29 June 2008

Politics and theory of biology - part 1

John Lunstroth

[Summary of this set of posts] A key principle, or natural feature, of political order (theory) is the recognition that individuals and groups of various kinds have the capacity to choose. They have free will, intention, purpose, goals, responsibility, duties, liberty and so on. A key theoretical feature of science, reflected in evolutionary theories of biology, is that nature (including all life) is the result of random processes, it lacks purpose. Is it reasonable to assume (or conclude) there is no such thing as purposive behavior? Contemporary economic, political and legal theorists, such as John Finnis, Amartya Sen, and Martha Nussbaum, grounded in the human rights ethos that was realized after WW2, are reviving the purposive theory of Aristotle’s biology in a secular context. I will be arguing in the rest of this thread that the political world is of greater importance to living things than the world of science because “man is a political animal.” Whereas science is about how we know and manipulate the world, politics is a feature of human identity. Therefore the theory of biology implied by and required for politics is more complete than that found in science and should have epistemological priority over it. Given that, “biology” as such is too limited of a category; rather, per Aristotle, biology, ethics and politics must be considered as the main component areas of the relevant category. I use the word “politic” and its derivatives as the superseding, categorical term that that most accurately refers to the world of living things. I assimilate scientific biology into political theory, and in the case of metaphysical disagreements reason political theory has priority. The disciplinary adjustment to a more comprehensive theory [of biology] has immediate implications in medical and legal education; in the ethics of scientific experimentation with living things; in theory of medicine and law; in understanding some of the conundrums of public health ethics related to the ideas of community and social determinants; in political and moral theory; in human rights and health; and so on.[end of summary].

It is self-evident that purposive behavior is a feature of human and other animal existence. It is widely institutionalized and assumed in all cultures. It is the basis of all social structures. There is no political philosophy, or human rights, without the assumption that human beings engage in purposive acts, that they have and can act on intention and responsibility. It is the basis of theories of justice, the laws, and so on. Let us assume for the sake of this argument that human beings engage in intentional acts.


Given that, then there is an epistemological conflict in the academy that runs very deep, not only philosophically but practically. On one side are the life sciences, including a significant part of medicine. The theory of life underlying the life sciences is based on physical determinism and as a foundational matter intentionality, responsibility, and related concepts are precluded by the theory of having anything more than illusionary existence. On the other side are the disciplines that can be gathered under the umbrella of political philosophy, including law, human rights, continental philosophy, qualitative sociology and anthropology, and so on, in which the ideas of intentionality, responsibility, etc. are so fundamental the disciplines could not exist without them. A discipline like public health encompasses both sides and thus can be thought of as having multiple personalities.

This raises some methodological questions if we are to reasonably make sense of the conflict. To begin with, are the two domains of knowledge commensurate enough to make a comparison? Can we choose to believe in evolution (a random process by which life and living forms develop) and believe in the political nature of the human being at the same time? Is this a conflict between two domains, or is it containable as one between theories of biology? Is it a scientific conflict? A philosophical conflict? A conflict between theories? A political conflict?

Let’s start with the idea it is a scientific conflict. That would mean, in essence, that politics would be reduced to science, because in order to compare the two ways of seeing the world we would have to decide science was the primary language, and assume for the sake of the argument science is the most reliable, best way to know something about the natural world. And, of course, we have no problem with the idea politics is a feature of the natural world. In this reading politics, and intentional, can be best explained and described as matters if not fully understood, fully understandable as science.

The big problem with the scientific perspective is that science, as a descriptive language of nature, has no facility to address the observation of purpose. It simply denies a priori that purpose is a feature of nature. It assigns observations of purpose into a few epistemological categories, e.g., purpose is an illusion; purpose is a useful construction based on an illusion; purpose is an epiphenomena of biochemical events that themselves have no purpose, an emergent property; and so on. Purpose is, to use a phrase from Marx’s science, “false consciousness.” It is a comforting and perhaps necessary illusion, but an illusion nonetheless.

The foregoing scientific position is of fundamental importance to our subject because it underwrites, with tremendous social authority, the extension of its metaphysics into all other disciplines and domains. It is important to keep in mind science has co-opted philosophical ontology to a significant degree, and epistemology to a lesser degree.

The argument can be summarized as follows. We, scientists, have the best tools for understanding and describing nature. Our tools lead us to theorize there is no such thing as purpose. Therefore we do not recognize purpose and it must not exist. If you see something that looks like purpose, since it cannot exist, it is an illusion.

Why would the tools of science lead scientists (biology theorists) to conclude there is no such thing as purpose? In short, because Aristotle’s more or less secular biology was assimilated by the Church and when the early modern philosophers of science teased apart nature from the Church, they left the baby in the bath water, so to speak. Explaining in detail exactly what that means is beyond the scope of a blog post, but the general meaning can be communicated.

In the 16th and 17th centuries, as our contemporary ideas about science were being formed, philosophers of science argued that purpose was not properly the concern of those who were investigating nature. There are many assumptions buried in this conceit, chief among which is that the idea of purpose is not part of the natural world. This particular mistake was entered into because of the looming historical presence of the Church and God in intellectual life of the time. Since scientists studied nature, and nature and God were separate (courtesy of the Church), and purpose was supplied by God, therefore the study of nature did not include the study of purpose. This set of arguments had at its core Aristotle’s analysis of causation, and at the time did not extend to theory of biology, chiefly because that had yet to precipitate from philosophy as a separate discipline.

Aristotle described four causes or explanatory principles. These are well known and much discussed or dismissed: material, efficient, formal and final causes. Discussions about cause are attempts to describe principles of change. That change occurs is irrefutable and self-evident. Change in inanimate things is much easier to describe and explain than change in living things. Change in inanimate things is more or less readily (but incompletely when a living thing is in the causal chain) describable in terms of material and efficient causation. Material causation is that related to the matter that is undergoing the change; and efficient causation is related to the agent acting on the matter to change it and/or to the principles that guide the action of the agent. A sculpture is made of marble, its material cause. It is sculpted by the sculptor (according to the principles of sculpting), its efficient cause. Or, moisture in the air precipitates around a mote of dust and becomes a rain drop. The material cause is water, and the efficient cause is the mote of dust in the cloud, with wind, and other appropriate conditions, all of which constitute the efficient cause of the change in state of the water from an indistinct cloud of vapor into a distinct drop of water.

What the founders of the empirical tradition, such as Frances Bacon, did, was to restrict descriptions and explanations of causation in nature to efficient (and perhaps material) causation. Hume later solidified this outlook.

There was a problem though, and that problem has yet to adequately addressed. It is virtually impossible to describe animate things with any kind of accuracy without using the concepts of formal and final causation. I am now getting into an immensely complicated subject. It is historically complicated because of the influence of the church as the fundament out of which, or from which, science distinguished itself; it is philosophically complicated because it directly invokes fundamental epistemological and ontological questions; and it is culturally and rhetorically complicated because of such things as the “culture wars,” the association of criticism of evolution with Christian ideology, and the other topics that are well addressed in the sociology of science, including the fact scientists resist being convinced by reason and empirical data of things they do not believe in. A formal cause is that which the changed thing becomes; and a final cause the purpose, end or reason for the coming into being of the new thing, or the development of the living thing. It is that-for-the-sake-of-which. Although a cause need not have intention to be either formal or final, when intention is present it is clearly an example of, or demonstration of, final causation and in some cases formal causation.

There is a complex relationship between formal and final causation. In thinking about living things such as plants, in which intention is not much of an issue, formal and final causation are more or less completely overlapping. It is hard to separate the two. Likewise with law, with an important exception. The same law-as-statute acts both as formal and final cause; that is, the law determines what state of affairs shall (or should) develop, and it embodies a non-exclusive reason for-the-sake-of-which that state of affairs should come into being. However, one must recognize two kinds of law when considering law as formal or final cause. When thinking of “the laws of nature,” such as gravity, relativity, etc., then it appears final cause is collapsed into formal cause. But, when thinking of “natural law” the opposite condition holds. Formal cause collapses into final cause, since the central that-for-the-sake-of-which of all laws (natural, international, customary, constitutional, legislative) is the social and moral order, the common good. When considered as a whole, the laws embody a system of justice, which, for any political community, is the [pre-existing] form or constitution of the common good (and identity). With regard to a human life, one can discern a distinction. The formal cause of a human life is the mature adult, in which all the faculties or capacities are developed and the potential to flourish is complete. But what is the purpose of a human life? For a life such as that of a Supreme Court justice, who determines basic laws well into the twilight of physical existence, the purpose can be thought of as being indeterminable until the end of the life (or perhaps of the major social role of that life). In any event, the relationship between formal and final causation can be stated as a theoretical matter, but teasing apart the distinction in living things can be difficult.

Given that the only legitimate object of science (empiricism) is the physical world, and because formal and final causation are not permissible scientific concepts, then purpose and the world of ends are not proper objects of science. Since the only thing that exists is physical matter (God, consciousness, mental and other non-corporeal entities have no independent existent), and since efficient causation is unidirectional (except in the quantum world), then the world is determined by physical conditions. That is why evolution must be framed as being without purpose, the result of random events. These key features of the metaphysics of science result in or can be summarized as a material or physical determinism.

There are, in this narrative, two elements I want to highlight. First, the limitation on the idea of the kinds of things or matter that can be said to really exist; and two, the limited idea of causation.

Remember why all of this is important. The limitation of the idea of causation, considered in the context in which the limitation was developed, limits the objects of science [as I defined it in another post]. In turn the theory of biology is conceptually limited. In other words, a series or chain of constraints can be traced to the limitations on the definition of science imposed by early theorists of empiricism, and these constraints directly affect the theory or philosophy of biology or human (animal) nature. The theory of the human directly impacts theory and practice of [scientific] medicine, ethics, human rights, and politics.

In this subsection the general question we are considering [politics and theory of biology] is whether viewing the conflict surrounding the idea of purpose as strictly a scientific matter is justified or reasonable. Since the ontology of science, and its theory of causation, preclude the possibility of purpose, it does not seem reasonable. If we seek to consider dignity as a concept with full epistemological and ontological status, as something that exists in its own right and that can be directly and reliably known, then we cannot use science.

***

The relationship between science and final cause is not quite as simple as I portrayed it above, although that position is widely held. Consider the following paragraph from the Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on causation, written by Richard Taylor for the 1967 edition, after a short introductory section on “Aristotle’s Four Causes.”

Partly because of the rise of physical science and the accompanying demise of Aristotelian modes of thought, the concept of cause is now generally that of an efficient cause or, more specifically what Mill called as “physical” cause. The remainder of this discussion [90%] will, accordingly, be devoted to this concept.
The concept of final causation can hardly be said to be retired in orthodox science.

A law of nature, such as “the law of gravity,” explains in advance how certain things will happen, given a certain set of initial conditions. I touch on this above, noting that it is practically impossible to describe living things without resort to teleological language that implies notions of formal and final causation. In fact, the theory of biology (life) held out as “fact” and ascribed to by most scientists, evolution, is deeply teleological. Darwin (1859), who articulated a theory of life that, as amended, does not, or is not supposed to, require purpose. But with little thought it is easy to see neo-Darwinism is deeply teleological, if not essentialist. Natural selection and adaptation, the two driving forces of evolution, occur for-the-sake-of reproductive success and survival. Is this not the “force that through the green fuse drives the flower?” Although teleological language is endemic in academic biology writing, it is dismissed by randomists as short-hand or sloppiness. The problem is so deep and structural though, such simple dismissals are hardly convincing, much less do they meet the standards of empiricism held by the randomists. It is impossible to talk about living things without using it. This is a reflection of the general problem discussed in this set of posts. Mathematical formulas, to the extent they accurately reflect physical processes, fall into the category of final causes.

[Because philosophers do philosophy, even if they cannot see into deeper waters, I want to note that just because a law (or mathematical formula) can be described, and the law works reliably to make predictions, philosophers do not agree on its ontological status. This is especially complicated for physicalists or materialists because 1) physical creation is supposed to exist solely as the result of random events; 2) the physical world, which is supposed to be all and only what exists, does not readily provide a substance in which the laws can be said to exist; and 3) given the mysterious nature of the existence of a law, how could such a thing have an effect on the material world, especially 4) since essences are in principle impossible.]

For example, here is an excerpt from a lecture on Aristotle’s explanatory principles that I found online. References to Aristotle’s texts are in the lecture notes.
1. To say that there are ends (telĂȘ) in nature is not to say that nature has a purpose. Aristotle is not seeking some one answer to a question like “What is the purpose of nature?” Rather, he is seeking a single kind of explanation of the characteristics and behavior of natural objects. That is, plants and animals develop and reproduce in regular ways, the processes involved (even where not consciously aimed at or deliberated about) are all toward certain
ends.

2. There is much that can be said in opposition to such a view. But at least it is not ridiculous, as is sometimes supposed. In so far as functional explanation still figures in biology, there is a residue of Aristotelian teleology in biology. And it has yet to be shown that biology can get along without teleological notions. The notions of function, and what something is for, are still employed in describing at least some of nature.
A couple of final observations that will carry over into the political analysis. The ontological problem with final cause is centered on the idea that the form, the end (telos), pre-exists the development of the matter into the form. Thus, Aristotle says the constitution of a polis exists before it is written down, that the writing of the constitution is the reflection onto paper of the internal cohesive principles of the political community that came into being naturally (for the common good). For example, think of the idea of the French constitution. This way of thinking presents immense explanatory problems for a system that only recognizes efficient causation and physical matter (substance) that can be quantified. It was historically rejected by the foundational science theorists, not because it was not useful, but because the only explanation it was associated was religious. The dispute between the creationists and the scientists dates into the late middle ages.

Contemporary economic, political and legal theorists, such as Amartya Sen, Martha Nussbaum, and John Finis, grounded in the secular doctrine of human rights realized in the International Bill of Human Rights, are reviving Aristotle’s biology in a secular context. I will be arguing in the rest of this thread that because the political world is of greater importance to living things than the world of science, the theory of biology implied and required for politics is more important than the theory of biology used by the scientists.

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