Re: Naturalistic Fallacy


<whitesickle@xxxxxxx> wrote in message
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Note: What the hell is ethical non-naturalism! Human being are a part
of nature. They are a part of Darwinian evolution. I admit adding
qualitative qualities like goodness, brutal, superior, inferior, right,
wrong, etc. to the natural phenomena of Darwinian evolution are
irrelevant and examples of the Naturalistic Fallacy.

While there may be some gradations in between the two, there can be some
very useful lines draw between what is "wild," versus what is "not wild."
It is interesting to note that sometimes what we humans prefer to call the
one or the other is anthropocentrically biased. Basically, each and every
organism on Earth lives within a set of externalities which -- for each
individual -- bear different significances.

For example, we speak of "the domesticated pig," if it escapes and gets
along well without human intervention in a forest, that it is a "feral" pig.
For a piglet born in a forest, feral schmeral. It has no regard for whether
its ancestors were penned up and kept dependant. Horses descended from
those that escaped the Spanish Conquistadors in the sixteenth century
thrived and -- absent the micro-supervision of their breeding by
owners/keepers -- got filtered by externalities, in the same ecologies where
they later became "protected" from some of those filters by those who
captured and worked them, and concommitantly "deprived of certain
protections," such as protections from pathogens that could be more more
invasive of populations kept in close quarters and fed whatever it please
their keepers to feed them, or neglect to feed them.

I asked an emu rancher, a few years ago, if any of his stock had escaped,
and how they faired. "Yes," he said, "A few birds had gotten out into the
forest and they prevailed out there."

"Shook up a few deer hunters in the process." (Lucky for them none of those
deer hunters was an outlaw type who knew the alleged health benefits of
eating emu meat,)

So, yes, we could ask what was "natural" for these domesticated animals.

SOME domesticated animals appear to have been remorphed by way of husbandry
manipulations toward ways that limit their ability to live in the wild (or,
to live as some call it, "in nature"). Few spots remain on earth that are
not either under full-fledged exploitation by humans or, at least, subjected
to human "ecological footprint." Therefore, the meaning of "in nature" is
at the very least somewhat "muddied," these days.

But when we think about it, externalities are externalities, and there is NO
ESCAPING each species' needing SOME kind of externality complex if it is to
survive. (Try going outside Earth's atmosphere without at least a space
suit and some breathable oxygen-containing gas, and you will have a problem
Houston cannot resolve. (:<)

So what is "Nature" (with a capital N)? It is just an anthropocentrically
assigned pigeon hole for a certain fuzzily defined class of externalities.
And, when you come right down to it, one externality facet can be at once
both one species' meat and another's POISON. For example, most fish cannot
live outside of water for very long, and most humans cannot live for very
long inside it (unless they take air, and a way to dispense it as needed,
along with them). Actually, however, there is some overlap of dependence.
Humans must have SOME water, and fish SOME oxygen. So each is dependent
upon each and both, but AVAILS each by way of different mechanisms.

Hence we can see that a few externalities are not good nor bad in and of
themselves alone, but are the one or the other ONLY by virtue of what
particular mechanisms one has for utilizing them in certain forms, or at
certain temperatures, or in certain isotopes. In short, each species seems
to have a different set of "availance mechanisms" for getting what is needed
from what is "out there." And what is "out there" (by way of variations in
isotopes, termperatures, relative concentrations, ... and such... is not
favorable nor unfavorable so much by way of being where it is but, rather,
by way of what "availance mechanisms" also are "out there" trying to utilize
them in such a way that each might have some chance of getting to reproduce.

My contention about evolution is that change in an evolutionary spiral is
somewhat random -- but not completely so, in view of the fact that an
offspring that is TOO DRASTICALLY DIFFERENT from a parent is likely to
sink whereas its parents and other fellow species members get by as
swimmers, while another weirdo too drastically different from its parents
and fellow species members may float, when the mechanisms of the others is
to bottom feed. Hence, we can see that it is not floating nor sinking that
is, in and of itself, "natural" or "unnatural," but what is the best mode
for an offspring, especially while it is dependent upon parents and or
neighbors during the intermim between its hatching and is getting up and
running.

Q. So, in the ever-changing spiral of change called evolution, "What the
hell is Natural?"
A. Hey, whatever works for one individual, in one Earth circumstance, at
one time and one (approximate) Earth place. (If one stayed in one place,
the Earth would rush off into space, in its race around the sun, and leave
him there, and we mentioned earlier above, what kind of problem that would
entail.)

If one is too different from parents, that could result in an immediate
fatal nexus. But to be a little bit different? Not necessarily a problem.
And the beauty part for the "overall" continuance of "life" on Earth is that
Earth does seem to present some abiotic variations both horizontal in time
(meaning cotemporily) and vertically (by which I mean what is sometimes
referred to as "down through the centuries" but, also, could be spoken of as
"up through the centuries."

History indicates (by abundant hard examples) that Earth does, most
definitely, not remain exactly the same temperature, the same in respect to
the size and locations of continents, the same in oxygen titer of its
atmosphere, nor the same with respect to many other variables. Also, our
current knowledge of genetics and post-genetics (by which I refer to the
increasingly recognized switchings that take place beneath a genetic
"umbrella") enables us to understand that genomes change, spirally, over
time.

Now everything I have read or heard of or seen persuades me that this change
is NOT DIRECTED by externality determinism, but rather goes about its merry
process of changing, and what HISTORICALLY may be perceived as having
followed a course of directionality actually followed a course of sink or
swim, in what is there to be sunk in or swum in, at each particular
evolutionary junture. The only thing that makes sense to me is that the
development of a well-established and highly successful (as to allowing
survival of a species) is equivalent to WINNING A LOTTERY.

So... once again...

Q. What the hell is "Natural" in this homeostatic, yet
change-accrual-spiralating process?
A. Whatever WORKS for a given individual, and a given species, at a given
Earth time, in a given Earth place... an NOTHING ELSE.

For a single individual there may be one too many lions about. While, for
that individual's species as an entirety, one and one's fellows might
over-populate and do the Malthusian death dance. So, what is good for the
species might very well be utterly detestible for the drawer of the short
straw at, say, 9:12 A.M. on a given day on the east bank of the lower Nile
where you might be the one for whom it is "natural" to get a feline mouth
around your nose, and become oxygen deprived... while it is not "natural"
for that to happen to all your neighbors.

Now let me see how any of this applies to a "Naturalistic Fallacy." The
expression does have some of the earmarks of a buzz term, doesn't it. But,
also, it has some of the earmarks of a dogmatic drum beat, as well.

What is the fallacy exactly. Does it imply that genetic variations do not
actually occur. That would be a blatant falsehood. Does it imply that some
genetic abberations (or "errors") do not confer disadvantage (human
psychophrenia, for example) while others confer advantage (such as a child's
inheriting more of the kind of muscle fiber that best avails long distance
running, and might end him/her up in the olympics and, having won a gold
medal, getting to appear on some commercials that provide money for buying
pablum for one's own progeny?) Both favorable and unfavorable mutations do
occur.

What is the fallacy then? Is it in "non-naturalistic ethics" perhaps?

If so, all rightee then, while we are asking what "the hell" something
means, what say we ask what "in hell" THAT means... exactly... in the
context of evolution and not some pseudo-philosophical buzz definition.

Once we've pinned down what "non-naturalistic ethics" means, maybe we can
get some idea of what "natural ethics" would mean, as well.

Until it is better defined, I remain inclined to define "natural ethics" as
WHATEVER WORKS for one individual, or one individual's species as an
entirety, at the particular Earth time, and in the particular Earth place,
into which that individual and/or his/her species has stumbled, staggered,
blundered, hatched, waked up one day... whatever...

g


.

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