CULTURE, VALUE AND
MEANING OF LIFE
VALUE OF NATURE AND
HUMAN LIFE
Dr Alexandra Cook
Questions to think about
during the lecture:
What feelings/impressions do you
experience when you hear the
word ‘Nature’?
What is your concept of the good
life and is nature part of it?
LECTURE OUTLINE
I. Nature’s instrumental value:
 Bacon, Descartes and Locke (17th cent.)
 E.O. Wilson (20th-21st century)
II. Nature’s intrinsic value:
 Aristotle (4th century Greece BCE)
 Rousseau & Kant (18th century Europe)
 Leopold (20th century U.S.)
III. Nature the enemy?
IV. Further reading
I. Nature’s instrumental value
Bacon, Descartes, Locke and
Wilson
What is instrumental value?
The worth of something is based on its
ability to help us secure something we
want, e.g. health or wealth.
Francis Bacon (17th c.)
Bacon envisions a utopian state which uses bioengineering and other technologies to
achieve material prosperity and political
apathy.
Therefore: he looks at nature “under constraint
and vexed…forced out of her natural state”
to achieve the “relief of man’s estate…”
(Great Instauration and Advancement of
Learning, 1627).
What is ‘man’s estate’? Brutal and hard, full of
toil, disease and death.
René Descartes (17th cent.):
More struggles against nature; the medical
imperative to exploit nature:
We should “make ourselves masters and
possessors of nature…to enable us to enjoy
without pain the fruits of the earth and all the
goods one finds in it, but also principally for
the maintenance of health, which
unquestionably is the first good and the
foundation of all the other goods of this
life…” (emph. added; Discourse on Method,
pt. 6).
John Locke (17th cent):
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“…of the products of the earth useful
to…man nine-tenths [9/10] are the effects of
labour…in most of them ninety-nine
hundredths are wholly to be put on the
account of labour” (emph. original; Second
Treatise of Government, ¶ 40, 1688).
Earth’s value = 1%!
Life is a struggle; people must toil hard to
extract their living from the soil.
E.O. Wilson (b. 1929),
Harvard entomologist:
“Biodiversity is our most valuable but least
appreciated resource.”
“Few are aware of how much we already
depend on wild organisms for medicine….
In the United States a quarter of all
prescriptions…are substances extracted
from plants. Another 13 percent come from
microorganisms and another 3 percent more
from animals….these materials are only a
tiny fraction of the multitude available” (The
Diversity of Life, 1992, 281, 283).
Nature’s creativity:
divine or evolutionary?
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“Organisms are superb chemists…they are
collectively better than all the world’s chemists at
synthesizing organic molecules of practical use.
Through millions of generations each kind of plant,
animal, and microorganism has experimented with
chemical substances to meet its special needs.
Each species has experienced astronomical
numbers of mutations and genetic
recombinations…The experimental products thus
produced have been tested by the unyielding forces
of natural selection…” (Wilson, DL, 285).
Common drugs
Drug
Plant source
Use
Aspirin
Meadowsweet
(Filipendula ulmaria)
Analgesic
Bromelain
Pineapple
(Ananas comosus)
Anti-inflammatory
Caffeine
Tea
Stimulant
(Camellia sinensis)
Opium poppy
Analgesic
Codeine
(Papaver somniferum)
Camphor
Camphor tree
(Cinnamomum camphora)
Rubefacient
Chinese medicine
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Drugs sourced from plants and animals;
Many still prefer natural sources, e.g. bear
bile instead of a synthetic or herbal
substitute;
What about species extinction?
Or cruelty? E.g. extraction of bear bile
Can these practices be justified in the age of
synthetic drugs?
II. Nature’s intrinsic value:
good in itself, not as a means
Aristotle, Rousseau and Kant
Aristotle (4th cent. BCE):
Contemplation of nature part of good or
philosophic life:
“…nature…offers immeasurable pleasures …to
those who can learn the causes and are
naturally lovers of wisdom…in all natural
things there is something wonderful” (emph.
added; Parts of Animals, 645a10-20).
This idea inseparable from that of telos.
Aristotle: the idea of Telos
Design, purpose (telos), order in nature:
“…the non-random, the for-something’s-sake, is present in the
works of nature most of all, and the end for which they have
been composed or have come to be occupies the place of the
beautiful” (Parts of Animals, 645a25-30, 4th cent.).
Example of telos:
-we posit that one of the purposes of the plant is to perpetuate the
species;
-the reproductive organs (next slide) enable the plant to do this;
these organs are purposive, and not just random body parts.
A key problem with teleology: humans decide what the telos is.
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This may work for the narrow example given above, but what
answers can we give to the question: what are species for?
Camellia sinensis
(what is it?)
The Argument from Design
The orderliness or design in living things is proof of a divine creator,
e.g. the Christian God;
Consider the work of Fibonacci (12th cent.), who discovered a
number series that describes many natural phenomena:
-1,2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377…(e.g. rabbit
population increase)
-The ratio of successive terms yields the ‘Golden Section’,
.618034, or phi;
- phi describes such phenomena as phyllotaxis, or the angle of
arrangement of seeds, petals and leaves in plants;
-An angle of phi provides optimal light and rain exposure.
‘Intelligent design’ theory uses such information to support a
modernized version of the argument from design.
Order in Nature
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‘There are two sets of
`clockwise’ and two
sets of `anti-clockwise’
spirals. The number of
outer clockwise spirals
is 55. The number of
spirals in each of the
other sets is a
Fibonacci number’
(courtesy, Professor
Laurence Goldstein).
J.-J. Rousseau (1712-1778):
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“…earth in the harmony of her three
kingdoms offers man a living, fascinating and
enchanting spectacle, the only one of which
his eyes and his heart can never grow
weary.”
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“At such times [the observer’s] senses are
possessed by a deep and delightful reverie,
and in a state of blissful self-abandonment
he loses himself in the immensity of this
beautiful order” (emph. added; pt. 7,
Reveries of the Solitary Walker, 1782).
Immanuel Kant (18th cent.):
“…to take an immediate interest in the
beauty of nature…is always a mark of a
good soul; and…it is at least indicative
of a temper of mind favourable to the
moral feeling that it should readily
associate itself with the contemplation
of nature” (emph. original; Critique of
Judgement, ¶ 42, 1790).
Why do we take this interest?
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Form or pattern in nature (Fibonacci)
Independence of wild things from human
intervention;
Their spontaneity: “They are simply
there…indifferent to human desires or
artifice”;
Distinct from civilization (lit. life in cities).
See Simonsen, “The Value of Wildness”.
Reasons for our interest, cont.
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Inaccessibility
Grandeur
Uniqueness
Beauty (order, harmony)
Kant summarized all of this with the
term ‘sublime’.
Wild nature
Evolution rejects
Intelligent Design
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Charles Darwin (19th cent.) replaced purposeful
design with his theory of evolution;
Evolution holds that the way organisms are
organized arises from natural selection over
generations of a species (see Wilson, above);
Natural selection favors those organisms/species
most adapted to their environments; less welladapted organisms/species tend to die out;
There is no divine Creation, no higher purpose for
nature; it has no purpose at all, and hence no telos.
III. Nature the age-old enemy?
The Tsunami, Katrina, SARS,
bird flu…
Unwelcome Occurrences
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SARS, AIDS and avian flu can all be fatal to humans;
Does that mean that nature is our enemy?
Is it ever valid to speak of such events without considering
human actions?
Some examples: mangrove swamps protect coastlines during
storms and tidal waves, but people have destroyed them in
many places;
Current human dietary preferences involve raising enormous
populations of poultry, among which a disease such as flu can
rapidly spread.
Is there some ‘nature’ acting separately from humans?
Two Philosophers’ Views
Aldo Leopold (1887-1948)
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)
Leopold and Rousseau
Leopold:
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‘an ecological interpretation
of history” shows “[t]hat
man is only a member of a
biotic team….Many
historical events, hitherto
explained solely in terms of
human enterprise, were
actually biotic interactions
between people and land
[‘land’=soil, water, plants,
animals] (‘The Land Ethic,’
1949).
Rousseau on the Lisbon
earthquake of 1755:
‘the majority of our ills are our
own work….nature would
never have placed together
twenty thousand houses of
six or seven stories, and if
the inhabitants of this huge
city had been more equally
dispersed and better
accommodated, the
damage would have been
much less, and perhaps
none at all’ (Letter to
Voltaire, 18 August 1756).
VI. Further reading
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Bacon, New Atlantis, pp. 71-83.
Descartes, René. “Discourse on Method,” Pts. 5
and 6, in Discourse on Method and Meditations on
First Philosophy. Trans. D.A. Cress. 3rd ed.
Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993.
Wilson, E.O. “Unmined Riches,” in The Diversity of
Life. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, 1992.
Leopold, Aldo. “The Land Ethic,” in A Sand County
Almanac. New York: Oxford UP, 1989 [1949].
Kenneth H. Simonsen, The Value of Wildness,”
Environmental Ethics Vol. 3, no. 3 (Fall 1981): 25963.