Against Nature

The MIT Press RRP $27.99

THE TITLE EVOKES, PERHAPS, the furious polemical pamphlets of the past and their adversarial agendas. It is not, in some ways, an inapt comparison.

Not that Against Nature is an exercise in sturm und drang condemnation. Rather, it is, as the author characterises it, an exercise in “philosophical anthropology”, and an entertaining one at that. At just 74 pages, including references, the work is little more than a beefy pamphlet, but Daston – director of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, in Berlin – packs it full of densely reasoned content. In essence, the work explores the curious human habit of seeking examples from the natural world and employing them as justifications for behaviours, social constructs, and, all too often, monstrous injustices.

Darwin’s ideas on evolution have been used by others to justify eugenics and capitalism. The natural world has been pressed into service to both promote and condemn slavery.

This second example illustrates why such arguments are, ultimately, baseless. Like a fundamentalist rugby player reading a Bible, look at the natural world long enough and you’ll find something to justify any human behaviour, no matter how repellent. All you have to remember to do is to overlook the equally plentiful examples that could be used to prove the opposite.

Daston points out – and she is not the first to do so by far, as she readily concedes – that there exists absolutely no moral or ethical correlation between the non-human world and human society.

Ants may be useful as metaphors for industriousness (or enslaved populations, take your pick), but that has nothing to do with the intrinsic nature of the ants themselves.

“Why should nature be made to serve as a gigantic echo chamber for the moral orders that humans make?” she asks.

Exploring possible answers, she makes the point that the very word “nature” has multiple and contradictory definitions, and that justifications can be made by appealing the nature of place, or of fundamental actions, or of universality.

Each of these – in fact, a multitude of these – deliver a range of alleged meanings, all of which are dependent on the viewpoint of the person making the argument. There is nothing fundamentally teleological in the natural world.

Nature is used to justify social norms, she points out, yet those norms vary from place to place. All that can be said is that humans are fundamentally “normative” – that is, they must argue from some form of comparative standpoint. And that, in all its contradictory glory, is the nature of the beast.