Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
should reckon with and respect? In either of these senses, should we
design with nature, obey nature, or accept its barriers and bounds?
The answer is plainly affirmative insofar as we refer to nature in the
sense of “everything in the world.” The laws of nature—for example, of
gravitation and motion—apply to human beings as to all objects. In this
context, however, the admonition to obey nature or respect nature, while
excellent advice, would be unnecessary since no one can do otherwise.
By knowing and taking advantage of the laws of physics—such as the
principles of Newtonian mechanics—humanity can command nature, as
it were, by obeying it. Mill concludes: “To bid people to conform to the
laws of nature when they have no power but what the laws of nature
give them—when it is a physical impossibility for them to do the small-
est thing otherwise than through some law of nature—is an absurdity.
The thing they need to be told is, what particular law of nature they
should make use of in a particular case.”
21
Now consider the term nature in the sense in which it means not every-
thing that happens but that which takes place without human agency.
How may we understand the maxim to respect nature in this sense, that
is, to keep ourselves within nature's spontaneous course? This maxim,
Mill writes, “is not merely, as it is in the other sense, superfluous and
unmeaning, but palpably absurd and contradictory.” He explains:
For while human action cannot help conforming to Nature in the one meaning
of the term, the very aim and object of action is to alter and improve nature in
the other meaning. If the natural course of things were perfectly right and satis-
factory, to act at all would be a gratuitous meddling, which as it could not make
things better, must make them worse. . . . If the artificial is not better than the
natural, to what end are all the arts of life? To dig, to plough, to build, to wear
clothes, are direct infringements of the injunction to follow nature.
22
Mill's argument poses a dilemma for those like Lander who seek to
ban the manipulation of the human genome in order to maintain human-
ity as a product of nature. If one considers the term nature to refer to
everything that obeys the laws of nature—in short, all that is not super-
natural—then it is clear that whatever humans do is natural, depends
entirely on nature, and is completely consistent with nature. If one sup-
poses that terms like nature and the natural refer only to that which has
not been altered intentionally by human beings, then humans cannot help
but depart and exclude themselves from nature's spontaneous course.
