Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Mill on Nature
An examination of the normative power of appeals to nature or the
natural may begin with John Stuart Mill's remarkable essay “On
Nature,” one of his
Three Essays on Religion
. There, Mill questioned
the romantic view that nature exhibits an order or plan. He wanted in
part to refute the well-known argument from design, which infers the
existence of God from the orderliness of the natural world. Rather than
concede this argument for the existence of God, Mill wrote that the
violence, arbitrariness, and sheer horror of natural history—parasites,
predation, starvation, freezing, fire, and so on—led him to think that
principles of beneficent design could not be true of the natural world.
Nature is “too clumsily made and capriciously governed,” he wrote, to
justify the attribution of order, purpose, or design to its spontaneous
course.
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“In sober truth,” Mill declared, “nearly all the things which men are
hanged or imprisoned for doing to one another, are nature's every day
performances. Killing, the most criminal act recognized by human laws,
nature does once to every being that lives; and in a large proportion of
cases, after protracted tortures such as only the greatest monsters whom
we read of ever purposely inflicted on their living fellow-creatures.”
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How could so vicious an arrangement be thought of as well designed,
much less the creation of a beneficent deity?
To make his argument, Mill distinguished between two senses of the
term
nature
. First, nature may refer to everything in the universe—that
is, everything to which the laws of physics apply. In this context, the
natural constitutes the opposite of the supernatural. Everything human
beings do, in this sense, is natural. Second, nature may refer to the spon-
taneous arrangement of things—that is, all that is independent of or
unaffected by human agency. In this sense, the idea of the natural is
defined in terms of its significant opposite, the artificial or cultural. (This
distinction, fundamental in Western culture, harks back to the Greek dis-
tinction between
physis
and
nomos
, nature and convention.) Mill asks
whether nature in either of these senses possesses a design, an organiza-
tion, an order, or—as we might say—an integrity. Does nature either in
the sense of “everything” or in the sense of “untouched by humankind”
obey patterns, embody principles, or display uniformities that humanity
