Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
nary language of harming a subspecies such as bulldogs by breeding
animals that cannot breathe or of harming the telos of dogs in general by
creating defective breeds such as bulldogs, we mean that we harm the
individuals falling under those categories. One cannot harm a species (or
telos) except by harming the individuals falling under the concept.
Thus, the problem with creating chickens for current agricultural
systems is not a problem of harming “chickenness” in the abstract; it is
rather a matter of not meeting the inborn needs and wants of the actual
chickens we create. It is for this reason that we can morally condemn
confinement agriculture; the animals kept in its systems are
miserable
.
Could we genetically change the chickens to be happy under these con-
ditions (probably per impossibile physically, but logically possible), we
would not be causing harm because, in my view, abstract entities cannot
be harmed.
Telos and Engineering Human Nature
When applying the original Aristotelian concept of telos to human
beings, the issue becomes far more complex than those that arise about
animals. Obviously, if we look at humans in strictly biological terms, the
concept of telos can serve as a basis for the study of human biology as
it does for animal biology. There are, after all, certain ways in which
humans sense, reproduce, move, grow, metabolize, and so forth—the
sorts of things one would learn about in a course on human biology or
find in a textbook for such a course. Such a sense of telos, however,
would be extremely impoverished because it would not do justice to the
high degree of plasticity that can be found in the most significant aspects
of human nature, rationality, and sociality, as Aristotle recognized. (In
what follows, by the way, I would not claim to be doing Aristotelian
scholarship, a task one of my colleagues claims is impossible, since
Aristotle moves so quickly he stimulates one to
do
philosophy, not figure
out what he meant.)
In any case, it is clear that Aristotle recognizes that there is an enor-
mous range of answers to the human teleological characteristic of social-
ity. Humans are indeed social, yet the social nature of Spartans is very
different from the social nature of democratic Athenians, which again
differs from the social satrapy of Persia, which differs from feudal
