The Women Are Up to Something

This book tells two intertwined stories, centered on twentieth-century moral philosophers Elizabeth Anscombe, Mary Midgley, Philippa Foot, and Iris Murdoch. The first is the story of four friends who came up to Oxford together just before WWII. It is the story of their lives, loves, and intellectual preoccupations; it is a story about women trying to find a place in a man’s world of academic philosophy. The second story is about these friends’ shared philosophical project and their unintentional creation of a school of thought that challenged the dominant way of doing ethics. That dominant school of thought envisioned the world as empty, value-free matter, on which humans impose meaning. This outlook treated statements such as “this is good” as mere expressions of feeling or preference, reflecting no objective standards. It emphasized human freedom and demanded an unflinching recognition of the value-free world. The four friends diagnosed this moral philosophy as an impoverishing intellectual fad. This style of thought, they believed, obscured the realities of human nature and left people without the resources to make difficult moral choices or to confront evil. As an alternative, the women proposed a naturalistic ethics, reviving a line of thought running through Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas, and enriched by modern biologists like Jane Goodall and Charles Darwin. The women proposed that there are, in fact, moral truths, based in facts about the distinctive nature of the human animal and what that animal needs to thrive.

THE APOLOGY OF THE WHOLE

At the level of the whole organism, an idea of the complexity of living things is formed as a combination of levels of organization (layers) of biological and virtual reality, which develops as a space for visualization (digitization) of living objects. New digital formats of living objects, coupled with the naturalistic ethics of obtaining them, create a trend towards a complete transition of biology to a quantitatively new level of obtaining biological information – information about the state of living biological objects. The development of digital biology contributes to an increasingly large-scale transition to the creation and analysis of virtual images of living biological objects, and at the same time "removes" the biologist from the actual object of research: a biologist can work with a virtual image and not destroy his research object. Digital naturalism appears, and, consequently, a digital "experiment" must also be expected, which will undoubtedly continue the eternal confrontation between naturalists and naturalists or vitalists with mechanists in the new techno environment.

Ethics and Natural Philosophy in Empedocles

“Ethics and Natural Philosophy in Empedocles” demonstrates how the broad features of Plato’s naturalistic ethics are prefigured in the integration of ethics and natural philosophy in Empedocles, while at the same time emphasizing the distinctive features of Empedocles’ conception. Empedocles’ doctrine of metempsychosis, the basis for a universal prohibition against killing other living creatures and consequent imperatives for self-purification, is itself grounded in the more general idea at the heart of his cosmology that no mortal thing is either born from, or passes away into, total nothingness. The chapter explores the deep connection between the birth, destruction, and rebirth of the elements and the wandering of the daimones or spirits, with whom Empedocles identifies his reincarnated self, all of which are subject to the lamentable influence of cosmic Strife as well as the more positive influence of cosmic Love that he advocates.

Aristotle’s Metaethics

Aristotle’s critique of attempts to ground ethics in metaphysical abstractions would be the logical place for him to have articulated the case for a naturalistic ethics, but he does not do so. Rather, we find, in Eudemian Ethics, a contrary case for a distinction between the natural good and the practical good. Given Aristotle’s well-known emphasis on the nature of action, and his practice of beginning normative treatises from the nature of action, we can see implicit in this focus an argument that, for rational agents, the fact that we aim at some good commits us to seeking the genuine or true good. This chapter argues that an apparent fallacy in the first sentence of Nicomachean Ethics yields—if properly understood—an insistence that rational agency requires consideration of the truly best goal.