Remember the BP oil spill, and the lessons we were supposed to learn from it? For months last summer, we were riveted by daily updates from the Gulf of Mexico, as pundits galore offered up advice, not least that it is often dangerous and even downright despicable to fool with Mother Nature.
But as the conversation turns (alas, almost exclusively) to compensation for damages in the region, we need to look back at what was—and was not—discussed. There is this surprising and provocative fact: Oil itself, that yucky, death-dealing substance, is altogether natural (mostly compressed diatoms and other plankton). Here, accordingly, is a lesson from the Gulf, not so much about oil as about our shared attitudes and often unstated assumptions: Although we don't always like to admit it, nature isn't very nice.
For many, myself included, criticizing nature doesn't come, well, naturally. My own preferred recreational activities—hiking, climbing, running, snorkeling, riding horses—embed me in nature. I have surrounded myself with animals of all sorts, and I try to avoid consuming pesticides, herbicides, and the antibiotics and hormones to which industrial agriculture has become addicted. I was delighted when a natural-foods supermarket recently opened within a mile of our home, and I patronize it almost exclusively.
Nonetheless, in resisting many things that I view as "unnatural"—nuclear weapons, global warming, chemical pollution, habitat destruction—while also honoring, respecting, defending, admiring, and nearly worshiping many things that are natural (sometimes just because they are natural), it is all too easy to get carried away, to forget that much in the world of nature is unpleasant, indeed odious. Consider typhoid, cholera, polio, plague, and HIV: What can be more natural than viruses or bacteria, composed as they are of proteins, nucleic acids, carbohydrates, and the like? Do you object to vaccination? You'd probably object even more to smallpox.
I recall returning soaking wet, cold, and miserable, more than half hypothermic after a backpacking trip in the gloriously natural Canadian Rockies, during which fog and mist had alternated with rain, hail, and snow (in August!), and then encountering this bit of wisdom from the 19th-century English writer and art critic John Ruskin: "There is no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather." One may conclude that Mr. Ruskin hadn't spent much time in the mountains. Similarly, I suspect that those well-intentioned people who admire "natural" raw milk have never experienced the ravages of Campylobacter, pathogenic E. coli, or bovine tuberculosis, each spread by the unpasteurized McCoy.
Even in sports, with its cult of the drug-free "natural athlete," devotees strive to move beyond nature's gifts to what is beautiful, elegant, or impressive, fully recognizing that it takes time and work. Hence: spring training, exhibition games, coaches, trainers, and interminable "practice." Dressage, the classical form of horsemanship, seeks to help a horse move with a mounted rider as beautifully as it would solo, in nature. To do so takes at least a decade of effort, pushing horse and rider to work hard and in unnatural ways, in order to achieve harmony and beauty. It is natural for horses to stand around in fields, eating and pooping and swatting flies. It is not natural for them to dance to music.
In short, what is natural is often good, but not always. It may be natural to be a couch potato, to punch someone in the nose if he has angered you, for people to get sick, or for a child to resist toilet training. And of course, bacterial infections, lousy weather, and troublesome behavioral inclinations aren't the only regrettable entities out there in the oh-so-natural world. Don't forget hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes, droughts, the devastation wrought by volcanoes, lightning storms, sandstorms, and blizzards. Oh, yes, also by oil.
In his A Treatise of Human Nature, in the 18th century, David Hume presented, and criticized, what has come to be known as the "is-ought problem"—the notion that we can derive what ought to be from an examination of what is. Is there any way, he asked, that we can legitimately connect how the world "is" (which, by extension, I believe, includes our own behavioral inclinations) with how it "ought" to be (including how we ought to behave)? Simply by raising the question, he so conclusively severed "is" from "ought" that the distinction—between the descriptive and the prescriptive, between facts and values—is called "Hume's Guillotine." His insight that it is fallacious to derive "ought" from "is" has become known as the "naturalistic fallacy," a term coined by the British philosopher G.E. Moore in his 1903 book, Principia Ethica.
In 1710, three decades before Hume sliced into the issue, the philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Leibniz struggled with the problem of theodicy, the theological effort to reconcile the existence of evil and suffering in a world supposedly governed by a god all powerful and wholly benevolent. It was—and still is—a tall order. Leibniz concluded that since God is necessarily good (by Judeo-Christian-Islamic definition, at least), as well as omnipotent, and since the deity evidently chose to make the world as it is, then this must be "the best of all possible worlds." That famous phrase proved easy to satirize, most notably by Voltaire in Candide, the picaresque adventures of Mr. Pangloss (a Leibniz caricature) and his student, who experience no end of terrible events but always interpret them through a cheerful lens.
Voltaire was especially outraged by a devastating natural disaster, the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, estimated to have killed tens of thousands of people. But he wasn't shy about depicting the cruel but equally "natural" behavior of murderers, rapists, and torturers. It's a theme that continued to resonate: In the 19th century, John Stuart Mill argued that "nature cannot be a proper model for us to imitate. 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 what nature does, but what it is good to do."
So philosophy has long taught us, or at least tried to. What does modern evolutionary biology have to offer? "Nature," acting through natural selection, whispers in our ears—cajoling, seducing, imploring, sometimes threatening or demanding—and undoubtedly inclining us in one direction or another. Those inclinations are derived from a remarkably simple process: the automatic reward that comes from biological success. If a given behavior leads to greater eventual reproductive success for the behaver (or, more crucially, for the genes that predispose us toward that behavior), then selection will promote those genes, and thus the behavior. It will seem—and be—natural.
Natural selection (the very term reverberates) has a very efficient way of getting animals and people to do things that are "good" for the organism, or at least for the genes involved. Call it pleasure. Living things find it pleasurable to eat when hungry, drink when thirsty, sleep when tired, obtain sexual satisfaction when aroused. The evolutionary benefit to genes for, say, self-nourishment would not be well served if those genes induced us to refrain from eating. But whether, in Mill's terms, such things are necessarily "good to do," in the sense of ethics and morality, is another matter entirely.
Should we refrain from cleaning the house, since the Second Law of Thermodynamics, a fundamental natural law, dictates that disorder necessarily increases within any closed system—in which case it follows that entropy is good and struggling against it is wrong? Is it unethical to exceed the speed of light, or simply impossible? Similar absurdities arise if one attempts to "naturalize" ethics from chemistry, geology, astronomy, mathematics, and so forth. When it comes to biology, however, many people seem to feel otherwise.
Isn't there something good—maybe even magnificent—in the song of a nightingale, the majesty of a bull elephant trumpeting? If nothing else, they bring pleasure, even delight, to people. And isn't it downright estimable for a mother robin to feed her nestlings? It's certainly good for the baby robins, and thus for the evolutionary success of the adults—or, more precisely, for any genes that predispose adult birds to feed their offspring. It is easy to assume that the working of biological nature—as distinct, perhaps, from physical nature, or chemical nature, or geological nature—is not only admirable, but also ethically instructive.
The result, however, can be disquieting. Take advances in reproductive technology. Contraception has long been opposed by those—especially, but not solely, in the Roman Catholic Church—who claim that to interfere with the "natural" act of reproduction is, ipso facto, wrong. Ditto for much of the objection to cloning and stem-cell research. Consider, as well, in vitro fertilization: For decades the developers of that immensely beneficial medical option were vilified for "playing God" by promoting unnatural "test-tube babies." (The 2010 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Robert G. Edwards, who, with the late Patrick Steptoe, pioneered the technology, undaunted by the criticism that it violated the presumption that only the natural is good.)
Any dispassionate look at the natural world should confirm just how fallacious the naturalistic fallacy really is, along with its implied and oft-assumed inverse: What is unnatural is bad. It simply does not follow that biological nature is necessarily good for giving us insight into morality or ethics. To an extent that should trouble any "natural ethicist," the living world is a zero-sum game, in which benefit for one organism often comes at the expense of others, and where no sign of overarching ethical restraint, no independent claim to goodness, can be discerned.
After all, many carnivorous animals devour their prey alive. The usual method seems to be to subdue the victim by downing or grasping it so it can't flee. Snakes eat everything whole, often dislocating their own jaws as they stuff their prey—sometimes alive—into their mouths. Ants don't even have to catch their quarry: In the spring they swarm over newly hatched, featherless birds in the nest and eat them tiny bite by bite.
Annie Dillard's marvelous meditation on nature, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, contains an unforgettable account of her encounter with a "very small frog with wide, dull eyes," whom she watches being devoured by a huge water bug. Dillard notes with understatement that "it's rough out there, and chancy," that "every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac," and that "cruelty is a mystery," along with "the waste of pain." We must, she concludes, "somehow take a wider view, look at the whole landscape, really see it, and describe what's going on here. Then we can at least wail the right question into the swaddling band of darkness, or, if it comes to that, choir the proper praise."
Rereading that section of the book, I must confess that I am not at all sure what is the right question, or indeed, whether given the myriad unknowns that intervene between our human consciousness and the rest of the natural world, there are any inquiries that could support the designation "right" or "wrong." (As for choiring the "proper praise," my atheist self declines that, right off the top.)
Nonetheless, I think I know what Dillard means, at least insofar as there is a profound and desperate need, a deeply human responsibility, to wail or choir, or in some other way to impel an urgent inquiry into what it means to take a wider view, and not just describe what's going on in this gorgeous but deeply troubling landscape of which we are a part; to figure out what our rightful place is, and how to occupy it.
Some especially devout Jains hire sweepers to walk before them, brandishing large fans to displace any tiny invertebrates, lest they be stepped upon. But even Jains and Western vegans must eat. To survive—never mind, to prosper—is to perpetuate a grim tragedy, one that goes beyond simple ethics, be they Kantian, utilitarian, situational, deontological, consequential, theological, or whatever. As beautiful as it is bountiful and awe-inspiring, life proceeds via the taking of life, and is therefore no less likely to be ugly, amoral, and awful. And we are stuck in it, up to our necks ... and more. Indeed, our immersion in the natural world goes further and deeper than that of any other life form, insofar as we are masters at manipulating, distorting, and restructuring it, all the while knowing—or at least bearing responsibility—for what we are doing.
In Stephen Sondheim's dark musical Sweeney Todd, we learn that "the history of the world, my sweet, is who gets eaten and who gets to eat." In the nonfiction world we all inhabit, there is pleasure and pain, suffering and delight, eaten and eater, life and death, growth and decay, luscious Louisiana salt marshes teeming with innumerable, natural, glorious lives and horrendous pollution and destruction wrought by noxious eruptions of equally natural petroleum. One could argue that nothing on this planet can ever be unnatural—including our own actions, since everything (not least our own DNA and neurons) is necessarily composed of the elements of the periodic table.
And yet just a moment's reflection tells us that it is precisely because some things are wholly natural, and also wholly loathsome, that they had best be left alone, Pandora's boxes that should never be opened. If folly and avarice (acting, for example, via hunger for petroleum) do so nonetheless, those things must be struggled against with all the strength and determination, natural or not, that we possess.
Comments
1. camerongpc - December 13, 2010 at 09:47 am
Natural may not be all good and unnatural may not be all bad, but if we cannot effectively determine right from wrong, upon what foundation do we act. There must be a universal human standard, or "universal intent", on which we judge even if we may judge wrongly.
Cameron Coltharp
2. ellenhunt - December 13, 2010 at 11:16 am
"Oil is ... mostly compressed diatoms and other plankton"
There are multiple theories of petroleum origin, none absolutely certain. The abiogenic idea has seen recent revival. There are large deposits of methane clathrates originating from bacteria on the sea floor, and they are in a position to be subducted. There may be multiple origins of oil. What it's definitely not from is diatoms and plankton. That forms chalk, or diatomaceous earth, like the white cliffs of Dover.
There is an excellent book I liked on the central thesis of the article. Dark Nature: A Natural History of Evil, by Lyall Watson. http://www.amazon.com/Dark-Nature-Natural-History-Evil/dp/0060927909
Generally, I agree. There is a bit overmuch "mother goose beautiful out in the woods" idealism these days. It is a product of great wealth in our society that has tamed the natural world.
3. iris411 - December 13, 2010 at 03:58 pm
hmmm, culture defines nature, the it's a never-ending battle to fight "natural fallacy" and deconstruct our notion of nature.
4. rcatmur - December 15, 2010 at 07:37 am
Perhaps I'm wrong in my atheism. Perhaps we are living under the thumb of a cruel and rather facetious God(dess) who likes to watch the pathetic antics of humanity. Perhaps this is, after all, hell. If so, then I most emphatically choose hell over some divined standard of "good". Noooooo, thank you......
5. 11227291 - December 15, 2010 at 07:41 am
It strikes me that in 'talking about nature' we assume we can step aside from that about which we talk, but in truth is not our 'talking about...' simply our 'natural-way-of-being.' We cannot escape from being natural, even when we are being 'unnatural.' 'Unnatural being' is our delusion that we can transcend our nature. Sounds somewhat egomanical to me.
Wayne
6. drj50 - December 15, 2010 at 09:35 am
Thanks for a thoughtful analysis. Not all "natural" is good. I think about this every time a see a product advertized as "all-natural." Arsenic is natural, but I don't want it in my food or water in any significant quantities. We need to help our students and society be a little more critical about assertions about the value of what is "natural."
7. tpul2014 - December 15, 2010 at 10:15 am
A nice way to look at the relationship between the natural and the unnatural, or between nature and culture, is to meditate on the conceptual, though not historical, relationship between ecology and economy. Ecology is the "logos of the oikos", or the logic of the natural environment, while economy is the "nomos of the oikos", or the normatized relations of the natural world as they have been changed by human agency.
8. dank48 - December 15, 2010 at 11:09 am
Great piece. It seems to me that one of the most persistent fallacies is the notion that "natural" and "good" are synonymous. Even granting, just for the sake of argument, that "man-made" or "human-made" or "synthetic" or "artificial" are opposite to "natural," it should be obvious that laws are human attempts to improve over "natural" behavior that society has decided is unacceptable, i.e. "bad." No law was ever passed against things nobody wanted to do.
9. deepwater - December 15, 2010 at 01:25 pm
It was a windy day. I went for a walk in the woods. A branch blew down and killed me. Damn! God's will again.
10. bcollins03 - December 20, 2010 at 08:25 am
I greatly enjoyed this article. It makes several observations relevant to Christian ethics, and it provides a nice perspective on the Creation Mandate of Christian theology.
For the glib atheist commenters, I suggest John Feinberg's *The Many Faces of Evil* http://www.amazon.com/Many-Faces-Evil-Theological-Problems/dp/1581345674/
He provides an overview and critique of several different approaches to the the problem of evil (including a critique of Leibniz's theodicy from a Christian perspective).
11. largocee - December 20, 2010 at 08:54 am
It was a windy day. I went for a walk in the woods with my enemy. A branch blew down and killed him. Now that's my kind of God!
12. grward - December 20, 2010 at 09:53 am
Interesting article. The main idea is an old one of course, but Mr. Barash, as always, integrates and synthesizes ideas from many times and places and realms in such a way as to show us new perspectives, or at least new depths.
I must quibble, however, with his lumping together of "...much of the objection to ..." in vitro fertilization, cloning and stem cell research with examples of the naturalistic fallacy. There are many of us in the field of health research who advocate for caution (and I suspect that Mr. Barash would be sympathetic to our concerns). We are not against such research for aesthetic or religious reasons. Many of us are atheists but, to paraphrase Yossarian in Catch-22, the god we don't believe in is not just all-powerful: he is all-knowing as well, and those of our colleagues who advocate "playing God" seem to believe (or not) in a God who uses his power without necessarily knowing everything relevant to the issue beforehand. The history of health research is full of examples of rushing to intervene with new technologies and therapies before they are fully understood and then learning, after the damage has been done, that more caution should have been shown. I'm all in favour of stem cell research and research into assisted reproduction, as I believe that greater knowledge of life processes is always superior to less knowledge, and will lead to decreased risk of adverse events when new therapies are implemented. I'm frustrated, however, by always having to act as if the burden of proof is upon me to prove risks and hazards, when history abounds with the folly that results when trying to wield the power of a god without the requisite knowledge. In science, recognition of the limits of our knowledge should be seen as a necessary component of our intellectual tradition: instead, it's rapidly becoming a sign of defeatism and (horror of horrors) suspect loyalty to joint corporate/academic funding models of research.
13. meshabob - December 20, 2010 at 10:34 am
Consider typhoid, cholera, polio, plague, and HIV: What can be more natural than viruses or bacteria, composed as they are of proteins, nucleic acids, carbohydrates, and the like? Do you object to vaccination? You'd probably object even more to smallpox.
---
What a silly observation. Diseases such as typhoid, cholera and plague are largely a function of unnatural urban environments. For example, the cholera epidemic taking place in Haiti today is an expression of water being used as a toilet. I doubt that anybody in their right mind would describe this as "natural".
14. leomarka - December 20, 2010 at 11:23 am
I am not so sure sticking it to the Catholic Church's resistance to scientific desires to "play God" via test tube babies belongs in a meditation on nature, at least in this point of history. If anything, the RCC itself seems to exalt not the natural but the anti-natural, or supernatural if you prefer, and by so doing seems to me quaint, not threatening. When I think of scientists playing God, what comes to mind is Robert Oppenheimer crooning about the lovely dreadfulness of the atomic bomb, not some MD working on designer babies.
Uranium is natural. So is human aggression and bloodlust. For that matter, backpacking in the Canadian Rockies for the purpose of getting back to nature, likely a vacation subsidized by subservient taxpayers, seems effete to me.
15. csmac3144 - December 20, 2010 at 12:16 pm
I recall my years as an atheist. This article resonates: the curious sense that one is dealing with an idiot savant -- a spiritual version of autism.
The most naive and clueless people are those sophisticates who believe their minds are completely rational (in the profane sense) and that their psychic webs are spun from "pure reason."
Such individuals tend to be markedly tedious and shallow, as they are alienated from the larger and most vital part of their being. They tend to be on the obsessive-compulsive end of the spectrum, holding tightly to their little spotlight that is fixed upon a small area of darkness, instead of the vast -- even infinite -- interior cosmos that extends beyond the range of the spotlight, both "up" (into supra-sensory realms) and "down" (into the unconscious). In holding so tightly to their point, they miss it altogether.
The worst thing about this state of being is that one has no way of knowing that one is so imprisoned. The "logic" that to others appears as it is: shallow, puerile and sterile appears to the atheist to be made of Truth itself. How truly quaint. Theology exists because it is the only adequate response to the miraculous existence of Being, Life and Mind. Those who mock or dismiss this say nothing whatsoever about God, but a great deal about the profound claustrophobic poverty of their own internal psychic landscape.
16. csmac3144 - December 20, 2010 at 12:19 pm
I recall my years as an atheist. This article resonates: the curious sense that one is dealing with a sort of spiritual version of autism. I remember being like that; what a nightmare.
The most naive and clueless people are those sophisticates who believe their minds are completely rational (in the profane sense) and that their psychic webs are spun from "pure reason."
Such individuals tend to be markedly tedious and shallow, as they are alienated from the larger and most vital part of their being. They tend to be on the obsessive-compulsive end of the spectrum, holding tightly to their little spotlight that is fixed upon a small area of darkness, instead of the vast -- even infinite -- interior cosmos that extends beyond the range of the spotlight, both "up" (into supra-sensory realms) and "down" (into the unconscious). In holding so tightly to their point, they miss it altogether.
The worst thing about this state of being is that one has no way of knowing that one is so imprisoned. The "logic" that to others appears as it is: shallow, puerile and sterile appears to the atheist to be made of Truth itself. How truly quaint. Theology exists because it is the only adequate response to the miraculous existence of Being, Life and Mind. Those who mock or dismiss this say nothing whatsoever about God, but a great deal about the profound claustrophobic poverty of their own internal psychic landscape.
17. ralandbeck - December 20, 2010 at 12:44 pm
"just how fallacious the naturalistic fallacy really is"
Being 'imprisoned' by the limitations of an evolutionary logic should be self evident by the moral/ethical failures of our all too bloody human history. Blame atheism or religion if you like, but both are a human intellecutal construct. We are prisoners of our limitations as a species, moral and intellecutal. Theology only exists because nothing has yet been revealed but provides a self deceiving rational or meme to avoid confronting the rather unholy character of human nature itself. And psychology, which probably only exists because of the very real need to comprend the human condition, yet which has contributed little, componds the situation, like religion and all intellectual or ruling elites, by avoiding a honest, critical self scrutiny of ourselves. For the most part, confusing cultural respectibility for morality!
18. apothegms - December 20, 2010 at 01:11 pm
Hume, like so many great philosophers, is most famous for his most egregious error. His guillotine severs a head from a non-existent body. Like all living creatures, we operate out of a value system. The instincts are nothing other than the aggregate of the animal's values, and the beatific confidence and security enjoyed by a cat as it follows its instincts makes us so envious that we invent religions to give us the poor simulacrum of animal certitude. The "fall of man" is nothing other than our loss of the Eden of instinct. A more positive way of putting our fallen condition is to say that we are now uniquely constituted by consciousness to CHOOSE our values rather than have them imposed by our instincts. But again like the animals that we still are, we also choose our facts, based ON our values. We notice, we select, we constitute as our fact-world, only what our value-system has predisposed us to see as relevant to us. The cat expresses her value system when she seems not to hear the racket my stereo makes or the soft rustling of my newspaper but then goes on full alert at the soft rustling of the mouse under the sink. Beethoven's Ninth Symphony is not a fact for her at all, but a squeak beyond the threshold of my own hearing is.
All my facts are expressions of my values. There cannot be an is-ought dichotomy because the "is" comes to me already imbued with the "ought." I do not notice and could not possibly notice "what is"--in any given second, an infinitude of data impinge upon my sensorium. I notice, I perceive, I constitute as a fact, only what is valuable to me. It is patently absurd to say that a high-protein diet "is" nourishing and then to say that this in no way implies, or ever can imply, that it "ought" to be consumed by me. I honor Hume for wanting to shut up the moralists of his day once and for all, but I can only conclude that the intensity of his desire blinded him to this glaring fallacy. It is curious, though, how his blindness has been transmitted down through the centuries to lodge finally in David Barash.
There is nothing much here, as most people already occupy the ground that Barash is standing on--appreciative of natural beauty, aware of natural evil, and working out human morality without much regard for either. In this latter project, we won't get much help from the glib Darwinism promoted by today's evolutionary biologists and psychologists. Barash writes: "The evolutionary benefit to genes for, say, self-nourishment would not be well served if those genes induced us to refrain from eating. But whether, in Mill's terms, such things are necessarily 'good to do,' in the sense of ethics and morality, is another matter entirely." Because cultural evolution has almost entirely superseded biological evolution these past 15,000 years, such observations have ceased to be illuminating in any way. Millions of women and not a few men diet almost to the point of starvation, operating out of value systems that see "facts" of obesity in the mirror that no other mammal would see. Nothing in evolutionary studies can help us here; and not much in Hume.
19. leomarka - December 20, 2010 at 07:24 pm
As for me I think quaint is fine. I am not anti-religion so much anymore since I discovered the bloody truth of the twentieth century's connection to state atheism. Whenever one sees tirades against religion naming the Inquisition as the great evil remember how it is portrayed: in ancient lithographs. By contrast the Chekist, Nazi, Maoist, Polpotist etc (ie., atheist) executions visited upon us more recently can be viewed on youtube.
Anyway as for Darwinism I think it is invalid when applied to human matters since the cornerstone of its scientific claim is that organisms breed to the maximum the environment allows, thereafter to be winnowed away. People don't breed to the maximum but rather to the optimum, so go figure.
20. helbock - December 20, 2010 at 09:26 pm
Then there is natural child birth and skip the eye ointment and infant immunizations. Natural, however, is 25% of women ll die with their first childbirth and 50% of children die before 1 year of age. Nature is really nasty.
21. strefanash - December 21, 2010 at 02:41 am
If "ought" cannot be derived from what "is" and nature is all there is then moral nihilism and every other kind of nihilism is the only possible line to take. But the author seems to lack that kind of rigour.
BTW the Marquis de SAde was to my knowledge the first consistent thinker who applied the "all is natural" mode of thinking. Look where it got him
As for "the best of all possible worlds" we have no reason to believe the creator should or did create such, and under the christian doctrine the redeemed and glorified creation is to be a great deal better than either the fallen or original creation. So the notion of "best of all possible worlds" stemmed only from some enlightenment rationalists' sensibilities, and nothing else
It is a pity that people presume to speak as to how the christian God did things while themselves showing no knowledge of the Bible. For this brings me to my final point.
How to resolve the paradox or nature beautiful but cruel?
A perfect creation that could in fact be improved on at some later date, and man fallen into sin. Therefore God cursed the creation to make it clear to self righteous man, full of his delusions of perfection or perfectability, that something was indeed wrong.
Paradox resolved. But this paradox speaks of humnan culpabiliity, and this offends us. For the only people we care to deem culpable are the other people, the child molestors or the foreign mass murdering dictators ad their minions.
For me in my christian paradigm the problem of man's place and alienation from nature is solved. I have no need to be troubled by the thinking that the author put into his piece.
And no need to believe him
22. mhjhnsn - December 21, 2010 at 06:25 pm
Whenever I hear something is "natural," I figure, "Oh, no trans-uranium elements."
Beyond that, the term "natural" has very little meaning in common usage, certainly nothing that should drive moral orethical judgements.
23. russniel - December 22, 2010 at 02:56 am
David Barash's writing is always illuminating and provocative. I am a great fan of contemporary evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology, though it has its limitations in the realm of meaning and value (as Barash clearly recognizes). One clear mistake he makes: opposition to stem cell research has an entirely different basis than opposition to test-tube babies or cloning. No ethicist or moral philosopher of whom I am aware objects to stem cell research UNLESS it involves the destruction of human embryos. Stem cell research that does not involve embryo destruction is simply not a controversial issue. Living human embryos are by definition nacent human life and the destruction of that life to obtain stem cells is morally problematic for those of us who believe that all innocent human life, even life at its earliest microscopic stages, has a right not to be killed. The moral issue here is one far different than that involved in cloning or in vitro fertilization.
24. laocoon - December 22, 2010 at 01:22 pm
He could have just posted a book report on Moby Dick.
25. binkless - December 23, 2010 at 09:05 am
Tell it to Rousseau
26. willismg - December 23, 2010 at 09:40 am
If 'evil' didn't exist, we would have no opportunity to test our own worthiness as virtuous or moral humans as opposed to animals. So-called calamities or tragedies happen not to test the victims, but to test the rest of us. Maybe God is simply giving us all a chance to show our quality in a free choice kind of world.
So I also find no inherent inconsistency with the existence of evil allowed by an omnipotent Deity.
Merry Christmas to all, especially to Strefannash.
27. 11188926 - December 26, 2010 at 08:54 pm
David Barash offers an opportunity to think. What more can one do? Over extended analysis seeking ways to criticise add little to serious consideration of our relationship to the natural world, what ever that may mean / be to who ever is "thinking about our relationship to that world".
Thank you Professor Barash for offering the opportunity to look at this relationship through your perceptions - if we agree or disagree is not particularly important. Academics seem to thrive on disagreement. Maybe some day agreement will emerge- but unlikely. When the different points of view add clarity, substance and an opportunity for each to reach their own vision / understanding we all benefit.
Happy New yYear.
28. kimberlymj - January 01, 2011 at 02:19 pm
Terrific piece of writing. The "naturalistic fallacy" should be widely discussed. I often make a version of this argument when explaining my vegetarianism, or uninterest in reproduction. Just because people have traditionally eaten animals and reproduced doesn't mean they are inherently "good"--just common. They are seen as "natural." But with many things--including killing--we really can improve on nature, or, as with our eating habits and reproducing, make different choices.