Teleology and the Norms of Nature

William J. FitzPatrick

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781136712678
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della filosofia

This work is an examination of teleological attributions i.e. ascriptions of proper functions and natural ends) to the features and behavior of living things with a view to understanding their application to human life.

Chapter I
Introduction

1. Teleology and Living Things

Living things stand dramatically apart from other objects in the natural world, and this is due only in part to their unparalleled degree of complexity. Equally significantly, organisms—unlike non-living natural objects—seem to exhibit a teleological organization among their parts, features and activities. This is not to suggest that they were created for a purpose, or even that they were created at all; nor is it to suggest that the type of process that has given rise to organized complexity in living things—evolution through cumulative natural selection—is a purposive or end-directed one. The point is just that organisms appear to be integrated systems, the parts and features and activities of which can be said to have functions in a sense that implies existing or occurring for the sake of certain unifying biological ends of the organism—this being a teleological relation. If this is so, it is a remarkable fact about living things, and raises interesting questions about the nature and source of such natural teleological relations.¹

It is useful to begin by recalling just how pervasive function ascriptions are in connection with living things. We naturally attribute functions to biological entities ranging from organs (e.g. the heart), tissues (e.g. cartilage), cells (e.g. red blood cells), subcellular organelles (e.g. chloroplasts), and genes (e.g. a hemoglobin gene), to processes (e.g. photosynthesis), secreted or ingested substances (e.g. hormones, vitamins and minerals), behavioral traits (e.g. the stalking of prey) and certain products of behavior (e.g. spider webs). The concept of function is clearly central to our thinking about organisms. It is important, then, to be clear about what exactly is being said when a biological function is ascribed to something, and what implications such judgments have.

First, we should notice that the concept of function employed in such ascriptions is not merely the broad and uninteresting one employed, for example, in the claim that the rain functions as a street cleaner, or functions to clean the streets. The notion of function employed in these claims about the rain is just the notion of a useful effect that something happens to have, as the rain happens to have the useful effect of cleaning the streets. By contrast, the heart does not merely function to pump the blood, as the rain functions to clean the streets: It is, we say, the heart’s function to pump the blood. We cannot say that it is the rain’s function to clean the streets, for while the rain has the effect of cleaning the streets, it cannot be said to have the function of cleaning the streets, i.e. to have the cleaning of the streets as its function. Similarly, while certain aberrant heart sounds may function as warning signs of heart trouble, proving very useful to physicians, it cannot be said that they have the function of indicating heart trouble to physicians—i.e. that this is their function, just as it is the heart’s function to pump the blood. When we say that the heart’s function is to pump the blood, we are employing the term “function” in a more restricted and interesting way than we are when merely speaking of useful effects.²

This more restricted use of the term “function”—which is also commonly found in connection with such things as artifacts, institutions and social roles—is basically equivalent to a certain familiar use of the term “purpose”, where this is understood in a way that does not essentially have any psychological connotations.³ Thus, we might say that the heart’s purpose in the body—the biological point of the heart, as it were—is to pump the blood. By contrast, we would not say that it is in any sense the purpose of the heart to make certain noises, even if this proves useful as a diagnostic aid (i.e. where deviation from the usual noise pattern would indicate trouble); nor would we say that it is the purpose of the rain to clean the streets. Often the expression “proper function” is used when speaking of a thing’s function or purpose, as opposed to what it merely happens to do, or “functions to do” or “functions as”, and this is illuminating. The term “proper” indicates the connection of this concept of function to the normative notion of proper functioning—a connection which is absent in the other case. A heart is the sort of thing that can be said to be functioning properly or malfunctioning, for example, unlike the rain or the clouds. And such judgments—along with related evaluative judgments about its being in good or poor condition, or being good of its kind or defective—are made in connection with the heart’s proper function, not in connection with the various things it merely happens to do. A properly functioning heart is one that is performing its proper function well, i.e. pumping the blood properly, and a heart is in good condition if it is well-disposed with respect to the performance of its proper function.⁴

Finally, attributions of proper function—which I will henceforth refer to simply as “function” for convenience—are teleological in nature because this notion of function is bound up with the notion of an end for the sake of which the function is performed, as opposed to other effects which are merely incidental.⁵ The proximate biological ends served by the pumping of the blood, for example, are its circulation throughout the body and the consequent distribution of nutrients and removal of wastes; the making of noise, by contrast, is recognized to be a mere side-effect, quite beside the point, as it were. If such talk of ends served by functions sounds stilted, we may notice that the same thoughts are regularly expressed more colloquially by using teleological expressions such as “in order to” or “for the sake of’, as when it is said, for example, that it is for the sake of circulation that the blood is pumped by the heart—the circulation in turn being for the sake of nutrient distribution and waste removal throughout the body. By contrast, we would certainly not say that the heart beats for the sake of making noise, even though it does indeed make noise and its doing so proves to be useful. Nor would we say that the clouds make rain for the sake of cleaning the streets, even though the clouds’ making rain functions to clean the streets. This again illustrates that the broad notion of “functioning to φ” or of “functioning as a φ-er” is not a teleological one (though it can of course be used that way), which further helps to isolate the notion of function we are after.

Teleological judgments are particularly interesting in that they appear to serve as explanations, answering a certain sort of “why?” question—i.e. one that concerns what something is for. We can ask, for example, why blood is circulated, meaning not “what causes it to be circulated?” (which may already be understood) but “what function is served by its being circulated—what’s the physiological point of it?” And here the appropriate answer would be a functional teleological judgment: “It is circulated for the sake of nutrient distribution and waste removal”—and not for the sake of cooling, for example, as someone might wrongly have thought. Such teleological explanations are found throughout biology right alongside causal mechanistic explanations, and they appear to be genuine biological facts.

Despite fairly widespread agreement on the above points, however, there is still much disagreement over what it is that makes living things teleological systems, what exactly an entity’s having a function—or a function’s being for the sake of a. certain end—consists in, and what kind of shape an organism’s teleological organization can be expected to have. Of what relevance, if any, is the concept of organismic welfare, and on what level—individual, group, or species (or perhaps even ecosystem)? Do facts about the evolutionary history that has given shape to a given type of organism also determine the teleological profile of organisms of that type, and if so, how exactly do they do so? Different answers to these questions will yield different pictures of the shape of biological teleology—different accounts, for example, of the biological ends toward which a given organism’s various proper functions are ultimately directed, as well as different accounts of the sort of explanation that is provided by appeals to functions or ends.

Much of the recent discussion has been shaped by the recognition that the clearest examples of functional characteristics in organisms—things like the heart’s pumping of blood, or the spider’s spinning of webs—are products of natural selection. In light of this connection it is only natural to wonder just how intimately the historical facts relevant to the presence of biological adaptations in current organisms are related to present functional teleological facts about them.⁶ To some it does not seem obvious that the two issues are related at all, beyond the fact that processes of natural selection are often causally responsible for the presence of the properties that are directly relevant to functional teleology. The historical origins of a trait are one thing, it might be thought, and the trait’s function in a species at a given time quite another. The latter might seem to have to do simply with the present possession of certain properties—such as dispositions to promote certain aspects of the organism’s (or group’s, etc.) welfare—regardless of how they came to be possessed. Why, after all, should a trait have to have any particular causal history in order to have a genuine function here and now? Could any discovery about natural selection history—or even the discovery that the theory of natural selection is false and that organisms are the result of intelligent design after all, or of something else altogether—possibly make a difference to our account of the present functions of such things as hearts or honeybee stings?⁷

Someone who is thus inclined to ignore historical background in thinking about present function may not even see any reason to restrict natural or biological function to matters of survival and reproduction—a restriction that is primarily a product of historically-based views, with their focus on the process of natural selection. Instead, such functions may be thought to relate more generally to the good of the relevant organisms, i.e. to the ways in which the typical needs of members of a given species are regularly met, where such needs might in principle go beyond anything having to do with mere survival and reproduction (as they certainly do in the human case, for example).

I shall refer to this general approach to biological function—whether the focus is on contributions to organismic welfare narrowly conceived or as conceived in a broader way—as the ahistorical, welfare-based approach. The essence of such a view is the belief that we can arrive at an adequate understanding of the functional teleological facts about organisms just by considering the ways in which various traits presently tend to contribute to the organisms’ welfare, without paying any attention to the causal history behind the development of those traits. There are a number of possible developments of such a view, though I shall focus critical attention on Philippa Foot’s recent view, for reasons that will be explained below.⁸

At the other extreme, many will think it all too obvious that an understanding of the historical background of a biological trait bears directly on an understanding of the trait’s present function: For they take the functionality of a trait just to consist at least largely in its possession of a certain kind of causal history. Wright, most notably, has argued that the essence of teleology is what he calls “consequence-etiology”. A trait has a consequence-etiology if the causal explanation of how it came to be present in current organisms involves an appeal to certain causally relevant consequences that the trait (-type) has.⁹ If the theory of natural selection is correct, then biological adaptations have consequence-etiologies, at least if they still have the effects that were selected for, since through natural selection they have come to be characteristic of populations or species—and hence have come to be widely present in current specimens—because of certain relevant effects they have, such as frightening away predators or attracting mates. On Wright’s view, the possession of some such consequence-etiology, whether through natural selection or some other process (though he believes that it is in fact natural selection that plays this causal role in biology), is necessary and sufficient for the trait to be genuinely functional, the effect in question being its function; indeed, the trait’s having a function just consists in its possessing a consequence-etiology.¹⁰ Following Wright and others, we may call this sort of approach to biological function—whether characterized generally in terms of consequence-etiology, as in Wright’s case, or formulated more narrowly to include only cases involving natural selection, as on other accounts—the etiological approach, since it ties function directly to causal history.

I believe that there is some truth to be found in each of these approaches, but that in the end both are flawed and must be rejected. The etiological approach is on the right track, I shall argue, insofar as it acknowledges the importance of the natural selection background to facts about biological function in actual living things. On some versions it even manages to yield a specification of the functional facts that is at least in large part extensionally accurate. It goes wrong, however, in its account of why historical facts pertaining to natural selection are relevant to facts about present function. In particular, it makes a fundamental mistake in just reducing facts about functional teleology directly and atomistically to facts about causal history (or to these together with the fact that the trait in question still has the effect that figures into the causal history). This is closely related to what I take to be the equally misguided reduction of functional ideological explanation to a kind of historical-causal explanation—namely, consequence-etiological explanation, which in this case would be the evolutionary explanation of how the trait in question came to be widely manifested in current specimens, involving an appeal to certain effects (or consequences) that type of trait has. The former mistake will be discussed in chapter seven, section two, and the latter is the topic of much of chapter eight.

In contrast to etiological views, the ahistorical welfare-based approach rightly avoids both of the above forms of reduction. It goes seriously wrong, however, in treating the natural selection background as something that can generally be ignored in seeking to understand facts about present biological function, as if the latter could be gleaned simply by looking at how members of a given species normally “get on”, without regard for how they came to be the way they are. This, I shall argue, results in an inability to draw a non-arbitrary distinction between functional and merely incidental contributions to ends—or between genuine ends and merely useful eff...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter I Introduction
• Chapter II Functional Systems: Artificial and Organic
• Chapter III Natural Selection, Genes and Organismic Welfare
• Chapter IV An Account of Biological Teleology
• Chapter V Development and Applications of the Account
• Chapter VI Welfare and Natural Teleology
• Chapter VII Contrasts with Dawkins and with Standard Etiological Accounts
• Chapter VIII An Account of Functional Teleological Explanation: Historical Sensitivity Without Reduction
• Chapter IX Biological Teleology in Human Life
• Chapter X Human Nature and Morality
• Bibliography
• Index