CULTURE, VALUE AND MEANING OF LIFE

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CULTURE, VALUE AND MEANING OF LIFE

• VALUE OF NATURE AND
• HUMAN LIFE
• Dr Alexandra Cook

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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?

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LECTURE OUTLINE

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

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I. Natures instrumental value

• Bacon, Descartes, Locke and Wilson

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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.

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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 vexedforced out of her natural state to
  achieve the relief of mans estate (Great
  Instauration and Advancement of Learning, 1627).
• What is mans estate? Brutal and hard, full of
  toil, disease and death.

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René Descartes (17th cent.)

• More struggles against nature the medical
  imperative to exploit nature
• We should make ourselves masters and possessors
  of natureto 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).

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John Locke (17th cent)

• of the products of the earth useful toman
  nine-tenths 9/10 are the effects of labourin
  most of them ninety-nine hundredths are wholly to
  be put on the account of labour (emph. original
  Second Treatise of Government, 40, 1688).
• Earths value 1!
• Life is a struggle people must toil hard to
  extract their living from the soil.

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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
  prescriptionsare 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).

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Natures creativitydivine or evolutionary?

• Organisms are superb chemiststhey are
  collectively better than all the worlds 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
  recombinationsThe experimental products thus
  produced have been tested by the unyielding
  forces of natural selection (Wilson, DL, 285).

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Common drugs
Drug 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
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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?

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II. Natures intrinsic value good in itself,
not as a means

• Aristotle, Rousseau and Kant

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Aristotle (4th cent. BCE)

• Contemplation of nature part of good or
  philosophic life
•  natureoffers immeasurable pleasures to those
  who can learn the causes and are naturally lovers
  of wisdomin all natural things there is
  something wonderful (emph. added Parts of
  Animals, 645a10-20).
• This idea inseparable from that of telos.

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Aristotle the idea of Telos

• Design, purpose (telos), order in nature
• the non-random, the for-somethings-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?

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Camellia sinensis(what is it?)
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The Argument from Design

• The 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.

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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).

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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 observers 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).

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Immanuel Kant (18th cent.)

• to take an immediate interest in the beauty of
  natureis always a mark of a good soul andit 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).

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Why do we take this interest?

• Form or pattern in nature (Fibonacci)
• Independence of wild things from human
  intervention
• Their spontaneity They are simply
  thereindifferent to human desires or artifice
• Distinct from civilization (lit. life in cities).
• See Simonsen, The Value of Wildness.

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Reasons for our interest, cont.

• Inaccessibility
• Grandeur
• Uniqueness
• Beauty (order, harmony)
• Kant summarized all of this with the term
  sublime.

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Wild nature
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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.

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III. Nature the age-old enemy?

• The Tsunami, Katrina, SARS,
• bird flu

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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?

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Two Philosophers Views

• Aldo Leopold (1887-1948)
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)

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Leopold and Rousseau

• Leopold
• an ecological interpretation of history shows
  that 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 landsoil, 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).

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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.