Showing papers in "Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement in 2005"

Other Histories, Other Biologies

Abstract: Taking the counterfactual turn When philosophers look to the history of biology, they most often ask about what happened, and how best to describe it. They ask, for instance, whether molecular genetics subsumed the Mendelian genetics preceding it, or whether these two sciences have maintained rather messier relations. Here I wish to pose a question as much about what did not happen as what did. My concern is with the strength of the links between our biological science—our biology—and the particular history which brought that science into being. Would quite different histories have produced roughly the same science? Or, on the contrary, would different histories have produced other, quite different biologies? I shall not endeavour to address the whole of biology or its history. I will concentrate on genetics, the headline-grabbing branch of biology in our time. The claims of this science on our future have given its history an unusually high public profile. Newspaper articles on the completed Human Genome Project came with timelines of genetic achievement, stretching back into the pre- Mendel mists, and forward to a future where, thanks to geneticsbased medicine (we were told), the average person will live to more than ninety. Even more recently, the fiftieth anniversary of the introduction of the double-helix model of DNA in 1953 prompted books, symposia, television programmes, even a cover story in Time magazine. It also spurred people to wonder out loud about the nature of history. In 2003, we celebrated James Watson and Francis Crick above all. But they inferred the structure of DNA from Rosalind Franklin's remarkable X-ray crystallographic photograph of the B form of DNA.

Needs and Capabilities

Abstract: How should actions to redress absolute human deprivation be framed? Current international coordinated actions on absolute poverty are framed by human rights or by goals such as the Millennium Development Goals. But appropriate, effective and sustained responses to needs require localized participation in the definition of those rights/goals/needs and in measures taken to redress them. Human rights or the MDGs do not seem necessarily to require such processes. For this reason some argue that no universal framework can describe economic, social, or cultural rights. Yet to address absolute poverty purely from the local perspective still requires the identification and prioritization of capabilities or needs, and often requires actions by greater-than-local institutions, so in practical terms a framework is not rejected without cost. This paper argues that the identification and prioritisation of rights or MDGs can and should be done at an international level, but that they might be framed as capabilities, and that far greater attention need be given to the iterative specification of these rights, and to the ongoing protection of certain agency freedoms. The paper explores how Wiggins’ account of need can fruitfully inform the specification of needs claims. It also draws significantly on Sen’s work to identify the intrinsic importance of process and opportunity freedoms, and to identify how these can relate to universal priorities.

Need, Care and Obligation

Abstract: All humans experience needs. At times needs cut deep, inhibiting persons' abilities to act as agents in the world, to live in distinctly human ways, or to achieve life goals of significance to them. In considering such potentialities, several questions arise: Are any needs morally important, meaning that they operate as morally relevant details of a situation? What is the correct moral stance to take with regard to situations of need? Are moral agents ever required to tend to others' well-being by meeting their needs? What justification or foundation, if any, can be given for requiring moral agents to respond to others' needs?

Needs and Global Justice

Abstract: In this paper I argue that needs are tremendously salient in developing any plausible account of global justice. I begin by sketching a normative thought experiment that models ideal deliberating conditions. I argue that under such conditions we would choose principles of justice that ensure we are well positioned to be able to meet our needs. Indeed, as the experiment aims to show, any plausible account of distributive justice must make space for the special significance of our needs. I go on to offer some empirical support for this view by looking at the important work of Frohlich and Oppenheimer. I then present an account of our basic needs that can meet a number of goals: for instance, it provides a robust theoretical account of basic needs which can enjoy widespread support, and it can also provide an adequate framework for designing policy about needs, and thus help us to discharge our global obligations. I then briefly discuss the relationship between basic needs and human rights, arguing why the basic needs standard is more fundamental than—and required by—the human rights approach. Finally, I tackle a few important sets of objections to my view, especially some objections concerning distributing our responsibilities for meeting needs.

Aristotle on Necessities and Needs

Abstract: Aristotle’s account of human needs is valuable because it describes the connections between logical, metaphysical, physical, human and ethical necessities. But Aristotle does not fully draw out the implications of the account of necessity for needs and virtue. The proper Aristotelian conclusion is that, far from being an inferior activity fit only for slaves, meeting needs is the first part of Aristotelian virtue.

An Idea we Cannot do Without: What difference will it make (eg. to moral, political and environmental philosophy) to recognize and put to use a substantial conception of need?

Abstract: 1. Conferences on the subject of need are lamentably rare. All themore honour then for this one to the Royal Institute of Philosophy(an organisation long dedicated to saving philosophy's better selffrom its worse), to the Philosophy Department at Durham, and toSoran Reader, the organizer and editor. 2. Someone asked me recently what first made me think it wasimportant for philosophy to secure for itself a substantial andserious idea of needing and of thing vitally needed . What made itseem imperative to safeguard these categorizations from conceptualand rhetorical degradation? What suggested that there was aproblem here?

Needs, rights, and collective obligations

Abstract: Normative political discussion can be conducted in a variety of different vocabularies. One such is the vocabulary of rights; another is that of needs. Others, with which I shall be less immediately concerned, are the vocabularies of common good and perhaps-although one might regard it as such a general term as to be common to almost all the terms in which one might conduct normative discourse-that of moral obligation.

Folk Psychology and the Biological Basis of Intersubjectivity

Abstract: Recent philosophical discussions of intersubjectivity generally start by stating or assuming that our ability to understand and interact with others is enabled by a ‘folk psychology’ or ‘theory of mind’. Folk psychology is characterized as the ability to attribute intentional states, such as beliefs and desires, to others, in order to predict and explain their behaviour. Many authors claim that this ability is not merely one amongst many constituents of interpersonal understanding but an underlying core that enables social life. For example, Churchland states that folk psychology ‘embodies our baseline understanding’ of others (1996, p. 3). Currie and Sterelny similarly assert that ‘our basic grip on the social world depends on our being able to see our fellows as motivated by beliefs and desires we sometimes share and sometimes do not’ (2000, p. 143). And, as Frith and Happe put it, ‘this ability appears to be a prerequisite for normal social interaction: in everyday life we make sense of each other’s behaviour by appeal to a belief-desire psychology’ (1999, p. 2).

Where does the Moral Force of the Concept of Needs Reside and When

Abstract: Does Moral Force Reside in a Systematic Schema? Not in Any Simple Way My point of departure in the book Meeting Needs was the conviction that the concept of needs has moral force, but the force has been dissipated and anyway made hard to see by multiple complications including but not confined to multiple abuses. I now think that is only half the problem. To help restore the moral force to view for systematic application, I worked out a philosophical construction – a schema – designed to give a stable foundation for the concept of needs in the uses in which it carries moral force. It is this schema on which I shall focus in the present paper. If vanity in addition to familiarity plays any part in my decision to do so, the vanity is offset, I hope, by the fact that I shall be carrying out an exercise in self-correction; and by the reasonable expectation that what I say in correcting the view to be taken of my own schema will apply to other attempts to systematize the concept. The schema specified a list of matters of need and minimum standards of provision for each need and each person. The matters of need were course-of-life needs, that is to say, needs (like the need for food and for being spared terrorization) that people have throughout their lives, or at least (like the need for sexual activity) in certain stages of their lives.

The cultural origins of cognitive adaptations

Abstract: According to an influential view in contemporary cognitive science, many human cognitive capacities are innate. The primary support for this view comes from ‘poverty of stimulus’ arguments. In general outline, such arguments contrast the meagre informational input to cognitive development with its rich informational output. Consider the ease with which humans acquire languages, become facile at attributing psychological states (‘folk psychology’), gain knowledge of biological kinds (‘folk biology’), or come to under–stand basic physical processes (‘folk physics’). In all these cases, the evidence available to a growing child is far too thin and noisy for it to be plausible that the underlying principles involved are derived from general learning mechanisms. This only alternative hypothesis seems to be that the child’s grasp of these principles is innate. (Cf. Laurence and Margolis, 2001.)

Is Drift a Serious Alternative to Natural Selection as an Explanation of Complex Adaptive Traits

Abstract: ‘There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know.’ —Donald Rumsfeld, 2003, President George W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense, on the subject of the U.S. government’s failure to discover weapons of mass destruction in Iraq

Need, Humiliation and Independence

Abstract: Needs, justice and community The needs principle—that certain goods should be distributed according to need—has been central to much socialist and egalitarian thought. It is the principle which Marx famously takes to be that which is to govern the distribution of goods in the higher phase of communism. The principle is one that Marx himself took from the Blanquists. It had wider currency in the radical traditions of the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century it remained central to the mutualist form of socialism defended by Tawney and Titmuss. The principle underlay the development and justification of the modern welfare state—thus the National Health Service is still founded upon the idea that the distribution of medical resources should be determined by medical need, not by ability to pay. One source of the power of the needs principle lies in the fact that it appears to be both a principle of justice and a principle of community or social solidarity. As a principle of justice it is offered as a corrective to the particular forms of unequal distributions of goods that can result from market transactions, and as a principle of community or social solidarity as a corrective to the possessive individualism taken to be the corollary of a market order. Recent discussion of the needs principle in political philosophy has focused on its status and defensibility as a principle of justice.

Are There Genes

Abstract: Contrary to one possible interpretation of my title, this paper will not advocate any scepticism or ontological deflation. My concern will rather be with how we should best think about a realm of phenomena the existence of which is in no doubt, what has traditionally been referred to as the genetic. I have no intention of questioning a very well established scientific consensus on this domain. It involves the chemical DNA, which resides in almost all our cells, which is capable of producing copies of itself that accurately reproduce a very long sequence of components, and which plays a role in the physiology of the cell which in certain basic respects is quite well understood. This substance has also achieved a remarkable iconic status in contemporary culture. It is seen as fundamental to personal identity both in the practical sense of providing a criterion of identity through DNA testing, and in the much deeper sense of being seen as, somehow, defining who we are. The latter role is illustrated, for example, by the recent debate about the right of children conceived by sperm donation to know who are their fathers. Such people, it is passionately argued, must be able to find out where they came from, who they really are. On a daily basis we are confronted with claims about the discovery of the genetic basis of—or in fact very often the ‘gene for’—all manner of psychological and physical characteristics, and all kinds of disorders. This holds out apparent possibilities

The Ontogenesis of Human Identity

Abstract: “ >.Das hiess doch: Wenn du dir gewisse Tatsachen anders denkst, sie anders beschreibst, als sie sind, dann kannst du die Anwendung gewisser Begriffe dir nicht mehr vorstellen, weil die Regeln ihrer Anwendung kein Analogon unter den neuen Umstanden haben.” (L. Wittgenstein, Zettel, § 350)

Evolution and aesthetics

Abstract: I want to begin with four quotations, fairly typical of their type, and germane to our topic because they encapsulate what many artists and art lovers feel about art and music These feelings are often inchoate, to be sure, and in the cold light of analytical day they may look extravagant and exaggerated But they do capture something of the experience people often have of art and beauty, and for that reason alone must be given some phenomenological plausibility at least First quotation: ‘It is reserved to art to salvage the kernel of religion, inasmuch as the mythical images which religion would wish to be believed as true are apprehended in art for their symbolic value, and through ideal representation of those symbols art reveals the concealed deep truth within them’ Second quotation: ‘(In art) for a brief moment we really become the primal essence itself, and feel its unbounded lust for existence, and delight in existence Now we see the struggles, the torment, the destruction of phenomena as necessary For all our pity and terror we are happy to be alive, not as individuals but as the single living thing, merged with its creative delight…’

Needs, facts, goodness, and truth

Abstract: In this paper I want to explore certain parallels between the logic of action and the logic of belief or, as it might otherwise be put, between practical and theoretical reasoning and rationality. The parallels will be seen to involve an ontological dimension as well as psychological and linguistic dimensions. It may help to begin by mentioning how I was drawn into an examination of these parallels. This was through becoming convinced of the correctness of an externalist account of reasons for action, having been persuaded of this by, amongst other things, arguments found in Jonathan Dancy's recent book on the subject, Practical Reality . Externalism about reasons for action appeared to me to be, on reflection, the only view that one could plausibly adopt in conjunction with a libertarian account of free will—the latter being a position which I am now convinced is not only coherent but entirely defensible and indeed correct. Oddly enough, however, recent debates concerning internalist versus externalist accounts of reasons for action tend to have been dominated by moral philosophers, whereas those concerning compatibilist versus libertarian accounts of free will tend to have been dominated by philosophers of action. As a consequence of this, the two debates have been carried on relatively independently of each other—in my view, to the detriment of both. The present paper is part of a larger exercise of trying to bring them together.

The Problems of Biological Design

Abstract: Here is one way that philosophers and biologists sometimes speak of Darwin’s explanatory innovation: ‘Eyes, organs of echolocation, camouflage and the like are all wonderful instances of contrivance, of complex adaptation, of good design. Paley and the other natural theologians sought to explain this good design by appeal to an intelligent designer. Darwin, on the other hand, offers us a superior explanation for the appearance of this same property: Darwin shows us that we can explain good design through the action of selection. Indeed, selection is the only process that can explain good design in nature. And that is why evolutionary biologists can continue to use a version of the argument from design called the argument from biological design: when we see an instance of good design in nature, we should infer not the guiding hand of God, but the hand of selection at work.’

Evo-devo: A New Evolutionary Paradigm?

Abstract: The homologies of process within morphogenetic fields provide some of the best evidence for evolution—just as skeletal and organ homologies did earlier. Thus, the evidence for evolution is better than ever. The role of natural selection in evolution, how–ever, is seen to play less an important role. It is merely a filter for unsuccessful morphologies generated by development. Population genetics is destined to change if it is not to become as irrelevant to evolution as Newtonian mechanics is to contempo–rary physics. (Gilbert, Opitz, and Raff 1996, 368)

Under Darwin’s Cosh: Neo-Aristotelian Thinking in Environmental Ethics

Abstract: ions, as averages over populations of individuals) are not. Sober, rightly in my view, rejects both halves of this claim. (See Sober, ‘Evolution, Population Thinking, and Essentialism’, op. cit. note 18.) In the present context Mayr’s questionable metaphysical picture need not be a cause for concern. His key insight concerning the explanatory priority of individual variation in population thinking does not depend on the dubious metaphysical window-dressing he supplies, and so may be formulated without it (which is what I have endeavoured to do in the main text). I take it that this is Sober’s view also. 23 R. Lewontin, ‘The Organism as the Subject and Object of Evolution’, Scientia 118 (1983), 63-82. developmental temperature is as high as 30° centigrade. And things get more complicated once we allow, in addition, variations in the genotype, and consider the ensuing pattern of interactions with the relevant environmental factor. For example, Drosophila with a mutation known as Ultrabar always end up with less visual receptors than those with wild genotype. The same is true of Drosophila with a different mutation, Infrabar. However, the two mutant genotypes have opposite relations to temperature, such that the number of receptors possessed by Ultrabar flies decreases with developmental temperature, while the number possessed by Infrabar flies increases. In fact, if we make two plots of the number of light receptors against developmental temperature, one for Ultrabar and one for Infrabar (more on this idea in a moment), the two curves will cross over. How is this developmental space to be conceptualized? Let’s begin with the natural state model. According to the strict interpretation of this model, there will be a unique number of light receptors that constitutes the natural phenotypic outcome for insects of this species, although interfering forces during morphogenesis may well mean that this number is often not realized. (In a more relaxed frame of mind, we might allow that the relevant natural state may be specified in a mildly disjunctive way, such that, for example, the natural state will be realized if the number of light-receptors takes any one from a limited, small range of values. This does not alter the fundamental character of the explanation, so, for ease of exposition, I shall continue to work with the strict interpretation.) Each of the mutation-driven, temperature-driven, or interactive variations in phenotypic form that we identified in the data above needs to be characterized as a deviation from some natural state—the natural phenotype. The most likely candidate for the natural phenotype is a compound eye with 1000 light-receptor cells (or some appropriately relaxed take on that phenotype). However, this is not the only option. There is no requirement in the natural state model that the privileged phenotype be statistically the most common. Now let’s turn to the approach recommended by population Under Darwin’s Cosh? 277 24 My brief analysis of Drosophila morphogenesis that follows is, in essence, the local application of a general theoretical analysis, advanced by Sober, of the different ways in which natural state thinking and population thinking approach development; see his ‘Evolution, Population Thinking, and Essentialism’, op. cit. note 18. In that paper Sober considers, only to reject, a number of different moves designed to reduce the tension between the natural state model and population thinking. biology. The population geneticist will appeal to the concept of a norm of reaction. We’ve just seen this idea at work. A norm of reaction is a curve generated by taking a particular genotype, and plotting changes in a phenotypic trait of interest (in our example, the number of receptors) against an environmental variable (in our example, the developmental temperature). In effect, a norm of reaction shows how an organism of a particular genotype would develop in different environments. So one might conceptualize our fruit-fly developmental space in terms of a set of norms of reaction. This way of thinking enshrines individual variation at the root of biological nature. Each norm of reaction identifies a range of possible developmental outcomes for a particular genotype. Moreover, there is a deep sense in which, in terms of our understanding of the fundamental character of biological systems, each of these outcomes, and each of the outcomes for each of the different possible genotypes, is conceptualized as being on an equal footing. Of course, it may be true to say of the fruit-fly not only (a) that there is a wild genotype, but also (b) that in its ordinary developmental ecology, the temperature is regularly within a small range of values. This might explain why the number of lightreceptor cells in the Drosophila compound eye is usually about 1000. Nevertheless this situation, riddled as it is with statistical and environment-relative contingency, seems to fall short of establishing the dual presence of a uniquely privileged developmental outcome and an associated tendency for the organism in question to realize that outcome—the kind of constrained developmental profile that the natural state model requires. These apparent problems with the natural state model reverberate into environmental ethics. If the third Darwinian contribution identified by Mayr is on the mark, and the base-line of biological nature really is that actual organisms are, at root, no more than points on a vast landscape of phenotypic diversity, rather than enforced offshoots from a path that leads to a preferred speciesspecific destination, then it is hard to give any conceptual weight to the idea that in perturbing the developmental trajectory of an organism, we are preventing it from realizing its natural state. Any philosophical strategy for specifying ethical norms that rests on that idea is thereby undermined; and that includes Taylor’s biocentric individualism. But have we got the base-line right? Our first Michael Wheeler 278 25 As mentioned above, in his paper ‘Philosophical Problems for Environmentalism’ (op. cit. note 18, 233–40), Sober traces certain difficulties facing some environmentalist positions to their implicit adoption of the natural state model. Sober’s target is the very general claim, plausibly flirtation with contemporary developmental biology certainly suggests that we have; but perhaps all is not as it seems. 4. Kick-Starting Aristotelianism I now want to suggest that we have been moving too fast, and that there is, in truth, growing support in contemporary biological science for something which looks very much like an Aristotelian natural state model of organismic development. Self-organization is a phenomenon that is now recognized as being widespread in nature—and that includes human nature. Indeed, it appears that wherever we look (e.g. at chemical reactions, lasers, slime moulds, foraging by ants, flocking behaviour in creatures such as birds, Under Darwin’s Cosh? 279 at work in a number of environmentalist positions, that what is morally reprehensible about an action that frustrates an organism’s endogenous developmental tendency to reach its natural state is that any such action places the organism concerned in an unnatural state. As Sober points out, once development is conceptualized on the population biology model, the idea that any one phenotype is the only natural one is deeply problematic. The worry about neo-Aristotelian environmentalism that I present here clearly reprises Sober’s critique in certain respects, although I have endeavoured to add fuel to the fire by showing in detail exactly how that natural state model underlies the detailed neo-Aristotelian structure of one prominent environmental-ethical framework. More importantly, as we shall see, I think the natural state model lives to fight another day, whereas Sober doesn’t. 26 I am not the only person to have claimed recently that modern biological science is inadvertently rediscovering supposedly discarded Aristotelian concepts and principles. For example, Denis Walsh has been arguing that contemporary evolutionary developmental biology explains why organisms have the particular phenotypes they do (and in particular, the organismal capacities that underlie the evolvability of organismal lineages) by appealing to a reciprocal relation between the goal-directed plasticity of organisms and the causal powers of their underlying developmental systems. According to Walsh, this reciprocal arrangement maps onto, and, in the end, plays the same fundamental explanatory role as, the kind of interactive unity between a biological form and its realizing matter that constitutes an Aristotelian organismal nature. See D. Walsh, ‘Evolutionary Essentialism’, unpublished conference paper given at Teleology, Ancient and Modern, University of Edinburgh, 16–18 August 2004. Although the analysis that follows in this paper exploits different aspects of Aristotelian philosophy of biology and of contemporary developmental biology, it is clearly an overlapping and complementary

Needs and Ethics in Ancient Philosophy

Abstract: Aristotle What I propose to do in this short paper is to outline two different approaches to needs in Greek philosophy. The first is the reasonably familiar approach used by Aristotle, and, in some moods, by Plato; the second is a rather less well-known approach which can with some justice be associated with Socrates, and/or Plato when he is not in an Aristotelian mood (if I may so put it)—and also the Stoics, who seem to have picked up some distinctly Socratic ways of thinking. The Aristotelian line, if not necessarily familiar as Aristotle's, will be familiar just insofar as it gives some degree of that recognition to needs that most moderns would suppose the idea should be given. What I am calling the Socratic line, by contrast, appears to leave no room for the idea of needs at all (or at least, that will be my way of putting it for now; I shall need a rather different formulation later on). It is this second, ‘Socratic’, approach that primarily interests me, not least because it is non-standard. But first the Aristotelian perspective. I quote from a recent review of a book on the philosophy of mind: Virtue theories understand human beings as members of a species who flourish in distinctively communal forms of life; given the right upbringing and circumstances, individual fulfilment and communal wellbeing are mutually supporting. […]

The Loss of Rational Design

Abstract: Charles Darwin published his Origin of Species on November 24, 1859. Whatever hurdle the theory of natural selection faced in its struggle for acceptance, its impact on human self-images was almost immediate. Well before Darwin had the chance of applying the principle of natural selection to human origins—in his Descent of Man (1871)—his contemporaries quickly and rashly drew the infer–ence to man’s descent from the ape. Satirical magazines like Punch delighted in depicting Darwin with his imposing head on an apish body. At the Oxford meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (June 1860), Bishop Wilberforce asked T.