The Fifth Way, remixed even more

In the previous two posts (here and here) I offered interpretations or remixes of Aquinas’s Fourth and Fifth ways read as ways of showing how a theistic Aristotelianism solves a pressing problem that the basic Aristotelian metaphysics cannot solve.

Here I want to do again for the Fifth Way, but now I will depart further from the text, and so while the previous two posts might have been interpretations, this one is much more of just a remix of the Fifth Way, with some ingredients from my version of the Fourth Way thrown in.

On Aristotelian metaphysics, each substance aims at its own good. The good of a substance is defined by the substance’s form, and the form points the substance at that good. But this good is just an internal good of the substance. Think of this internal good as akin to MacIntyre’s internal goods of a practice. The directedness at the internal goods is largely a matter of a priori metaphysical reasoning about substance. But now let’s go back to the things themselves—for, after all, the Five Ways are supposed to be empirical. If we do that, we come across two facts I want to stress.

First, the internal goods of substances tend to be intelligible to us as goods independently of the forms of these substances. Squirrels grow and reproduce. We understand growing and reproduction as valuable features. Imagine that squirrels instead characteristically scratched themselves to near-death. Even if their nature specified such self-scratching as their end, without a further more comprehensive story such self-scratching wouldn’t be intelligible to us as a good. Now, it is true that we tend to judge things by ourselves: it is also our human good to grow and to reproduce, and so it is easy for us to recognize that as good in squirrels. But I do not think we should say that when we judge squirrels’ growth and reproduction as a good thing independently of the form of the squirrel we are simply mistaken—and yet if we were just imposing merely human standards, we would be mistaken.

We might make the point as follows. It is good for a squirrel to fulfill its form by growing and reproducing. But it is also good, in a different sense of “good”, that the squirrel’s form includes growth and reproduction. This different sense of “good” is missing from basic Aristotelianism, a point central to my reading of the Fourth Way.

So we have something that calls for an explanation: Why is the squirrel’s form aimed at something that is actually good in this further sense?

And here is a related and but less abstract question. The teleology of a squirrel harmonizes to a significant extent with the goods of other species. We have an ecology. A “circle of life”.

The squirrel’s activity, thus, is not only directed at its internal good, and that internal good is intelligible as a good apart from its internal form, but the pursuit of that internal good harmonizes with the goods of other things in nature. This coordination between the ends of different species is something that basic Aristotelianism has a serious difficulty explaining.

There are thus two senses in which there are external goods found in nature: first, the internal goods are themselves typically intelligible as goods independently of the forms that define them; second, the end-directed activities of the organisms are good for the ecology at large. Both of these call for an explanation, and Aquinas’ suggested explanation seems excellent: “Therefore some intelligent being exists by whom all natural things are directed to their end.”

Note that the ecological dimensions might be explained evolutionarily, as long as we have an explanation of the coincidence between the normative and the statistical, a coincidence that forms the heart of my previous reading/remix of the Fifth Way.

Fun with ecological simulations

This week and last I'm having fun using AgentCubes to teach programming to gifted middle schoolers (the link is to the Frogger activity, but you can close the video and make whatever you like). One of the activities was designing a simple ecological simulation. It's very easy to set something up where there are, say, cows and grass, and the cows eat and reproduce, while the grass reproduces. But it's hard to tweak the parameters (reproduction rates, movement speeds, hunger thresholds) in a way that makes the simulation stable, with the population neither going out of control nor collapsing.

Here's a very simple simulation, with sexual reproduction (red bulls and white cows), and some immortal snakes that symbolize other dangers thrown in. But eventually the cow population explodes, destroys the grass, and we're left with just the immortal snakes.

When thinking about the problems that natural selection needs to find solutions to, it is easy for non-biologists like me to think primarily about individual immediate challenges: how to find a mate, how to reproduce, how to avoid predators, etc. But there is also the problem of avoiding unstable ecosystems. And these problems seem to me to be in one sense more difficult to find natural selection solutions to: it is only after a number of generations that one can evaluate whether the problem has been solved, and so the evolutionary process must be slower and there is the danger that variations that are ecologically beneficial in the long term might have enough short-term unfortunate consequences that they be selected against. Nothing new to biologists, no doubt, but I hadn't realized this.

Is pollution bad for the earth?

A curious thought hit me today: What could it mean for something, say pollution, to be bad for the earth? We have, I think, a fairly good idea of what it is for something to be good or bad for a human, a dog, a wasp, a tree and maybe even a bacterium. But for a planet? For humans, dogs, etc., there are roughly three accounts of well-being: (a) the hedonist account that well-being is pleasure and absence of pain, (b) the desire account that well-being is (roughly) fulfillment of desires and lack of frustration of desires, and (c) the flourishing account. Now, (a) requires consciousness and (b) requires mind, so neither is applicable to a tree, a bacterium or the earth.

That leaves the flourishing account. But while I have some idea about canine and waspish flourishing, I have very little idea about planetary flourishing. For instance, does hosting life make a planet flourish, or to the contrary, do planets flourish more when they are devoid of life? After all, if the average member of a natural kind is likely to have a normal degree of flourishing, it appears that lifeless planets have a normal degree of flourishing. So as long as we don't literally blow the earth into pieces, it seems that whatever pollution we inflict on it, we won't push it below the normal level of well-being.

But perhaps we need to distinguish different kinds of planets, and different kinds of planets have different kinds of flourishing. Thus, maybe, a planet in a "habitable zone" in a stellar system has the support of organic life as part of its flourishing. But what kind of organic life is needed for flourishing? Is the planet better off for hosting more complex life-forms? (Is a house better off for having people rather than geckos in it?) Or for a greater diversity of life-forms? (Is a house better off for having people and cockroaches rather than just people?) It seems plausible that unless we have a metaphysical teleology, either of the Aristotelian or the theistic sort, for planets in the habitable zone, these questions have no answer. And even if we have such a teleology, the epistemology of that teleology will be difficult, because the earth is the only habitable planet we know of, and typically we learn about the teleological properties of a natural kind by observing multiple instances.

But perhaps it is a mistake to think of the earth as rocks, water and atmosphere. Rather, the suggestion goes, the ecosystem is not just hosted by the earth, but is a part of the earth. I am not sure we should buy that. While parthood might not in general be transitive, it seems plausible that since we are parts of the ecosystem, then if the ecosystem were a part of the earth, we would be parts of the earth. But surely we are not parts of the earth. We live on earth, but we are not parts of it any more than we are parts of the galaxy (though the earth is a part of the galaxy).

But let us grant that the ecosystem is a part of the earth—or maybe that "the earth" is sometimes a metonymy for the ecosystem. In that case, pollution that causes destruction of a part of the ecosystem without a compensating growth elsewhere does seem to be contrary to the flourishing of the earth. But more detailed study of flourishing still seems mired in epistemic problems. It is very hard to figure out the teleology of the ecosystem as a whole, unless we accept revelation and say that the teleology is the support of humanity.

Love of substances

Thesis: Necessarily, it is appropriate to love x in the primary (or focal) sense of "love" if and only if x is a substance.

Why? Maybe because of the Augustinian and Thomistic doctrine of the interchangeability of being and love, and the Aristotelian doctrine that substances are what has being in the primary sense.

If the Thesis is true, this has metaphysical and ethical consequences. Metaphysical consequence: All persons are substances. Ethical consequence: We shouldn't love countries, nations, ecosystems, galaxies, ideas, etc. in the primary sense of "love". If, further, we add the Aristotelian claim that the only real substances there are beings that have life, we get the useful fact that we shouldn't love our non-living material possessions in the primary sense of "love". (I am open, however, to particles being substances. It's odd to say that I should love particles in the primary sense. But less odd when one considers the fact that they do have a sort of "life", and even less odd when one adds that love needs to be proportioned to the dignity of the beloved, so that particles, though lovable in the primary sense, are lovable in only a little way.)