Sex Is Not A Social Construct

Tags

sex realism, social construction, teleology, transsexuals

This post is a reply to EvolutionistX’s article “Don’t stop me if you’ve heard this one: Sex is biological; gender is a social construct.” Located here:

https://evolutionistx.wordpress.com/2015/09/16/trans-people-prove-that-gender-is-real/

In that post EvolutionistX defends the claim that sex is a social construct, a claim I wish to respectfully dispute. EvoX begins her article with the claim:

“X is a social construct does not mean “X is totally made up.” It means, “The word is defined however the hell people feel like using it.” This is true of all language.”

Right from the beginning you can see that the source of her error comes from being lead astray by certain outmoded semantic and conceptual issues. I discuss these same issues concerning the word “race” here. If I feel like using the word “dog” to refer to elephants it does not affect the meaning of “dog”, it just means I am using it incorrectly. Language consists of a mass of public conventions, each which is reproduced for their ability to often enough meet speaker and hearer common interests. That “dog” refers to dogs in English is a fact about these public conventions, and if I idiosyncratically decide to use “dog” to refer to elephants it does not affect the meaning of “dog.” That terms have their history and proliferate and survive because they successfully facilitate communication about specific things in the world is a fact about the world.

But there is something else mistaken here. Social constructs are usually contrasted with natural kinds. To say that X is a social construct is in part to say that there are no natural kinds X. For example, to say that race is a social construct is to say that race is not a natural kind, that there are no mind or social-practice independent kinds that are races. And so to say that “x is a social construct” means “The word is defined however the hell people feel like using it” is mistaken about the nature of social constructs. That something is a social construct is primarily an ontological claim, not a claim about language (although it might then require an account of how language for constructs works if it is not being used to refer to natural kinds).

EvoX goes on to state:

“200 years ago, people did not define “biological sex” as “has XX or XY chromosomes,” because no one knew about chromosomes, and yet they still had this concept of “biological sex.””

Notice the unstated premise here: there is a single concept of each thing that is shared by all individuals who understand a term and it must be the same through all time periods. Since people had a concept of biological sex 200 years ago, before they had a concept of chromosomes, the concept of biological sex can have nothing to do with chromosomes.

EvoX is here being lead to her conclusion by an old-fashioned view of concepts. The traditional view, descended from Kant, is that concepts are ways of organizing experience, or “carving up reality.” Her unspoken premise is that there is one concept of X, that all individuals who speak a language share this same concept, and that it doesn’t change across time. On the other hand, the contemporary view is that concepts are not classification schemes. Instead, concepts are mental abilities to reidentify what is objectively the same on disparate occasions and under disparate conditions. So 200 years ago people might have identified an individual’s sex by, say, checking for the presence of male or female genitalia, and today we might use genetic testing, but these are just different ways of identifying the same real (that is, not socially constructed) natural phenomenon. It in no way calls into the question the reality of the phenomena.

EvoX then goes into a long discussion of different sexual conditions, abnormalities, and syndromes. Her examples are supposed to loosen up our intuition that essence of sex is the possession of XX or XY chromosomes. The lesson EvoX wants us to draw from these cases is that the existence of these conditions calls into question the reality of sex. How is this supposed to work? The problem is that EvoX is working on the essentialist view that a sex is a class of individuals with some common essential property. If you define being a male as possession of male genitalia, EvoX will show you a male who lacks male genitalia; if you define it as the possession of XY chromosomes, EvoX will show you someone who possesses an XY chromosome but did not develop as a normal male; if you think male is XY and female is XX, EvoX will show you individuals who are neither XY nor XX.

The problem is that biology does not work on this essentialist basis; it works on the basis of function/malfunction, normal/abnormal. The real lesson to draw from examples such as those presented by EvoX is that sex is a functional biological norm, and individuals can deviate from this norm in many different ways. “Biologically normal” means working as designed by natural selection, or being in the condition it is supposed to be in, where “design” and “supposed to” means that the item is in the condition its ancestors were in on those occasions where they actually were selected for by natural selection. I will use “design” and “supposed to” since they are more intuitive to grasp and easier than writing out “as happened historically when the mechanism was selected for” each time.

For instance, take the nectar retrieval system of the honeybee. When a bee finds a source of nectar it flies back to the hive and does a squiggle dance. The turns and pace of the dance indicate to watching bees the location of the nectar relative to the sun and hive. The perceiving bees then fly off to the location indicated by the dance and retrieve the nectar. That is how the retrieval system is supposed to work, how it is designed to work.

Lots can go wrong however. For one, perhaps the bee misidentifies something as a source of nectar that isn’t one. Maybe it is a plastic flower and not a real one. Or perhaps this bee has a brain parasite and its internal mapping system miscalculates the location of the nectar. Or perhaps the system that translates the bee’s inner directions into dance moves suffers from brain damage so that the bee does a malformed dance. Or perhaps the viewing bees have visual impairment and perceive the dance incorrectly and so fly off in the wrong direction. Or maybe environmental conditions are unfavorable and the bees are blown off course by a tornado. All of these are abnormalities that prevent the dance from performing its function as it was designed to. But none of this shows that the dance wasn’t supposed to map the location of nectar, or that a sperm which doesn’t fertilize an egg wasn’t supposed to, or a heart that can’t pump blood wasn’t supposed to, or camouflage that fails to make an animal invisible to predators wasn’t supposed to.  This is how it can be said that camouflage might fail, or that a heart might be deformed, or that there is a right dance for the bee to do given the location of nectar, or that a thalidomide baby developed abnormally.

Thus, that each previous step has been done as designed is a biologically normal condition of each subsequent step functioning normally. That the bee’s internal system of translating the mental map or directions it has in mind is working as designed is a biologically normal condition for the perceiving bee’s mental system of translating squiggles and loops into a mental map. If the dance isn’t performed as designed, the perceiving bee’s translation system can’t work as designed—what is biologically normal for the perceiving system is that the dance actually corresponds to the location of nectar. All of these steps are supposed to line up and work as designed for the entire system to work as designed.

To take another example, when light enters the eye it is focused on the retina. The rods and cones fire depending on the quality of the light and send a signal up the optic nerve to the brain where the information is processed into a mental image of the world. That is how the vision system works when it is working normally. But things can be abnormal at every step. A cataract might prevent the light from passing through the lens undistorted, nearsightedness might make the image out of focus, the rods and cones might be damaged and not fire, the optic nerve might be severed, brain damage might prevent the production of an accurate image. Each of these steps requires the others to be working correctly for the system to work as designed.

And so, being a human male isn’t whether you are XY, it is whether you are supposed to be XY; it is whether this is what would have been the biologically normal result had the process that determines sex worked as designed. Like the bee dance example, when a fertilized egg ends up XY this is supposed to kick off a whole series of events that are supposed to line up. If you are XY you are supposed to develop male genitalia, your body is supposed to develop a certain way (with greater upper body strength, for example), and when your brain develops you are supposed to psychologically identify as a male, and are supposed to be attracted to females. All of these steps are designed to line up in this way in order for one to develop as a normal male.

But also like the bee dance, each step in the developing and functioning of the human sexual system can go wrong. When a sperm fertilizes an egg, for a few moments the chromosomes fight it out to see which ones are going to be expressed. The system is designed to produce either XX or XY, but things can go abnormally and the system fail to produce its selected effect. During these short moments where sex actually hangs in the balance, it might truly be indeterminate what sex the individual is supposed to be. However, none of EvoX’s examples are cases where you can’t determine what sex the individual is supposed to be (I suspect that any individuals whose chromosomes develop so abnormally that it is truly indeterminate whether they are supposed to be male or female, where the recombination of chromosomes truly failed, prove unviable and do not reach birth). As with everything in the biological world, things don’t always go as designed and the process might occur abnormally where we end up with individuals who are neither XX nor XY. But this does not effect whether they are supposed to be XX or XY. The system works correctly close to 99% of the time, which is pretty good for the biological world, and not unexpected given that everything is riding on whether the individual develops in a sexually normal way.

To take some of EvoX’s examples:

“Klinefelter Syndrome: person is born XXY instead of XX or XY. People with KS have tiny genitals. The Y chromosome triggers male development, but the two Xs cause an over-production of female hormones. Most people with KS are infertile. KS occurs in 1:500 to 1:1000 live male births.”

This is the case of abnormal male development. The very phrase “over-production of female hormones” and “male births” indicates that there are supposed to be fewer female hormones, that the presence of this many female hormones is abnormal in males.

“Some other obscure conditions with similar names are XYY, XXXX, and XXYY Syndrome. People with only one X chromosome and nothing else have Turner Syndrome. TS affects about 1 in 2000 to 1 in 5000 females, or about 75,ooo to 30,000 Americans.”

Evox X says right in the text that “TS affects about 1 in 2000 to 1 in 5000 females [my emphasis]” as in, we know they are females with an abnormality.

“Androgen insensitivity syndrome “is a condition that results in the partial or complete inability of the cell to respond to androgens. The unresponsiveness of the cell to the presence of androgenic hormones can impair or prevent the masculinization of male genitalia in the developing fetus, as well as the development of male secondary sexual characteristics at puberty, … these individuals range from a normal male habitus with mild spermatogenic defect or reduced secondary terminal hair, to a full female habitus, despite the presence of a Y-chromosome.””

This passage is full of normative terms such as “inability,” “unresponsiveness,” “impair,” “prevent,” “defect,” “reduced.” All of this shows that these individuals are not developing the way that is biologically normal. If this condition “can impair or prevent the masculinization of male genitalia” the presupposition is that male genitalia are what are supposed to develop.

“Kallmann syndrome is a genetic disorder in which, “the hypothalamic neurons that are responsible for releasing gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH neurons) fail to migrate into the hypothalamus during embryonic development.”

The most prominent symptom is a failure to start puberty; oddly, one of the other common symptoms is an inability to smell. It affects both men and women.”

Just by saying “It affects both men and women” shows that we can tell what sex the individual is.

These kinds of disorders do not only affect physical development, they are present in psychological development as well. Transsexuals are those whose sense of sexual identity does not align with their biological sex as is normal. I suspect that nature gives us an inborn sense of sexual identity so that we go on to behave as our sex in order to aid us in attracting a mate and passing on our genes. (Many transsexuals go on to produce offspring despite their disorder as other compensating factors such as social pressure come into play.) In homosexuals the psychological mechanism that determines the object of sexual attraction is working abnormally and hooking the individual up with the wrong object. Biological sex and object of sexual attraction are supposed to line up, but in homosexuals this isn’t happening. See my “The Myth of Sexual Orientation.”

In conclusion, sex is real, it can’t be changed, and there are only two of them. The cases that are presented to show otherwise all rely on an unwarranted essentialism, and ignore the fact that biological phenomena are functional in nature. Caitlyn Jenner is still a dude.

Update:  So what is male and female?

The original post was not intended to provide an account of male and female, it was just to show that examples such as those presented by EvoX did not call into question the reality of sex.  I said that sex is a functional norm where “function” is to be understood as what something is selected for, or what effect the item produced that provided a reproductive advantage and so was selected for replication.  And so what we need is an account of why sexual reproduction occurs at all and why it takes the form it does.  There is as of right now no universally accepted theory of why sexual reproduction started hundreds of millions of years ago and what advantage it bestowed over asexual reproduction.  A popular theory is the Red Queen hypothesis which holds that the recombination of alleles during sexual reproduction occurs so as to keep a step ahead of parasites evolving to attack the organism.  When sexual reproduction does occur one of the organisms does not contribute organelles so as to prevent competition within the organism to pass on its own organelles.

And so, if sexual reproduction produces an organism that is not supposed to contribute organelles so as to prevent the negative effects of intra-organism competition it is male.  If it is supposed to pass on its organelles, it is female.  This works for odd species such as crocodilians which don’t possess the xx/xy sexual chromosomes just as well as for those that do.

Whether this is the theory that is ultimately accepted is unimportant.  It is just an example of how a theory of what the sexes were selected for tells us what it is to be male or female.

Teleofunction, Not Tradition

Tags

dark enlightenment, teleology

I am going to try to write a few shorter posts over the next couple of weeks instead of my usual long, multi-part epics. Today’s subject is traditionalism. The point of this post is merely tactical, a way to get around the negative connotations of the word “tradition.”   As soon as someone says they are a traditionalist they open themselves up to some immediate objections. You can already hear howls that slavery was a tradition, or invocations of Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery. Either that or you will invoke images of silly harmless holidays like Groundhog’s Day. This is because the word “tradition” has a connotation of rote repetition for no other reason than that is how things have always been done.

However, this is not what a self-described traditionalist is trying to convey. When someone claims they are a traditionalist they are making the point that things have been done a certain way for good reasons, and that there isn’t really a better word for this in English than “tradition.” What is missing from the word “tradition” is the crucial point that traditions are teleofunctional. Take Chesterton’s fence. Chesterton’s point is that the fence serves a purpose; it has a function (to keep the horses in or whatever). A fence is a designed artifact with a function, and in claiming that tradition is like a fence the analogy is that traditions are designed to prevent problems, that traditions are teleofunctional.

Just because something has a function of course doesn’t mean it was good. Slavery had a function, providing the slave owners with a life of comfort. It is a separate argument to show that a social structure is needed or good. The ultimate weapon of reaction/neoreaction is that claim that anti-liberal structures are inevitable given the workings of nature (gnon) and human nature; that liberal values are deathwish values.

Plus, saying you’re a traditionalist sounds so musty and fuddy-duddy; saying you’re a teleofunctionalist sounds modern and sexy. So my proposal is to stop calling ourselves traditionalists and start calling ourselves teleofunctionalists. If you really want to sex it up call it bio-social teleofunctionalism, which encapsulates the Dark Enlightenment in a nutshell.

How a Lack of Teleological Thinking Lost the Marriage Debate

Tags

gay marriage, teleology

This post is an addendum to my series on marriage. You should probably read at least part one of that series before this post in order to understand what I’m talking about.

The most common objections to a procreative understanding of marriage result from the failure to appreciate that institutions are teleofunctional in nature, and so possess the distinctive character of teleological kinds.  Teleological kinds display the following features:

A) Human intentions do not determine an object’s function. One may intend to use a toaster as a door jam, or a space heater, or to illuminate a room by the glow of its electric coils, but none of these things are its function (what Millikan calls a direct proper function). These uses are what Millikan would call “derived” proper functions; the sense in which we would say that the toaster is functioning as a heater is derived from the user’s intentions (Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories, ch. 2). Prototypes of artifacts have only derived functions, when they begin to be replicated because they produce some effect they acquire a direct function as well.

B) An item may be able to perform its function only if external conditions are right, and yet because conditions are never right, the item may never perform its function. Millikan gives as an example an ice-cream machine. In order for an otherwise working ice-cream machine to perform its function, it needs to be hooked up to the appropriate environment and receive the appropriate ingredients as inputs. But because in this example the environment is never right and this particular ice-cream machine is never actually loaded with the correct ingredients, or plugged in and turned on, it never performs its function. And yet making ice cream remains its function (see “Existence Proof for a Viable Externalism,” The Externalist Challenge. New Studies on Cognition and Intentionality, p. 230).

C) An item with a teleofunction may be physically unable to perform it. A diseased heart may be unable to pump blood, yet that remains its function. It is because the possession of a teleofunction is a matter of what one’s ancestors did that the current item may lack these features and yet still have the performance of that action as its function.

D) The possession of a function is an objective fact. It is not a matter of opinion, or interpretation, or a matter of social agreement. It is a fact that the function of the heart is to pump blood. Anyone thinking otherwise is factually wrong. Aristotle thought that the function of the brain was to cool the blood; his proposition to that effect was false. Indeed, generations of biologists may be in agreement as to the function of some mechanism, and yet be wrong about it.

E) An item may fail in the performance of its function more often that it actually achieves it. For example, certain animal mating dances might fail more often than they succeed, yet they succeed often enough to make it worthwhile to keep them in use.

F) Saying that an item has a function is not to provide a conceptual analysis of the concept of that item. In describing an item’s function one is not giving a list of necessary and sufficient conditions for being that thing; having a function is neither necessary nor sufficient for producing the effect in question. Being a heart is a matter of possessing a certain history, and this history can not be revealed by conceptual analysis. In addition to possessing this history, in order to perform a function conditions must be what Millikan calls Normal conditions (LTOBC, p. 33).   Even pumping blood can be missing from a heart, as is the case in deceased, diseased, or damaged hearts, and yet pumping blood remains the heart’s function.

With these features of teleological phenomena in mind we can see how the arguments for gay marriage make invalid assumptions. They almost always assume an essentialism where a single counterexample can invalidate a principle. Teleological phenomena, however, do not work this way. Take the following commonly heard arguments for gay marriage:

Objection 1: Preventing the problems that result from heterosexual intercourse can not be the function of marriage since people get married for all sorts of reasons other than the having and rearing of children. Couples might marry for wealth, to secure an alliance, to receive tax breaks, for companionship, to avoid deportation, and so on.

Feature (A) above answers this objection; functions have nothing to do with an individual or group’s intentions. For example, a screwdriver could be used to fulfill various intentions–as a weapon, a can opener, a hole puncher, etc.–but its (direct as opposed to derived) function is to turn screws. That is what it was reproduced for its ability to do. Furthermore, even if it is constantly used as a space heater, toasting remains the function of a toaster. Whatever its derived function may be, its direct function does not change. Likewise, those entering a police force might be doing it for financial gain, and not law-enforcement, but that remains the institution’s function.

Objection 2: Marriage can have nothing to do with the production of children since lots of people might get married and decide not to have children. Or they may be infertile and unable to have children. A procreative understanding of marriage would say that these couples are not married because they do not perform the function of marriage. To quote Adele Mercier, “Anyone who thinks that the essence of their union is to produce children are mistaken unless they are ready to consider their marriage as having never existed at all should it result in no children” (The Monist, 91 (2008), p. 4).

Feature (B) above explains why an item or institution may have a function and yet never perform it. Imagine a police department that is lucky enough to exist in a place where there is no crime and so no criminals ever need to be apprehended. The apprehension of criminals is still its function despite the fact that it is not performed. Or simply imagine an otherwise working toaster that is never actually used to toast items. Toasting is still its function even though it is never performed. Similarly, a marriage that never performs its function still has that function. Likewise, with infertile couples, feature (C) shows that even if an item is unable to perform its function, it still has that function as its function. A broken toaster or malformed heart still has their distinctive functions even if they are unable to perform them. An infertile heterosexual couple still forms a natural reproductive unit with the function to produce offspring even if it is unable to perform that function. All that is required for marriage is that the couple forms a natural reproductive unit and takes the vows.

Objection 3: It can not be the function of marriage to prevent the problems that result from the production of children because many married couples do not prevent these problems. Parents may be abusive or neglectful, or otherwise make bad parents. In fact, they may make the problems worse than they would have been if they did not raise the child.

Feature (E) answers this objection. An item may still have a function even if it sometimes, frequently, or almost always fails. Police departments have the function to prevent crime even though they often fail to do so, the camouflage of a snowshoe hare has the function to avoid detection by predators even though most hares get eaten anyway, and the vast majority of sperm fail to perform their function of fertilizing an egg. All that matters is that the item succeeds often enough to make it worth while to keep around.

Objection 4: An infertile couple may happily remain together for decades. How can you say that this is an unsuccessful marriage?

Mutual love and happiness are great Aristotelian virtues of marriage; they are properties that help to enable a marriage to perform its function. And so this marriage is good insofar as it displays these virtues. However, it has been a monumental error to mistake the virtue of marriage for its function: love is not the function of procreative marriage. Furthermore, no one would deny that a couple that lovingly raise a child display other virtues, and that these are by necessity missing in the case of a childless couple. People may join all sorts of institutions and get much satisfaction out of them without ever successfully performing the function of the institution.

Objection 5: The argument begs the question by describing the problem in such a way that it excludes homosexual couples. It has defined marriage as preventing the problems that result from heterosexual intercourse, namely, the production of a child. Considering that this definition of marriage contains “heterosexual” right in the definition, of course homosexuals will be excluded.

Feature (F) above answers this objection. A teleofunctional account of marriage is not a definition or conceptual analysis of the concept of marriage. Since the argument does not rely on an analysis of “marriage” it does not beg the question to point out that functionally successful heterosexual intercourse has certain consequences missing from homosexual intercourse, and that these consequences might need a social institution with which to address them. If Aristotle was allowed to define the brain as an organ whose function it is to cool the blood, then he could never be refuted by those arguing otherwise, he could only be shown that the item which he took to be a brain, that lump of grey matter in the skull, was not in fact a brain. Anyone arguing otherwise would be accused of begging the question by including their new account of its function in their definition.

Objection 6: “Marriage is neither necessary nor sufficient for recognizing the dignity of children, for procreation, or for encouraging the flourishing of another person (by bringing him or her into existence.” (Brook Sandler, Social Philosophy Today 26 (2010) p. 27.)

Feature (F) answers this objection as well. No social institution is necessary or sufficient for performance of its functions: police departments are neither necessary nor sufficient for stopping crime, schools are neither necessary nor sufficient for education, hospitals are neither necessary nor sufficient for healing the sick. Yet those activities remain the institutions’ functions. The same goes for other functional items such as biological organs, behaviors, or manufactured artifacts. Functions are a matter of what has happened sufficiently often in the past (even if rarely) that explains why an item has been reproduced, and that something has happened in the past is no guarantee (in the form of necessary and sufficient conditions) that it will happen in the present since conditions may not currently be those found in the past that enabled the item to produce the effect for which it has been selected. In Normal conditions an item will be caused to perform its function as a matter of natural law, not metaphysical or logical necessity.

Objection 7: What if a homosexual undergoes a sex change operation to become the opposite sex. Can they then marry their partner?

Sex change operations do not change an individual’s sex (and are usually instead called gender reassignment procedures). Sex is a functional category and is assigned by nature. Sex change operations may however make life more pleasant for one whose sex and sense of sexual identity do not correspond.

Objection 8: Even if it once was the function of marriage to prevent the problems that result from the production of children, its function can change over time and so come to possess a different function.

The function of marriage does not change. More specifically, for as long as the combination of egg and sperm produces children, and this creates problems that can be prevented by the parents taking on certain obligations, marriage will have the function of preventing these problems. This is different from saying that this institution will inevitably be called “marriage.” And it is different from denying that the obligations of an institution might change, even to the extent that it no longer addresses the original problem. And it is different from saying that an institution may start solving a new problem, and no longer address the old one, and carry the institutional name along with it as it now solves this new problem. However, once a “new” institution is started to address the original problems, this institution will be marriage (again, even if it does not carry the name and some other institution does).

A Darwinian Look at Marriage, part 4

Tags

gay marriage, marriage, teleology

IV. Institutional Membership
The topic of this section is, given the existence of a social institution with the function to prevent the problems that result from the production of children, who may justifiably become members? If participants in marriage are to receive rights or benefits from the state–a question I won’t be addressing here and will just assume–the state needs to determine who may justly receive these rights and benefits. The principle of equality states that it is unjust to treat people differently based on a factor unrelated to the relevant character of an individual. And so it is a case of unjust discrimination to exclude an individual from an institution based on some characteristic unrelated to the position. Race is the classic example as race plays no factor in one’s ability to take on a social function, and so it is unjust to exclude a person from a function based on that factor. A similar principle applies in the case of social institutions; if there is an institution whereby individuals sow seeds, nurture the resulting plants, harvest them, and sell them, it is unjust to deny the title of farmer, and any benefits that would accrue to them in virtue of their farming, to any individual so engaged based on some characteristic unrelated to farming.

It is just to exclude someone from an institution when they refuse or are unable to perform their obligations. As I argued in parts I and III of this series, the obligations of an institution are those behaviors that produce the institutional end. In the case of marriage the duties are those behaviors that prevent the problems that result from the production of children. The first such obligation upon all the others are contingent is that one form an enduring reproductive unit. Forming any other kind of grouping plays no causal role in preventing the problems that result from its members’ production of children. Those who refuse this duty may be justifiably excluded from marriage.

There is a three phase process wherein candidates are admitted to or denied membership in a functional institution. Firstly, prospective members must possess an institution-relative function. Prospective members of an institution often, but not always, obtain their function from training institutions or schools. Schools produce doctors and scholars, police academies produce police officers, armed forces boot camps produce soldiers, and so on. These vocations are all typed by function. After graduation the individual is deemed to possess the relevant function and they then go on to perform this function in the field they have chosen. A function is institution-relative if it contributes to the performance of the greater institutional function. For example, prospective members of a police department undergo training in order to come to possess the function of police officer, or detective, or forensic scientist, etc. These functions are relative to the institution of a police department, and contribute to the institutional function of enforcing the law. Being a stockbroker, on the other hand, is not institution-relative to a police department.

Secondly, when titles, rights and benefits are distributed based on function, it is necessary to be able to tell what that function is, when it is being performed, and to distinguish it from other functions. Discerning the function of an institution and its members, and the behaviors that achieve it is the job of what I will call the “functional distinguisher.” For example, in a business, the human resources department often needs to distinguish the various positions from one another. In placing an advertisement for a position, the department will describe the position, its function, the reproductively established behaviors of the function that will be expected, and the requirements or virtues one must possess in order to perform these behaviors. This occurs because the business will be dispensing benefits such as a salary to those performing this function, and so it needs to be able to distinguish this role from those not performing the function (or performing some different function) so that the former but not the latter receive the appropriate benefits. For example, if a physician attempts to apply for a computer programmer position he or she may be justifiably excluded from the position and no unjust discrimination has occurred.

The third step is the selection phase. As its name implies, in this phase the acceptable candidates for the role are selected. In the business example, the selection role will be played by someone such as a hiring manager who decides who to accept to the position as described by the distinguisher. (Sometimes both roles may be played by the same individual.) It is just for the selector to exclude someone from taking on the position if they lack the virtues the position requires. For example, the candidate for a computer programmer position has selected which business he wishes to join, and the hiring manager selects whether or not they wish to accept the candidate. The candidate can be justly rejected for the position if they can not or will not program computers, or can not program them as well as some other candidate, and they can not then claim unjust discrimination or a violation of equal protection of the law.

As regards the state, in a liberal society the state is not permitted to prevent an individual from attempting to take on a functional role. The state can not stop someone from aspiring to be a farmer, even if they are incapable of farming well, for example. On the other hand, in totalitarian societies, such as the one described by Plato in The Republic, the state does select and assign individuals to certain institutions. Perhaps someone who makes a bad farmer would be unwise to try to perform that function, but in this example the individual is taking on both the role of farmer and the role of selector and so he can not be prevented from doing so by the state. But if he was looking to be hired to farm by someone else, and was unable to perform that function, he could justifiably be denied that position by the selector.

In the case of marriage, as we saw in section II, it is nature which assigns function and determines who forms a natural reproductive unit and so possesses the institution-relative function of producing offspring. The Normal way for individuals become part of a natural reproductive unit is by coming to be attracted to one another and coming together to be part of a pair. A homosexual pair either has no function or some function other than the production of children. In modern Western societies, the state has taken on the role of distinguisher (although the Church continues to play it as well). It is necessary that it does so as the state bestows certain rights and benefits on marriages, and so it needs to be able to distinguish what marriage is so as to prevent non-members or those with some other function from receiving those benefits. In so doing, the state is justified in preventing those who do not possess an institution-relevant function from joining the institution in question. If, for example, the state has a program of tax cuts in place for farmers, it is just to prevent blacksmiths and other non-farmers from claiming to be farmers and receiving that benefit. Likewise, as marriage prevents the social problems we have discussed through its members taking on particular obligations, the state is justified in encouraging it by providing benefits to those entering this institution, and denying them to those who do not have such a function. This answers Sadler’s challenge of explaining why “if some or all of the legal rights and benefits of marriage are genuine goods, it is difficult to see why such goods should be denied to non-married people (Sadler 2008: 581).
Finally, as regards the selection phase, in modern Western societies this step is performed by the individuals involved. In many places and times it is the parents who perform the selection of marriage partners for their children. And in a state that practices eugenics, the state plays the selector role for marriage. But even though in modern Western societies it is the individuals who perform the selection role, the state, as the distinguisher, is still justified in denying those without a relevant function from claiming membership (and the benefits that such membership bestows) in the institution.

To say that the state needs to distinguish marriage is not to say that marriage is merely conventional, or “socially constructed” by the state. Society or the state can no more construct the function of marriage than it can construct the function of the heart or liver. Like the biological examples, the function of marriage is entirely real and objective. However, the state does need to understand its nature because it distributes benefits to participants in that institution based on its beneficial effects, and so the state needs to be able to understand and distinguish that institution from others which do not perform its function. And so when Brake says that “a liberal state can set no principled restrictions on the … nature and purpose of [marriage] relationships” (Brake 305) she is in one sense right (but not in the sense she intends). The state can not set the purpose of marriage. But neither is the institutional purpose set by the intentions of its participants, as implied by Brake, any more than the function of a police department or school is determined by its members’ intentions.

The conclusion is that since homosexual relationships do not and can not have a function relative to the institutional function of procreative marriage, the state is justified in preventing homosexual couples from entering the institution. It is no more unjust to do so than it is to prevent a firefighter from being accepted into a police department, or perhaps that someone with cerebral palsy can not acquire the function of a linebacker and so may be denied acceptance to a football team. Indeed, justice demands it insofar as the state will be providing rights and benefits to those participating in the institution of marriage because of the specific benefit this institution bestows to society. That nature, for whatever reason, has set the object of sexual attraction to be of the same sex makes no difference. As mentioned previously, if the state was offering a tax benefit to farmers and an individual was claiming this tax break but was not a farmer, the state could justifiably deny the title of farmer and the benefits provided to farmers to that individual. As applies to our current case, homosexual marriage would be like the non-farmers calling themselves farmers; they are either do not possess that function and/or possess an entirely different function. Even if society agreed in calling the non-farmers farmers because of the great status farmers enjoy in that society, they would not thereby be farmers, and providing the non-farmers the benefits that rightly belong to farmers is an injustice.

The series concludes in part 5.

A Darwinian Look at Marriage, part 2

Tags

marriage, teleology

II. The Problem
This is the second post in my series on marriage.

The remainder of this article is concerned with a specific ubiquitous, important, and recurring social problem and the institutional solutions that deal with it in distinctive ways. This problem has its roots in the particularities of the nature of human reproduction. Understood biofunctionally, male and female are themselves functional categories; they are not a property of individuals, or the class consisting of individuals possessing a certain property or set of properties. In one’s sex one is assigned a function by nature just as the heart or kidney or liver is assigned a function by nature. The function of one’s sex is to combine with the other sex to produce offspring. As Godfrey-Smith (1994) puts it, “whole organisms, like people, have functions. Past tokens of people did things–survived and reproduced—that explain why current tokens are here. Hence, we have the function to survive and reproduce” (reprinted in Allen 1998: 459). In fact, male and female form two halves of a single functional device or system designed by nature with the function to produce offspring. Imagine the way that the two halves of a clay vase mold are one device with a single function. This functional unit, however, is not a functional institution such as we have been discussing as it is not taken on voluntarily the way one can choose to join or not join a social institution. Nor can society or the state assign or mandate the possession or dispossession of this function. One can choose to, or choose to not, perform the function of this unit, but one can not choose to not have this function. Even homosexuals have in their sex the function to combine with the opposite sex to produce offspring. But in their case their psychology is not aligned with their sex as is biologically normal.

In order to bring the two halves of this functional unit together, evolution has hit upon the strategy of producing a sexual desire in males for females, and females for males. Thus the etiological function of heterosexual attraction is to bring male and female together to produce offspring. As for whether homosexual attraction has a function, the origins of homosexual attraction are still unknown. One common theory is that homosexual attraction may be selected by natural selection so that one will not produce offspring to compete for resources with one’s sibling’s children. If so then whereas producing children is the function of heterosexual attraction, not producing children is the function of homosexual attraction. On the other hand, it is plausible that the mechanism by which the object of sexual attraction is determined has picked out an evolutionarily wrong object. It is likely that at some point after the sex of a fertilized egg is determined, evolution sees to it that a process kicks off to ensure that the object of sexual attraction is the opposite sex. Homosexuality would then be this process failing to perform its function as evolution has designed it. Or perhaps homosexuality is neither function nor malfunction and is a spandrel. A better understanding is needed of the way in which the object of sexual attraction is determined before an explanation is accepted. See The Myth of Sexual Orientation for details. The argument of the current article does not depend on which account is eventually accepted.

When all goes according to evolutionary design, which is a relatively rare occurrence as the vast majority of instances of heterosexual attraction fail to bring male and female together sexually, and many consummated instances of sexual attraction fail to result in fertilization, and many cases of fertilization still fail to result in a child coming to term, and some carried to term die in childbirth, nevertheless, when things happen in accord with the conditions under which they have historically been selected by natural selection, a child results. On these occasions when the child-making unit succeeds in the performance of its function, this produces a set of problems that need solutions in that human infants require a great deal of attention and support after birth as regards the nurturing, care, and upbringing of the resulting child. Every human society has a crucial need for institutions by which to address this most central of issues, and one would expect that the ways in which a society treats and prevents the problems that result from the production of children would stand out as one of the most prominent features of that society, and have a central place in the life of its people

There are three kinds of problems that may result from the production of children: problems the child itself may suffer, problems the parent or parents may suffer, and problems society as a whole may suffer. Although a complete inventory of the specific problems that may result from the production of a child is far beyond the scope of this paper, some examples help illustrate this point. Examples of the first sort of problem are the harm to a child’s physical and emotional health that may result in some situations. Most drastically, if a child is produced and left uncared for, he or she will almost certainly perish. And even when a child is not abandoned he or she requires an extraordinary amount of time, energy, and resources in order to reach maturity in possession of physical, moral, and emotional health. Examples of the second type of problem are the lack of time and resources that a single parent may face, or the emotional stress that may result from attempting to raise a child alone. An example of the third kind is the phenomenon of children abandoned to living on the streets. Societies both contemporary and historical have experienced this problem and suffered the attendant social ills this produces.

Society has produced several functional social institutions by which to address these problems. For example, an orphanage is an institution that is reproduced for its ability to provide care for children when no other means of support can be found. When no one else is able or willing to raise a child by adoption, orphanages are the last line of defense before abandoning the child to the streets. However, orphanages have their own problems which commonly result in being deemed less than optimal solutions. Some studies show that children raised in orphanages are susceptible to lower intellectual and emotional development as compared to those not raised in orphanages. (See for example, Carey, Benedict, “Study Quantifies Orphanage Link to I.Q.,” New York Times, December 21, 2007. Online at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/21/us/21foster.html)

Furthermore, the need for an orphanage shifts the burdens and costs of rearing children onto society at large as orphanages require funding which is provided either voluntarily through charity, or involuntarily through taxation. Both of these solutions are less than ideal if a way could be found for others to raise the child voluntarily and without the need for external sources of funding.
Adoptions, the kibbutz, and different varieties of co- or communal parenting are examples of other functional institutions designed to prevent or cure the various problems that result from the production of children, and each has their own distinctive reproductively established character designed to achieve their particular institutional ends. But unlike the case where those responsible for the production of the child take responsibility for raising it, all of these are ways of treating problems that have been produced by the sexual activity of others. A longer treatise would discuss the distinct functions and obligations of each of these institutions and how they differ from one another. Here I will just survey some of the problems that are prevented by having the biological parents of a child take responsibility for the raising of the child.
–When the biological parents raise the child, there is no need to find, and perhaps fail to find, another individual or couple willing to raise the child.
–Children raised by adopted or foster parents are more likely to suffer abuse than when raised by biological parents.
–In addition, when the biological parents raise their child, the costs of raising the child are not externalized onto society at large in the form of orphanages or taxpayer provided child support.
–If a child is raised by one parent, often, but not always, there will be a lack of financial resources or time that a parent may dedicate to the child as compared to cases where a child has two (or more) adults caring for them. In order to receive equal resources to those cases where two parents raise the child, it is possible to invoke various other failsafe social institutions such as taxpayer funded child support, court mandated child-support from the missing parent, paid nannies, or voluntary aid from charity. Each of these institutions has their own distinctive functions.
–Another problem of single parents raising a child are various social and psychological problems that research shows children of single-parent families are more likely to suffer. For instance, teenage girls raised in a single-parent household are more likely to become pregnant as a teenager. Boys raised by single-parents are more likely to have problems with aggression, attention deficit disorder, delinquency, school suspensions, and are more likely to end up in prison.
–The behaviors that resulted in these school suspensions and incarceration are additional social costs borne by the victims of these anti-social behaviors.

It is the function of marriage to prevent the problems that result from the production of children by having those pairs with the function of producing children take on certain obligations designed to produce this preventative effect. (Different forms of marriage, i.e., monogamy or polygamy, have their own subsidiary functions, a topic for another time.) The common recurrence of these problems and their persistent need for a solution explains the ubiquity of marriage across human cultures and times. It explains why we find in every society a procreative relationship between men and women that involves taking obligations towards one another. It explains why it is so incredibly rare for a society to warrant pre-pubescent children marrying. It explains what keeps the institution alive and why it has not died out over the centuries and millennia. It explains why it is so incredibly uncommon for a society to practice same-sex marriage. It explains why these social problems increase where marriage is rare or dysfunctional. It explains the difference between marriage and “going steady” or merely caring for someone. It explains why marriage traditionally had the obligations it did.

Although I believe this account of the origin and reason-for-being of marriage is correct, as an argument based on inference to the best explanation it needs a far longer treatise to argue for the superiority of this explanation and the deficiencies of competing explanations. And so I will not offer it here. Instead I am going to pretend that I am the first one to realize that having male/female pairs take on certain obligations serves to prevent the above-mentioned problems that result from the production of children, and propose that we hereby create a “brand new” institution exploiting this arrangement’s beneficial effects and deploy it to this end in society.

The series continues in part 3.

A Darwinian Look at Marriage, part 1

Tags

marriage, teleology

The next series of 4 or so posts will be addressed to looking at marriage from a Darwinian perspective.

I. Etiological Functions

Darwinism is usually thought of as a way to understand why things change, but it equally explains why things endure.  Hearts continue to exist and be copied across generations because they continue to be an effective way of pumping blood.  We continue to use the sound associated with “dog” to refer to dogs because it continues to be an effective way of bringing our listener’s attention to dogs.   We continue to manufacture screwdrivers because they continue to be an effective way at turning screws, and so on.  That is why these things continue to be reproduced.  In the philosophical literature, the effect that an item produces that causes it to be selected for reproduction is called its etiological function, or teleofunction, or proper function.  This approach to understanding function was pioneered by Wright (1973), but it was Millikan’s landmark 1984 Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories that opened the floodgates of interest in functions because Millikan revived interest in how the application of a theory of function could do serious work in addressing philosophical disputes.  According to the etiological approach, the possession of a function is not a matter of possessing a certain property or set of properties but the possession of a certain history; there must be a history of 1.  selection resulting in 2. reproduction in order for an item to be considered to be in the possession of a function.  A feature of an item is a reproduction in this sense if the presence of that feature is the result of the workings of natural law such that had a previous item (the ancestor) been different in that respect the other item (the descendent) would differ accordingly.  Picture the way the color patterns of a chameleon’s skin match the surface upon which it sits.  If the surface had been a different color, the chameleon’s skin would differ accordingly (assuming the chameleon’s pigment arrangers are working as designed).  Further examples are the way that the characters on the paper that come out of a photocopier correspond in shape to the characters that are on the originals, or the way that children’s genes are copies of their parents’ genes.

The selection requirement for the possession of a function is the Darwinian process by which an item or feature is passed on because it has sufficiently often produced some effect that has contributed to the item’s successful reproduction as opposed to items lacking this feature.  Those properties that are reproduced because in the past their ancestors have had a certain effect which lead to successful reproduction are called the reproductively established character of the item, and the effect in question is the function of the item.  In short, to understand an item’s etiological function is to understand that which its ancestors did that accounts for the item’s reproduction as opposed to items lacking that feature.  In the case of biological items such as organs or inherited behaviors such as mating displays, the function is that effect an item’s ancestors had that accounted for the proliferation of the genes responsible for its production.  One’s genes are copies of one’s parents’ genes, and the genes that produce hearts have been selected by natural selection because they produce hearts.  Hearts themselves contribute to the increased likelihood that an individual’s genes will be passed on due to that fact that they pump blood, not because they make “lub-dub” sounds, or squish when they are stepped on, or freeze when put into liquid nitrogen, or any of a million other things.

Items other than genes and their biological products may have etiological functions as the theory merely requires that the reproductively established character to have been selected for reproduction because it has correlated with some effect more positively than items lacking this feature.  Millikan, for example, claims that the imperative and indicative linguistic moods possess the functions to produce behavior and to produce true beliefs respectively (see LTOBC: ch. 3).  Likewise, a learned behavior can have a function if it is reproduced because it has led to a reward; it being the function of the behavior to bring about this result, and a manufactured good such as a screwdriver can have turning screws as its function since it is this ability that has lead to the selection and reproduction of screwdrivers in manufacturing.

I am not aware that any of the proponents of etiological theories of function have publicly claimed that in addition to biological items, artifacts, and behaviors, social institutions may have functions as well, and yet they do meet the requirements. For example, it seems natural to say that a police department has as its function the prevention of the breaking of the law.  Suppose a town has grown large enough and that crime has become sufficiently problematic so as to require a police department.  It is likely that this new institution will be reproduced by the townspeople on the model of previous departments existing in other towns.  Thus the reproduction requirement for the possession of an etiological function is met.  The selection requirement will be met in that the reason features of previous police departments will be copied is because they have historically proven to be an effective method of preventing crime.  Examples are the sending out of officers on patrol, training programs for prospective officers, systems of rank among members of the force, the provision for a place to incarcerate suspects, and so on.  Since these features are selected for reproduction because of their historical ability to prevent crime, that is their function.  If the residents decide not to copy features from their knowledge of police departments in other towns, and instead decide to create entirely new forms in the hope that this will reduce crime by trial and error, then these new features would have what Millikan calls a derived proper function until they are reproduced for their success at which time they acquire a direct function.

In general, functional social institutions spring up wherever there is a recurring social problem in need of a solution:  children to be educated in schools, the sick to be healed in hospitals, crime to be prevented with police, wars to be won by armies, etc.   In the case of biological items or artifacts, the reproductively established character of the item is a property; it is that a hammer’s hardness, shape, and resiliency are able to produce the effect of driving nails that these properties are copied in the process of manufacture.  In the case of social institutions, it is not properties but behaviors that are reproduced for their effect of preventing or solving the problem in question.  Police officers repeat the behaviors of going out on patrol, apprehending suspects, and the like.  These repeated behaviors which have often enough produced such-and-such an effect in the past are the duties or obligations of the institution.  Sometimes but not always the requirement to perform these behaviors is made explicit in the education or training that is required by those taking on the position, and failure to perform these behaviors results in the imposition of a sanction.

To inquire concerning the etiological function of a social institution is not to provide a conceptual analysis of the concept, but is to approach it the way a biologist would try to understand the presence of some feature or behavior.  It is to answer the question, why is this feature there?  What does it do that accounts for its continued reproduction?  Why hasn’t it died out over the centuries and millennia?  What ancient and continually recurring problem does it solve that explains why it has proven valuable to keep around?  That is the question I will address in this series of posts: why hasn’t marriage died out?  What is its etiological function?  What effect does produce that keeps it valuable to keep around?  What enduring problem is solved by having male/female pairs take on the obligation to form a lasting relationship?

We will look into that in part 2.

Teleology and Modern Liberalism

Tags

dark enlightenment, teleology

For most of the history of Western moral and political thinking, teleological notions held sway. For beginners, teleology revolves around the claim that some things have a natural end, aka a telos, or “final cause.” The end of the heart for example is to see to it that the body receives the nutrients contained in the blood. Where something has an end, it also has a function; it’s function being to produce its end. So again, the function of the heart is to pump blood so that it may fulfill its end of providing nutrients to the body. Furthermore, where a thing has a function it has certain features that allow it to perform its function. These are the virtues or excellences of the thing and it is the possession of the excellences or virtues that make an item a good one of its kind.

Politics was traditionally conceived of as the study of the good for mankind, ethics as the cultivation of virtue. This general framework held sway for 2000 years through Greece, Rome, and the Middle Ages, where it perhaps attained its finest elaboration of the work of Aquinas. Strands even survived into the 20th century.[1] However, Aristotle tried to apply teleology to physics, and so his explanation for why, say, fire rises, was that it was the end, or final cause, of fire to go up. His explanation for why stones move downward when you drop them was that it was the final cause for stones to move downward. In other words, it was not much of an explanation. Rejection of final causes paved the way for the magnificent success of atomism and Newtonian physics as they swept away the teleological approach which had dominated for millennia. The movement of objects could now be explained by natural forces and laws without having to refer to final causes at all. As Hume writes:

“all causes are of the same kind, and that in particular there is no foundation for that distinction, which we sometimes make betwixt efficient causes, and causes sine qua non; or betwixt efficient causes, and formal, and material, and exemplary, and final causes.”[2]

This scientific revolution and its banishment of teleology was then applied to the understanding of humans: the individual self became a kind of atom with its own energy in the form of desires, politics became the study of the interactions of another kind of particle known as classes. Teleology was hunted out of place after place until the faculties of the mind as well were thought of not as having functions and purposes, but mere dispositions to act under certain circumstances—to produce behavioral “outputs” in response to sensory “inputs”—the way a physical object has a disposition to behave when acted upon by external forces.

But with functions and ends also went excellences, virtues, and goods. It then became the task of moral philosophy to find a place for value and morality in this new world consisting merely of atoms subject to natural forces. At first it seemed as if physics might provide a model.  Just as physical bodies were subject to laws of nature, it was thought that the human will might be subject to moral laws of nature, or laws of reason. Kant’s view of human reason as legislating universal laws is the purest elucidation of this idea. Since reason works on universal principles, moral rules thus became a kind of law of nature in the form of universal rights. What exactly our rights were was always the subject of disputes both intellectual and military. How do we come to know what our rights are? Are rights a scientific discovery? A metaphysical insight? A rule of reason? Merely utilitarian? Why hadn’t anyone realized this before? These questions were never satisfactorily answered. Also troubling was that atoms are not the kind of things that are good or bad, and no combination of them seems to add up to values. To put it in Hume’s terms, no matter of fact or relation of ideas can produce a value.

Well, it was thought in reply, if the universe has no values, at least we do. Thus utilitarianism treated all our desires equally and thought that we ought to seek the maximum satisfaction of our desires.[3] However, without a standard of goodness other than that something is desired, utilitarianism was unable to differentiate between good and bad desires such as, say, the desire that others suffer.

The model of the inherently free, self-governing, isolated, monadic self existing in a universe governed by universal rights is the essence of liberalism. Somewhere in between the self down below and universal rights up above lay culture, which came to be understood as an evil that ought to be thrown off as it merely serves to limit the freedom of the self. Ones cultural heritage, ones faith, ones family traditions, ones local attachments and affections all became imposed impediments and limitation to the free exercise of ones autonomous self-fulfillment, the true meaning of life.

Although modern philosophy claimed to eschew teleology, it was never quite able to do without it whenever it came to understanding matters of morality. For example, Kant himself speculated about the ends and function of nature, thinking that “no organ is to be found for any end unless it be the most fit and best adapted for that end” and that “the true function [of reason] must be to produce a will which is … good in itself” [emphasis mine]. Locke speculated about the “end of matrimony,” (specifically looking at nature’s ends in other animals in order to understand human behavior) and “the end of civil society.”

Just as it seemed the last vestiges of teleology had been wiped away from Western thought, it has made a comeback in recent decades. See “The modern philosophical resurrection of teleology” by Mark Perlman for a nice history of this revival and an overview of the various positions on the issue. The main issue was that it seems clear that biological items such as hearts do in fact have functions. This is as much a natural phenomena as the things studied by physics. Biology is focused on understanding the functions of the kidneys, the liver, mitochondria, etc., and how these things go about performing them, as well as the reasons why they sometimes fail to perform them. There still remained the problem of understanding which of all the things something can do are its function? Why is it the function of the heart to pump blood rather than to make a “lub-dub” sound?

For my money, the Enlightenment came to an end in 1984 with the publication of Millikan’s Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories:  New Grounds for Realism.  Here, Millikan killed off the final remnants of Descartes with her attack on “meaning rationalism,” revived Aristotelian realism about substances, and explained how teleology fits into the natural world.  According to Millikan, to have a feature as a “proper function” requires that the item was copied from previous ancestors (the way our genes are copied from our parents’ genes for example, or that manufactured items are copies of a prototype or blueprint) and that it was selected as opposed to objects lacking this feature because it did this thing. And so a hammer has driving nails as a function because it was its ability of previous hammers to drive nails by possessing some particular shape and hardness that caused this hammer get its shape and hardness through our copying these features in manufacture. Similarly, hearts have pumping blood as their function because it is due to that fact that its ancestors pumped blood that has helped account for proliferation of the genes responsible for making hearts.[5] The possession of a proper function is a purely natural fact of the matter as to whether an item possesses such a history.

To understand something’s function then is to understand why it keeps getting copied or reproduced:  what has it done that accounts for its continued reproduction?  Modern philosophy’s great oversight was its failure to include history as a feature of objects along with primary and secondary qualities.  (I sometimes wonder how things would have been different had Descartes held a bird in his hands instead of a piece of wax.  He would have had to try to account for the fact that the birds wings and feathers seem to have a function, but he would have been unable to have accounted for this (he probably would have concluded that God put this notion in him)).  This approach has the additional benefit in that it allows us to understand where classical teleology went wrong. Atoms, rocks, fire, chemical compounds, planets, and the like do not possess a history of selection and copying and so do not have functions.

It is clear to me that with teleology once again philosophically respectable and rightly understood the Western liberalism which grew up around the rejection of teleology is doomed. The main reason is that the cracks in the pillars of liberalism are now so deep, and the foundation so undermined, that the only reason the entire edifice hasn’t come crumbling down is that there has been nothing on offer to replace it. No one believes in the traditional liberal view of the self, no one really believes that utilitarianism is correct, nobody believes that universal rights are a priori moral principles, and everyone believes the nihilistic replacements that have been offered–post-modernism, emotivism, deconstructivism, multiculturalism–are even worse.

The reason Christians and secularists get along so well in the, whatever it is we are calling ourselves this week, is that we both accept teleology.  This blog is primarily about in what ways modern teleology can do the work it once did for Aristotle and Aquinas. In short, my argument will be that in place of utilitarianism which sought to replace nature’s ends with human ends, virtue ethics will once again be the name of the game (see here.)  In place of universal values, local historical contingencies will be respected. Instead of demands for abstract rights, claims will be resolved on the basis of social functions and their attendant virtues.  Instead of seeing oneself as an isolated monad, we will see ourselves as a part of a historical tradition. Instead of rejecting culture, tradition, and heritage, these things will be seen as ones identity, great inheritance, and moral guide.  I argue for these points in the succeeding posts.

[1] For a discussion of this history see Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue.
[2] Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Book 1, section XIV.
[3] Mill of course did try to separate, unsuccessfully, between higher and lower pleasures, the former of which was to receive greater consideration.

[5] See Millikan’s “Propensities, Exaptations, and the Brain” in White Queen Psychology and Other Essays for Alice.