983b5–19). These Greek philosophers thought of phusis as the beginning or coming to be of something. But more often phusis meant the sort or kind or description of something—the essential character of a thing or a class of things. The nature of something could be what it is at birth or what it grows into at maturity, what it is at its beginning or at its end. "Nature is an end," Aristotle explained, "because whatever anything is like when its growth is completed, that we call the nature of each thing" (Politics 1252b33–35). These Greek philosophers began by asking about the nature of each thing, what each thing is like. And then they asked what everything was like. Thus, the Greek philosopher Parmenides (c. 515 b.c.e.) could write a book with the title On Nature, which considered the "nature" of everything.

When nature becomes everything, it is impossible to define. But generally nature is a term of distinction, and so its meaning may be clarified by asking what is its opposite. In ancient Greece, "nature" (phusis) was most commonly set in opposition to "custom" (nomos) or "art" (techne). Custom and art are human products. By contrast, nature is what arises on its own without human interference. Nature is what is not customary or artificial.

Philosophy or science arose in ancient Greece when a few thinkers noticed that customary practices and beliefs varied across human societies. This led them to doubt the authority of human customs and to look for what was universally true by nature as opposed to what was believed to be true by human custom. Whatever arises by human custom or artfulness is changeable, but what arises by nature, it was argued, is unchangeable and thus more real than the perishable products of human activity.

The ultimate justification for customary practices and beliefs is the claim that they are divine, that they originated from the commands of gods or god-like ancestors. But when Greek philosophers and scientists explained the "first things" as natural rather than customary or artificial, this suggested that even the gods might be artificial or human-made, as being products of storytelling. The natural was opposed to the divine or the supernatural. Consequently, as indicated by the Athenian trial and execution of Socrates (469–399 b.c.e.), who was charged with impiety, the philosophic discovery of nature implied a questioning of the gods.

Revelation and Nature

The religious believer could respond by denying the idea of nature as the autonomous order of the world and affirming that whatever exists is what it is only through the creative activity of the gods or God. The Hebrew scriptures contain no word that corresponds to nature. In the Greek scriptures, the word phusis does not occur except in the letters of Paul, who was influenced by Greek philosophy.

Yet the medieval scholastic tradition of Biblical theology adopted the Greek idea of nature insofar as God was understood to be the creator of nature. Indeed, this assumption allowed Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), for instance, to interpret the order found in the cosmos (which he termed lex aeterna or eternal law, because absent revelation the world was seen as eternal) and in human nature (which he termed lex naturalis or natural law) as both rational and normative in character. The natural law of what it is to be human was manifest in three levels of natural inclination or desire: for physical life, for family and children, and for political and rational experience.

In the late medieval period, as creation itself increasingly came to be conceived in technological terms, this nevertheless led to nature being thought of as God's artifice. As a divine construction, nature could stand on its own and was governed by its own "secondary laws." Although God ultimately remained the transcendent "first cause" of all things, the divine necessarily began to be pushed to the margins of scientific investigations.

The founders of early modern science such as Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), Francis Bacon (1561–1626), Robert Boyle (1627–1691), and Isaac Newton (1642–1727) adopted this medieval teaching in defending the science of nature as the study of "secondary causes," while increasingly delimiting the higher authority of Biblical theology as the study of God as "first cause." Nature was the book of God's works, and the Bible was the book of God's words. The book of nature was written in the language of mathematics, which was more pure and more progressive than theological disputes concerning historical revelations. To understand nature, scientists were thus encouraged to discover those mathematical principles of nature that constituted the "laws of nature."

The mathematical and observational methods of modern science have succeeded in uncovering the laws of nature in a sense much more expansive and less normative than for Thomas Aquinas. Does this advance in the scientific understanding justify the control of nature? Does the possession of power convey the legitimacy of its use? Bacon, René Descartes (1596–1650), and other early modern proponents of science certainly projected that their new science would conquer nature for human benefit. Beginning in ancient Greece, philosophers and scientists had striven for a theoretical comprehension of nature. Modern scientists under the banner of Bacon and Descartes strove for power over nature. The point was not just to understand nature but to change it, so that modern science from its beginnings exhibited an inherently technological orientation.

Organism versus Machine

The contrast between traditional and modern concepts of nature may also be presented as a contrast between visions of nature as an organism and as a machine. For the Greek philosophers and medieval theologians, nature was primarily manifest as a something that is born and grows. Even for premodern materialists such as Lucretius (c. 99–c. 55 b.c.e.), nature seems to be a super organism with a consequent sacred or awe-inspiring character. Although he seeks to remove all religious superstition from the world and present nature as devoid of gods, his poem De rerum natura opens with praise of sky and earth as the father and mother of all living things. In the presence of such a reality—indeed, as part of such a reality—humans are called upon to accept and to live in harmony with it. And for Plotinus (204–270 c.e.), throughout "the air, the earth and sea, there are advents of terrestrial, aquatic, and aerial gods [so that] the world is throughout filled with deity; and on this account is according to the whole of itself the image of the intelligible" (Proclus, Platonic Theology, 7.2).

For modern philosophers such as Descartes, however, nature was primarily manifest by inanimate entities such as rocks that can nevertheless interact as carriers of energy to create complex structures. For Descartes, even living things are complex machines—plants, animals, and human bodies (including the human brain and nervous system) are all machines.

Such a view of nature as machine undercuts the traditional distinction between nature and artifice. The science of nature as machine yields a technology by which nature as technology can be further molded by human beings to serve human purposes. When Bacon declared that "nature to be commanded must be obeyed," he transforms the premodern basic end in itself of obedience to nature into a mere means (Novum organum I, 3). Although he argues that all humans can do "is to put together or put asunder natural bodies" with "the rest [being] done by nature working within" (Novum organum I, 4), for him nature as a mechanical process has already ceased to exhibit much in the way of intrinsic value. From the eighteenth century romantic poets to contemporary deep ecologists, humans have worried that the science and technology of nature as machine brings about first in theory and then in practice, in Bill McKibben's phrase, "the end of nature": a wholly artificial world controlled by human will with no room left for natural spontaneity or wildness.

In response to this Romantic notion of nature and technology in conflict, some people have defended technology as itself natural. All organisms alter their environments in adaptive ways, and many animals build artificial structures: Beavers construct dams, bees fabricate hives, and leaf-cutter ants cultivate fungus gardens and herd aphids. Charles Darwin (1809–1882) contended that tool-making was common in the animal world, and human technology differed in degree not in kind. Some biologists argue that human technology expresses "niche construction," which is a trait found generally in the living world, because organisms do not just adapt to fixed environments, they also change environments to construct their own niches. There is no fixed "balance of nature," because nature is constantly in flux from the ever-changing forces of both physical and organic causes. For example, the present concentration of oxygen in the atmosphere has arisen from the production of oxygen by photosynthetic organisms. As a consequence, many organisms have evolved a capacity for aerobic respiration and other traits as adaptations to this atmospheric increase in oxygen levels over the course of geological time. Without such a change in the atmosphere brought about by ancient photosynthetic organisms, human beings could never have evolved.

The Problematic Appeal to Nature

Despite the modern replacement of nature as divine with nature as machine, and outside the more extreme Romantic attempts to re-valorize nature, it is nevertheless the case that the appeal to nature exerts a popular influence. On the one side, one of the most common criticisms of genetically engineered foods or bioengineered human-machine hybrids is that they are in some sense unnatural. On the other, one of the most common general forms of praise for science and technology is that they are natural and thus improperly delimited. The so-called naturalistic fallacy is found across the spectrum of discussions about relations between science, technology, and ethics.

Among those who have criticized this appeal to nature as a ground of moral judgment, it is common to distinguish two senses of nature. When scientists speak of the laws of nature, they mean nature as the collective whole of everything that exists or could exist, including humans. When non-scientists speak of nature they more common refer to whatever is spontaneous or not the result of human contrivance.

Insofar as nature covers the entire order of things, argued John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) in a classic modern criticism of the appeal to nature, the moral injunction to "follow nature" makes no sense; humans have no choice in the matter. Everything people do must conform to nature in this abstract, all-encompassing sense. On the other hand, if nature is the spontaneous order of things free from human influence, then "following nature" would be irrational and immoral. It would be irrational, because any human action would alter the course of nature and would thus be unnatural. And it would be immoral, because natural phenomena often have evil effects. Mill declares in his essay "Nature": "Either it is right that we should kill because nature kills; torture because nature tortures; ruin and devastate because nature does the like; or we ought not to consider at all what nature does, but what it is good to do." Morality requires that we go against the impulses of nature.

So morality is not natural, Mill concludes. Rather, it is nature artificially perfected by human cultivation and artifice to satisfy the moral concerns of human beings. Those who argue for a natural moral law mistakenly assume that what is can be the rule and standard for what ought to be. Natural science can reveal the natural facts of existence, but morality must tell humans about the moral values of human life.

This distinction between is and ought, or between facts and values, supports the common distinction between nature and culture. Morality is assumed then to arise not from nature but from culture, because moral norms of right and wrong, good and bad, are products of human cultural artifice. Through science, people can understand nature. And through technology, people can control nature. But to judge the moral ends of scientific understanding and technological control, one must go beyond nature and enter the realm of culture, which is an artificial world of human social contrivance set apart from the natural world. As Remi Brague (2003) has shown, Mill's essay on nature manifests the shift from the premodern idea that nature is a model for human action to the modern idea that nature needs to be corrected, not imitated.

The proponent of natural moral law might respond by saying that although cosmic nature might be indifferent to moral distinctions, human nature is not. If one can identify some human desires and inclinations as natural and not merely conventional, one can say that the naturally good human life is one that satisfies those natural desires and inclinations. Variable moral customs of culture can then be judged as good or bad, depending on whether or not they conform to those natural desires and inclinations. So, for example, if human beings have natural desires for life, for parental care, and for social bonding, then one can judge those beliefs and practices that satisfy these desires as naturally good.

Even Mill accepts this in his utilitarian morality, when he claims that the ultimate good for human beings is the attainment of happiness, which is the satisfaction of their natural desires. For example, humans' moral duties to others arise from their natural sentiments as social animals who care for their fellow creatures (Mill 1991). Of course, as Mill insists, people's moral virtues do not spring spontaneously from their human nature, because they need to be cultivated through individual habituation and social customs. But still, as Aristotle said, the cultivation of such virtues is made possible by our natural desires and inclinations (Nicomachean Ethics, 1103a14–26).

And so reflections about science, technology, and ethics lead to complex questions about the meaning of nature. To ponder such questions is part of human nature.

LARRY ARNHART

SEE ALSO Bioengineering Ethics;Christian Perspectives;Descartes, René;Earth;Environmental Ethics;Environmentalism;Nature versus Nurture;Rousseau, Jean-Jacques;Sierra Club;Thoreau, Henry David.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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