Biomedical Engineering Reference
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promulgated and defended by Aristotle. The answer is clearly that my
view is ultimately neither true to nor compatible with a strict and clas-
sical Aristotelian account. For Aristotle, of course, telos was fixed and
immutable, with the evolution of species or natural kinds ruled out a
priori, in part on the grounds that such evolution would make the world
unknowable. Aristotle was familiar with the version of evolution by
natural selection advanced by Empedocles. When confronted by fossils,
Aristotle would simply have dismissed them as another natural kind—
stone fish, for example—rather than acquiesce to the possibility of a
nature eternally in flux.
Hence, I have not advanced an orthodox Aristotelian view of telos. I
have rather adapted the concept to a worldview where it is plain that
natural kinds do undergo transformation over time, with biological
species being, as it were, stop-time snapshots of what is inherently, in
the long run, in flux. And I believe that this is a perfectly plausible move.
Whether species change by traditional breeding and artificial selection
(as in plants), natural selection done historically over aeons, or rapidly
by genetic engineering does not obviate the need I have outlined for the
notion of telos to serve as an ethical goal or target for the treatment of
individual sentient creatures at human hands. As I have said, the telos
of an animal represents the set of needs and wants, genetically encoded
and environmentally expressed, that characterize a certain sort of animal
at a given period of time. From an animal's nature, we get a sense of
what matters to animals of that sort during a certain stage of evolution.
For that reason, the ethical value of the concept of telos in my scheme
is to tell us how to best treat individual animals of a certain characteriz-
able kind. Unlike certain environmental ethicists, I believe one's ultimate
moral responsibility is to individuals, not to species. One could certainly
view species as morally more important than individuals—say, in certain
theologically based metaphysical schemes. But in my view, the focus of
moral concern is always individuals. The only sense, according to the
account I have developed, in talking about moral obligations to species
is in terms of the moral effect of what we do to species on the individu-
als making up that species. For instance, if we insert the gene for some
defect into dogs, as we have indeed done in virtue of breeding for show
standards, that is wrong because it harms individual animals, not because
it does harm to the abstract notion of “dogness.” When we speak in ordi-
