Thursday, January 30, 2025

Teleology and the normal/abnormal distinction

Believers in teleology also tend to believe in a distinction between the normal and the abnormal. I think teleology can be prised apart from a normal/abnormal distinction, however, if we do something that I think we should do for independent reasons: recognize teleological directedness without a telos-to-be-attained, a target to be hit. An example of such teleological directedness is an athlete trying to run as fast as possible. There isn’t a target telos: for any speed the athlete reaches, a higher speed would fit even better with the athlete’s aims. But there is a directional telos, an aim tlos: the athlete aims in the direction of higher speed.

One might then say the human body in producing eyes has a directional telos: to see as well as possible. Whether one has 20/20 or 20/15 or 20/10 vision, more acuity would fulfill that directional telos better. On this view, there is no target telos, just a direction towards better acuity. If there were a target telos, say a specific level of acuity, we could identify non-attainment with abnormalcy and attainment with normalcy. But we need not. We could just say that this is all a matter of degree, with continuous variation between 20/0 (not humanly available) and 20/∞ (alas humanly available, i.e., total blindness).

I am not endorsing the view that there is no normal/abnormal in humans. I think there is (e.g., an immoral action is abnormal; a moral action is normal). But perhaps the distinction is less often applicable than friends of teleology think.

4 comments:

Austin McCoy said...

It doesn't seem quite right to say that the goal of the eye is to see as well as possible. It might not be conducive to human ends, for example, for human beings to have x-ray vision (for reasons of privacy) or to be able to see the microorganisms in the air and on our skin (gross!). If this is right, then it makes more sense to call something like 20/20 normal and less acute vision that that abnormal.

Austin McCoy said...

Or maybe a better way to put it is that what it is to "see as well as possible" is indexed to other species norms

Alexander R Pruss said...

I've argued elsewhere that "as well as possible" doesn't mean what it literally looks like it means. It just means that for any degree of the thing, the teleology would pull towards a higher degree.

I think you're right that there are limits. These probably come from other aspects of our teleology. Maybe it's not so much that it's gross to see microorganisms, but that this much visual acuity would overwhelm our brain's visual processing abilities. So maybe a better way would to describe our visual teleology is not as a directedness towards seeing better, but seeing more usefully, or something like that. But I think the general point still remains. We aren't aiming at maxing out our useful seeing, but in the direction of maxing it out.

Wesley C. said...

Dr. Pruss, what do you think is the best argument in favor of the existence of stance-independent moral norms? That is, the idea that one really should seek out the good over the bad, which goes beyond simply having an in-built strong preference for the good such that one would practically never want to do evil, such that this "shoulding" is enough to even show one what one SHOULD do or prefer, independent of the desires or strong inclinations one HAPPENS to have?