The teleology of reality and of right An inquiry about cause, law and purpose in nature, holistically considered André Ferreira Leite de Paula, Goethe-University Frankfurt am Main (Pre-print) Introduction Throughout history, many societies have held conceptions of nature that involved the projection of some purpose onto it: animism, totemism and natural religions are expressions of this spiritual attitude. The existence of psychic evolutionary strategies that can be pursued by means of culture was not known to them. During most of the existence of humanity, it was not known that a substantial part of the moral ideals and legal norms have actually emerged and been maintained over millennia due to their usefulness for implicit purposes such as survival and reproduction. Instead, people followed norms and ideals for their own sake as principles that were in themselves independent of consequences, and breaches of these principles sometimes merited severe punishment. Incest avoidance is an example of a behaviour that has always had a sense of unconditional moral cogency, but the usefulness of this for society was completely unknown throughout most of human history. In Western societies, however, traditional spiritual attitudes towards nature were inverted. Western people became conscious of their own condition and developed awareness of the subconscious purposes involved in the construction of culture and the naïve projections of imaginary causes onto reality. For the sake of the greatest possible accuracy in the control of causes and consequences, enlightened men progressively banished notions of spirit and purpose from causal explanations and thereby enabled technological development. Laws were no longer divine words; the mundane person replaced the divine person in the authorship of normative sense and vindicated authority even over causality. Mechanism became the law of nature, and imperative the law of the commonwealth. Purpose was now a human privilege, nature was consequently in itself purposeless, and knowledge was divided into humanities and science, the subjective and the objective, interpretation and explanation, value and fact. The 2 worldview turned from theism and panpsychism to atheism and materialism. Incest continued to be prohibited, but apparently for other reasons. Now the time has arrived to become aware of the origins and subconscious purposes of the new worldview, for mechanism, atheism and materialism are also psychic evolutionary strategies, and are of extraordinary utility. Utility is, however, not made of matter. It consists in a relationship of means to ends that is known as teleology. Nor are the logical and mathematical relations, the memory and self-reference that play a role in the process of selfawareness, made of matter. They do not have size or weight, and do not prevent other things from occupying any portion of space. Matter does not have a worldview and cannot perform negations, let alone negations of itself. These are actually spiritual properties. If one calls the entities that perform these activities 'matter', one ascribes to the spirit the name of matter and thereby practices zoohylism, the opposite of the ancient hylozoist manner of thought. The performative contradiction that is committed with the negation of the spirit by the spirit itself led to the discovery that the new worldview was also a cultural construction, a projection of human imagination onto nature with subconscious purposes, among them the increase of power of their believers, who grew and multiplied in unprecedented dimensions. This article is about the teleological deep structure of reality, of agency and normativity, and what this means for ethics, law and science, especially for the relationship between them. Teleology is explicitly present in the most diverse fields of knowledge, and accounts for fundamental dichotomies in these fields. In ethics for example, the unresolved opposition between consequentialism and deontology is actually a problem that concerns the prevalence of the (teleological) good over the (deontological) right, or vice-versa. With the advent of evolutionary psychology, this problem has increased in complexity because it also involves subconscious factors of moral action and legal decision-making at the level of the co-evolution of genes and culture. In legal orders, citizens and judges must always decide whether a legal norm should be interpreted either in the restricted sense of its wording and, thus, deontologically, or according to an implicit and broad purpose that underlies it – a process that is known as teleological interpretation. In this way, intentional and subconscious projections of purposes in the moment of interpretation are very frequent. In physics, there are tendencies of movement such as entropy, gravitation and quantum phenomena that have a teleological structure, but whose co-existence with mechanical laws of necessity and with living beings generates dichotomies such as those between determinism and indeterminism. In biology, the functional activity of cells and organs in coordination with the whole of the organism and with other organisms also has a teleological structure. At the level of society, 3 this has causal and normative consequences for ethical action and the formation of legal orders. Since physical facts, living beings, culture and norms are different parts of the same reality, separate specialized accounts of their teleological components are not enough. Causal and normative interactions between them occur all the time. Now, what would it mean for ethics and jurisprudence if the structure of agency is irrevocably teleological? To which extent are teleological causes in physics and biology the cultural and normative constructions of observers? Ultimately, is teleology normative or is normativity teleological, i. e., is it normative reasoning that produces purposes, or teleological reasoning that produces norms? Is the behaviour of individuals and groups, and therefore also their norms, judgments and actions, ultimately driven by some biotic factor such as self-preservation or reproduction? Is teleology compatible with natural selection? Does the existence of biotic causes of behaviour such as environmental or evolutionary causes constitute or eliminate ethical truth? For the investigation of such questions, the humanities cannot maintain an anti-scientific attitude and deny entrance to biology and physics, nor can the natural sciences refrain from philosophical inquiry and cultivate metaphysical premises in a dogmatic fashion. Part One: The Ontology of Teleology 1.1 Physical Causation 1.1.1 The ineliminable difference between the generality of laws and the singularity of events From a single law of nature or from any combination of many or even of all laws of nature it does not follow that a particular event happens, is happening, will happen or has happened. This is necessarily so because there is a difference of generality between laws and particular events: while laws are general, every event is unique; it takes place within a unique moment in time and in a unique position in the space. If a law were not general, it would not be a law in the first place, it would be, rather, the singular thing or event themselves.1 While a law can embrace many events, in every event many laws are instantiated. The law of universal gravitation for example states that every body attracts another with a force that is proportional 1 The distinction between law and event appears in many manners and with different terminology in the specialized bibliography. See for example 'law' (Gesetz) versus 'event' (Ereignis) in Friedrich Dessauer, Die Teleologie in der Natur (Munich: Reinhardt, 1949), at 46-47. For reflections on the distinction between a 'law' (Gesetz) and a 'state of affairs' (Sachverhalt), see also Hermann Lotze, System of Philosophy. Part 1: Logic: In three books. Of thought, of investigation, and of knowledge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1884), at 333. A deep analysis of the relationship between laws, their instantiations and states of affairs can be found in David Malet Armstrong, What is a Law of Nature? (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983, ed. 2016). 4 to their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. However, this law does not completely determine to which direction every single particle with which intensity of force will attract the others, since it does not determine how many particles exist in the first place, how much mass every particle and body has, which distance they take from one another etc.2 In general terms, a physical law does not determine that, when, how and how often it is instantiated. Another example is the general law, although less general than the law of gravitation, that water boils at 100oC under certain conditions of pressure. This law does not determine which portions of water will boil, nor how long they will need etc.: while there is a physical law according to which water boils under certain conditions of temperature and pressure, there is no law that states that a singular quantity of water will satisfy the conditions A at time1 and space1x1x1 which would lead to the result B. A singular portion of water might not boil because it is in the North Pole of the Earth and the Sun light does not reach it. Of course, there are laws according to which the Earth develops its rotation and translation as it does and that are, among other laws, a causal factor for the fact that this portion of water is not boiling, but, again, as all of these laws are also general, they do not state which singular things will fulfil their own conditions; that would have to be determined by another law, which would be itself general, and so on ad infinitum.3 In other words, all laws that are valid for a singular event have a general character and, therefore, do not contain any information about the existence and necessity of that singular event (more precisely, any information that would be unique and, therefore, different from all other events which the respective laws are valid for). Thus, physical laws are unconditionally valid at the level of their abstraction, but only conditionally valid at the level of particular events: their instantiation in a particular event is not due to any physical law, i. e., there is no physical law 2 Physicist Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker has described the relationship of contingency between law and force in the following manner: "die Bewegung eines Körpers ist aber nicht durch seine Masse und seine räumlichen Merkmale allein bestimmt, sondern auch durch seine Wechselwirkung mit anderen Körpern. Diese erscheint in der Mechanik unter dem Titel der Kraft. Die allgemeine Mechanik lehrt aber nicht, was für Kräfte es wirklich geben muss; die Kraft erscheint von ihren Gesetzen aus wie etwas Kontingentes. ... Ein Hauptziel des mechanischen Weltbildes war es, die Kräfte als nicht kontingent, sondern notwendig zu erkennen. Man stellte Kraftgesetze auf. Das Gravitationsgesetz bot das klassische Beispiel. Die im Einzelfall auf einen Körper wirkende Kraft bleibt natürlich zunächst kontingent, weil sie von der kontingenten Lage der anderen Körper abhängt, die diese Kraft ausüben", Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, Die Einheit der Natur, 2nd ed. (München: DTV, 1982), at 138-139. 3 About this point, see Lotze's explanation: "Das vielmehr würden wir als allgemeine Ansicht behaupten müssen, dass jedes Element a, welches die Wirkung irgend einer Bedingung p erfährt, eben hierdurch zu etwas Anderem, zu einem α = ap geworden ist, und dass nun jede neue Kraft q nicht mehr auf dies veränderte dieselbe Wirkung auszuüben strebt, welche sie gegen das unveränderte ausgeübt hätte; dass also der letzte Erfolg nicht ein apq oder a(q + q) sondern ein ar sein wird; dies r aber würde auf keine Weise aus bloss logischer oder mathematischer Verknüpfung von p und q analytisch zu gewinnen sein, sondern, nur ableitbar aus dem Sinne des ganzen Weltlaufs, synthetisch zu jenen beiden Bedingungen hinzutreten", Hermann Lotze, System der Philosophie: Zweiter Teil. Drei Bücher der Metaphysik (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 2004), at 456. 5 according to which a physical law is valid for (or instantiated in) a particular event,4 i. e., physical laws do not create or have causal effects upon each other. The conclusion is that physical laws do not sufficiently cause the occurrence of any single event.5 No single event is determined by physical laws. 1.1.2 The necessity of laws and the indeterminacy of events The indeterminacy of particular events in relation to physical laws is not an exception to their validity or a miracle; it is the very consequence of what physical laws are. Physical laws are relationships of simultaneous necessity. The common expression for their representation is 'if A, then necessarily B', which means that B, the consequent, is necessarily always the case when A, the antecedent, is the case. Some examples may suffice: if water achieves 100oC and 1 atm, it necessarily boils; it does not first achieve 100oC and 1 atm and boils afterwards, but does both simultaneously. If two bodies have certain masses and distance, they attract each 4 Another way to put this is the following: although many events can be calculated with high probability, the beginning and end of them, say, when and where a singular body's trajectory that is being calculated will start and end, cannot be calculated by the same or by any laws or equations. About this point, see Dessauer, Die Teleologie in der Natur (n. 1), at 49-50: "Um also von der kausalen Determiniertheit der physikalischen Gesetze zu der materialistisch-mechanistischen Doktrin zu kommen, zum Laplaceschen Geist, zu Dubois-Reymonds Weltansicht von der freiheitlosen Volldeterminierung allen Geschehens durch physikalische – damals mechanische – Naturkausalität, sind zwei Hypothesen nötig. Erstens: Existenz eines physikalischen Gesetzes, das eindeutig bestimmt, welche Einzelgesetze in einem gegebenen Ereignis mitspielen, wieviele, wie stark ein jedes..." 5 As Hermann Lotze points out, "at the principle, lastly, which may serve to express in the shortest form what we mean by mechanism, the principle that, if several forces act together upon the same object, no one of them has any effect on the tendency to action of the rest, but each continues to operate as if the rest were not present, and it is only these several and singly calculable effects which combine to form a resultant. ... it is not the case that the forces have been indifferent and taken no account of one another: the truth rather is that they, or the inner movement of things which correspond to them, have taken this account of each other, only it happened that the resolution at which they arrived in this particular case was to the effect that each should maintain its former tendency to act, just as in another case it might have been that this tendency should be changed. From this it appears that these very processes which, as far as the form of their result goes, exhibit all the characteristics of mechanism, are not produced mechanically in this sense at all, and the whole conception of mechanism as a distinct type of action, based on the mutual indifference of things, must be banished entirely from the philosophical view of Nature", Hermann Lotze, Metaphysic in three books. Ontology, Cosmology and Psychology: vol. II Cosmology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1887), at 120-121. The English translation of this part of Lotze's text is quite confuse, so it is worth to mention the original version in German: "So kommen wir ... auf den Grundsatz endlich, der als kürzeste Characteristik dessen dienen kann, was wir Mechanismus nennen: dass in dem Falle des Zusammenwirkens vieler Kräfte an demselben Object keine die Wirkungstendenz der übrigen ändere, jede vielmehr eben so zu wirken fortfahre, als wären die übrigen nicht vorhanden, und nur die so isolirt berechenbaren Einzelwirkungen sich zu einer Resultante zusammensetzen. Keine dieser Vorstellungen drückt Etwas aus, was wir als thatsächlich vorkommend betrachten dürfen; auch der letzte Grundsatz nicht. ... nicht die Kräfte sind gegen einander gleichgültig gewesen und haben keine Rücksicht genommen, sondern sie oder die ihnen zu substituirenden inneren Erregungen der Dinge h a b e n vielmehr auf einander Rücksicht genommen, nur dass der Beschluss, zu dem sie kamen, in diesem Falle der Fortbestand der Wirkungstendenz jeder einzelnen war, wie er in einem anderen Falle die Abänderung dieser Tendenz hätte sein können. Das will also sagen: eben diejenigen Vorgänge, die der Form des Erfolges nach völlig die characteristische Art des Mechanismus zeigen, kommen doch auf d i e s e mechanische Weise gar nicht zu Stande, und die ganze Vorstellung vom M e c h a n i s m u s als einer characteristischen Art des Wirkens, die auf jene Gleichgültigkeit gegründet wäre, ist aus der philosophischen Betrachtung der Natur völlig zu entfernen", Lotze, System der Philosophie (n. 3), at 433-434. 6 other, whereas the masses and distance are not first achieved in order attraction to start afterwards. The force between two electric charges diminishes to a quarter when their distance is doubled, which also happens at the same time as the distance is doubled etc.6 The particle 'if' in the formulation of a physical law is indispensable because it indicates a conditional situation whose fulfilment implies a necessary (simultaneous) consequence.7 In contrast to what is believed by many since the late middle ages and the beginning of modernity, a physical law does not consist in a temporal relationship of necessity between antecedent and consequent, as if the antecedent A meant what must be the case at a time t1 in order the law to necessary bring about a consequent at t2. 8 For example: if one rapidly 6 Further examples: "To any action there is always an opposite and equal reaction; in other words, the actions of two bodies upon each other are always equal and always opposite in direction", Isaac Newton, Principia, 1687: in: Newton. Philosophical Writings, ed. Andrew Janiak (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004), at 71. "When bodies are enclosed in a given space, their motions in relation to one another are the same whether the space is at rest or whether it is moving uniformly straight forward without circular motion", ibid., at 78. 7 With a terminology that is common within the subject philosophy of 18th and 19th centuries, Lotze puts this idea in the following way: "Stated in its complete logical form a law is always a universal hypothetical judgment, which states that whenever C is or holds good, E is or holds good, and that, whenever C undergoes a definite change into C1 through a variation of itself dC, E also becomes E1 through a definite variation of itself dE which depends on dC. A law is hypothetical, because it is never meant to be a mere enumeration of what happens; its sole function is to determine what should or must happen when certain conditions are given", Lotze, Metaphysic in three books. Ontology, Cosmology and Psychology (n. 5), at 333. About the conditional status of laws of nature, see also Georg Henrik von Wright, Truth, Knowledge, and Modality (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), at 141142, who states that "Physical necessity, one could thus say, is a characteristic 'combination' of logical necessity and logical contingency ... As it stands 'if this is a piece of phosphorus, it will melt at 44oC' need not even be true. The piece may never be subjected to melting, so to improve the sentence one would have to add to it a clause 'if heated under appropriate circumstances' – a formulation which certainly is both incomplete and unperspicuous unless we specify the 'appropriate circumstances' in detail", ibid., at 137, 142. It should be clarified, however, that physical laws in themselves are not judgments, in contrast to what Lotze's formulation may suggest implicitly, since they exist even if people do not make judgments about them. For the same reason, laws are not formulae, since formulae exist only in dependence of agents who create symbols and use them in order to express thoughts. These and other critical remarks about the ontology and epistemology of physical laws can be found in Herbert Spiegelberg, Gesetz und Sittengesetz: Strukturanalytische und historische Vorstudien zu einer gesetzesfreien Ethik (Zurick: Max Niehans, 1935), at 103-110, 114-116. The idea that laws are relationships of simultaneous necessity is also present in Spiegelberg's notion of laws as "Abhängigkeitsbeziehung zwischen zwei Sachverhalten". See ibid., at 105. 8 This is the conception of causality held by John Locke, Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, Ernest Nagel and Franz von Kutschera. Locke's understanding is the following: "That which produces any simple or complex idea we denote by the general name, cause, and that which is produced, effect. Thus, finding that in that substance which we call wax, fluidity, which is a simple idea that was not in it before, is constantly produced by the application of a certain degree of heat, we call the simple idea of heat, in relation to fluidity in wax, the cause of it, and fluidity the effect", John Locke, An essay concerning human understanding (London: Wordsworth Editions, 2014), Book 2, Ch. 26, p. 306. According to Kant, causality consists in a series (Reihe) of antecedent and consequent that takes place according to a law (Gesetz) that has general character (allgemein), that contains a necessity (notwendig) and is unchangeable (unwandelbar): "Man kann sich nur zweierlei Kausalität in Ansehung dessen, was geschieht, denken, entweder nach der Natur oder aus Freiheit. Die erste ist die Verknüpfung eines Zustandes mit einem vorigen in der Sinnenwelt, worauf jener nach einer Regel folgt. ... wenn alle Kausalität in der Sinnenwelt bloss Natur wäre, so würde jede Begebenheit durch eine andere in der Zeit nach notwendigen Gesetzen bestimmt sein... Es muss aber eine jede wirkende Ursache einen Charakter haben, d. i. ein Gesetz ihrer Kausalität, ohne welches sie gar nicht Ursache sein würde... weil jede Ursache eine Regel voraussetzt, danach gewisse Erscheinungen als Wirkungen folgen, und jede Regel eine Gleichförmigkeit der Wirkungen erfordert, die den Begriff der Ursache (als eines Vermögens) gründet", Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Würzburg: Felix Meiner, 1956), A532, A534, A539, A549. According to John Stuart Mill, "between the phenomena, then, which exist at any instant, and the phenomena which exist at the suceeding 7 immerses a mercury thermometer in hot water (antecedent), the column is expected to rise (consequent);9 it does not, however, necessarily rise, since the thermometer can break right after immersion and the mercury disperse in the water. Here again, the difference of generality between law and particular event leads to the impossibility that a law, in this case the coefficient of expansion of mercury, or the conjunction of all laws, sufficiently causes the particular event. An eventual addition of the clause ceteris paribus (e. g., 'the mercury column necessarily rises if other events such as rupture of the thermometer do not happen') would be a mere reformulation of the same contingency rather than its elimination. Still, physical laws can be said to be mechanical because their necessity involves bodies and motion, rather than merely logical necessity such as the principle of identity (A=A) or as mathematical necessity (one is the half of two etc.). Now, even if the relationship of necessity that constitutes physical laws is simultaneous, physical laws are prior to the events that they are valid for because they do not need to be instantiated in order to be valid: boiling and melting points for example are valid instant, there is an invariable order of succession... The invariable antecedent is termed the cause; the invariable consequent, the effect. And the universality of the law of causation consists in this, that every consequent is connected in this manner with some particular antecedent or set of antecedents", John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic: Rationcinative and Inductive (London: Longmans, 1856), at 231. However, Mill also states (in contrast to the idea of universal and necessary causation) that laws of nature are inductive assertions of humans, and that they are a product of their reasoning. Laws of nature are according to him a "sufficient induction" that asserts observable uniformities in nature (ibid., at 206); the law of causation is also an "instance of induction" based on generalized experience (ibid., at 368-376). According to Ernest Nagel, the "principle of causality" can be in part understood as a "maxim" that "expresses the general objective of theoretical science to achieve deterministic explanations, in the now familiar sense of 'determinism' according to which, given the state of a system for some initial time, the explanatory theory logically establishes a unique state for the system for any other time", Ernest Nagel, The Structure of Science: Problems in the Logic of Scientific Explanation (New York etc.: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961), at 323. However, because of the relationships of simultaneous necessity that characterize physical laws, Ernest Nagel has also recognized that mechanics is a theory of "instantaneous positions and moments" rather than a "truth concerning the pervasive order of events and processes" and that determinism is, actually, only valid in theory, i. e., it is not valid for the experimental level of scientific inquiry: "For as we have repeatedly noted, the theory of mechanics formulates in general terms only pervasive patterns of relationships, and codifies those patterns with the help of "ideal" or "limiting" notions (such as instantaneous position and instantaneous velocity) rather than by way of experimental concepts. Accordingly, the determinism of mechanics holds strictly only for the theoretical mechanical states of systems, whose state variables are instantaneous positions and moments. It does not follow, however, that, given the initial positions and momenta of a system of bodies as ascertained by actual measurement, the theory of mechanics makes it possible to predict a unique set of similarly measured positions and momenta of the bodies for any later time. ... it is extremely difficult if not hopeless to regard the principle of causality as a universally valid inductive truth concerning the pervasive order of events and processes", ibid., at 283, 319. Franz von Kutschera conceives of laws of causality as laws of succession (Sukzessionsgesetze) of deterministic (non-statistical) character, with the (maybe selfcontradictory) caveat that they would not be ontological, i. e., causal laws are for him human propositions that are accepted as true by the scientific community. See Franz von Kutschera, Wissenschaftstheorie II: Grundzüge der allgemeinen Methodologie der empirischen Wissenschaften (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1972), at 343, 351-353. 9 Example from Carl G. Hempel, Studies in the Logic of Explanation: in: Scientific Explanation. Essays in Philosophy of Science (New York: The free press, 1965), at 246. Hempel holds that the conjunction of antecedents with laws would entail the consequent: "the event under discussion is explained by subsuming it under general laws, i.e., by showing that it occurred in accordance with those laws, in virtue of the realization of certain specified antecedent conditions", ibid., at 246. In the following it will be shown how antecedents and laws are not sufficient for causation. 8 for substances even when they are not boiling or melting, even if they had never boiled or melted or never boil or melt again, and that is the basis for the prediction that, if the temperature and pressure reach a certain amount, the substance will boil or melt. In short, the relationship of necessity holds even if the law is not being instantiated. This is possible because physical laws are not materially located inside bodies such as particles, stones and stars; they are not 'laws of matter' in the sense that they would be made of matter or exist spatially inside material entities; they do not have three dimensions in space, do not have weight, cannot be seen with a microscope or telescope no matter how powerful they are, and do not prevent things from occupying the same space or other laws from being valid for the same thing. The law that is valid for a physical body is exactly the same one that is valid for many other bodies, and that is why a physical law cannot emerge and perish together with the thing that it is valid for. Since there is no law according to which laws are instantiated within a particular event, every particular event has contingent or accidental properties, i. e., properties that are not derived from (or implied by) the laws of necessity valid for them.10 Every portion of water that boils has not only the properties that are common to all portions of water and to all boiling portions of water, but also unique properties such as a position in time and space, some specific combination of temperature and pressure, some shape and contact with other substances, if only the recipient, etc. Yet, even if a property of a thing or event is accidental, it must have been caused by something before it and is a causal factor for something that happens next. Although it is not necessary for all water not to boil and although it is not necessary even for all water in the North Pole not to boil, this particular portion of water does not boil because, among many other causes, it is in the North Pole, and that is why the Sun light does not reach it and it does not achieve the temperature and pressure of its boiling point. All of this, in its turn, has been caused by what happened before, and what happened before has been caused by what happened before etc. Some of the causes of particular events with all their necessary and accidental properties are, thus, the very things and events prior to them. 1.1.3 No causation without an effective nexus However, although particular things and events are necessary for causation of posterior things and events, they do not sufficiently cause them. It is not this particular portion of liquid water 10 This point is explored for example by Hermann Lotze, who concludes that the combination of physical laws results in "accidental conditions" at the level of particular events. See Lotze, System of Philosophy. Part 1: Logic (n. 1), at 362-363. 9 solely (or any other set of things) that causes the emergence of vapor in the subsequent moment, for this particular portion of water does not heat itself. The mere succession of previous things and events is not a sufficient cause of posterior ones; in epistemic terms: the mere indication of previous events is not a sufficient explanation of the posterior event.11 To state that, due to some statistical correlation, there would be a causal relation between two events, for example between the price of bananas in a Chinese market and the tectonic activity below the Mount Vesuvius, or between the singing of crickets and the rain afterwards, would incur in well-known fallacies such as post hoc ergo propter hoc,12 and be wrong even if crickets were infallible and a statistical correlation of 100% existed between both events. Regularity in succession, regardless in which statistical degree, is not causation and, therefore, does not provide explanation, although it might sometimes and coincidently suffice for prediction. Thus, even if one could consider frequent or infallible correlations between temporal antecedents and consequents as physical laws, which is often claimed,13 it would still be the case that laws do not determine what happens, since, in that case, it is the singular 11 Note the distinction between ontology and epistemology: while ontology has to do with causes (antecedent and consequent), epistemology has to do with explanations (explanandum and explanans). While a cause can exist without being known by anyone and, therefore, without appearing in any explanation, an explanation can exist without correspondence with a real cause, for example in the case of a scientific mistake. It is important not to confound ontology with epistemology, especially not to 'epistemologize' ontology, in order not to fall into the forms of naïve anti-realism that will be discussed below, at 2.1. 12 "The non causa pro causa. This is the mistake of imagining necessary connexion where there is none, in the way of cause, considered in the widest sense of the word. ... A particular case of this fallacy, which is often illustrated by the words post hoc ergo propter hoc, is the conclusion that what follows in time follows as a consequence. When things are seen together, there is frequently an assumption of necessary connexion. There is, of course, a presumption of connexion : if A and B have never been seen apart, there is probability (the amount of which depends upon the number of instances observed) that the removal of one would be the removal of the other", Augustus de Morgan, Formal logic: Or, The Calculus of inference, necessary and probable (London: Taylor and Walton, 1847), at 268-269. 13 A variant of this idea has been held by David Hume and extensively reproduced within modern philosophy as a standard theory of causation. In his words, "we may define a cause to be an object, followed by another, and where all the objects similar to the first are followed by objects similar to the second", David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding: ed. by Peter Millican (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2007), p. 56 (Section VII, 29). Among many other problems, Hume's conception of causation, as does any Regularity Theory of Law, "is unable to provide an inner connection for the individual instantiations of the law", Armstrong, What is a Law of Nature? (n. 1), at 94. For an in-depth discussion about the insufficiencies of the 'Regularity Theory' of laws and causation, see ibid., at 1-68. About distinctions between law and regularity, see also Spiegelberg, Gesetz und Sittengesetz (n. 7), at 118-119. Also Erwin Schrödinger, who was influenced by quantum mechanics, has held the thesis that natural events would occur due to statistical regularity, which would be incompatible with the idea of causality (since he understands causality as a mere human postulate based on inductive reasoning). About this kind of what he calls "a-causalism", see Erwin Schrödinger, Was ist ein Naturgesetz?: Beiträge zum naturwissenschaftlichen Weltbild, 6th ed. (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 2008), at 9-17. About the widespread reception of the positivist idea that reality would be made exclusively of succeeded states, see Ponce: "La ciencia, hoy en día (segun escuchamos en una conferencia de Jorge Bosch, sobre desarrollos recientes de la Física), parece respaldar la tesis de que los sucesos son las entidades primarias o los componentes básicos de nuestro universo. En consecuencia con esto, la teoria del "Big Bang" postula un suceso en el origen del cosmos; y la realidad física estaría constituída por combinaciones de sucesos elementales, como, por ejemplo, el choque de dos electrones. Sin embargo, debemos reconocer que esta idea es completamente antiintuitiva, pues no imaginamos el movimiento o el cambio aislados, sino que creemos mas bien que algo es lo que cambia, se mueve, choca, etc", Margarita Ponce, ʻTeleología y causalidadʼ, Dianóia, 30, 30 (1984), 155–172, at 169. 10 events that would determine the physical laws,14 i. e., physical laws would be instantiations of events (!) or the mere aggregation or quantity of singular events and, therefore, not prior to them; laws and events would always be simultaneous and ultimately the same. The consequence would be that events are neither possible nor impossible, since there would be no previously valid law that makes them possible or impossible. Therefore, for something to possibly happen, there must be additionally to pre-existing things and events and additionally to physical laws an effective nexus (nexus effectivus) that consists in the causal transition between a state at t1 and another state at t2. 15 The effective nexus is the spatiotemporal causal connection between antecedent and consequent. Effective nexuses are transitions between qualities, i. e., between something existing at t1 towards something different at t2, e. g. from a substance to another substance such as from hydrogen and oxygen to water, or from an accidental property to another accidental property of the same thing, e. g. from ice water into liquid water. Unlike physical laws, effective nexuses have a position within space and time; they start and end at some moment and can involve for example two bodies and not a third one, even if the bodies are of the same kind (and therefore permanently submitted to the same laws). Effective nexuses are 'effective' because they are, unlike laws, activities. Forces and pressures, gravitational, magnetic and electric fields are examples of effective nexuses. From that it is clear that the mere existence of things and events at all previous times is never sufficient for the causation of the things and events of any posterior time. In other words, previous things and events by themselves do not determine posterior things and events. Additionally to them and, as already seen, to all physical laws, for an event to happen a spatial-temporal effective nexus that leads causally to it is always necessary. The term cause must embrace, therefore, not only the things and events that precede another event, and not only physical laws, but everything that is the case in order something to happen at the time, in the space and in the way that it happens, is happening, has happened or will happen.16 14 As Ernest Nagel points out, "the view that the principle [of causality] is an empirical generalization, it has been argued, is difficult to maintain. For when the principle is formulated in a fully general way, without mention of which factors determine the occurrences of things and processes, the principle excludes nothing whatever from the logically possible orders of events in the world", Nagel, The Structure of Science (n. 8), at 324. 15 In contrast to the widespread assumption that the combination of laws with previous things and events would suffice for causation, as held for example by Stuart Mill: "everything which occurs is determined by laws of causation and collocations of the original causes", which he calls "Primeval Causes" and which are, according to him, "mysterious to us". Mill, A System of Logic (n. 8), at 226-227. Mill also denies existence to efficient causes. See ibid., at 213. 16 In this sense, the term cause employed here is close to Ancient Greek αιτία: "Conviene recordar brevemente que, de la filosofia clasica griega a Galileo, prevalecio la doctrina aristotelica sobre la causalidad. De acuerdo 11 1.2 Biotic causation Although the indetermination of particular events in relation to physical laws and previous events is equally the case for both inorganic and biotic nature, the latter has additional effective nexuses that are not present in inanimate parts of reality. Unlike inanimate bodies, living beings can start and stop at least some of their own movements. Biotic activity produces an exchange of energy and matter with the environment in order to maintain the internal equilibrium of the organism, a process that is called metabolism. Living beings can also reproduce and many can self-regenerate.17 Metabolism takes place against the tendency of spreading energy that the inorganic parts of a physical system have,18 which is called entropy19: if a cold physical body gets in contact with a warm one, their temperatures tend to equalize; an organism, on the contrary, tends to have a temperature that is slightly different from the environment and to preserve it internally despite external changes. Structures such as cells and organs have functions.20 Unlike physical laws, organic principles of motion are mediations between states at different times. The heart for example beats at t1 in order to provide the body with blood and nutrients at t2. The functional temporal mediation between states is always contingent,21 i. e., it can succeed or fail.22 For example, it may be that some con ella, toda determinación era determinación causal, pues la palabra "causa" designaba tanto un agente dinamico y productivo que modifica o cambia a otra entidad ("causa eficiente"), como factores estructurales, composicionales o materiales; y, desde luego, designaba tambien el fin o "aquello con miras a lo cual" una cosa se hace (Aristóteles, 194b 20-35, 195a 5). A partir de Galileo, el sentido de "causa" queda restringido al de "causa eficiente", es decir, se refiere ya sólo a entidades dinamicas que poseen virtu des generativas y productivas", Ponce, ʻTeleología y causalidadʼ (n. 13), at 161. See also Nico Naeve, Naturteleologie bei Aristoteles, Leibniz, Kant und Hegel: Eine historisch-systematische Untersuchung (Freiburg: Karl Alber, 2013), at 29. 17 About reproduction and regeneration of living beings and their relation to teleology and organization, see Cristian Saborido, Matteo Mossio and Alvaro Moreno, ʻLa dimensión teleológica del concepto de función biológica desde la perspectiva organizacionalʼ, Teorema, XXIX, 3 (2010), 31–56, at 43 and 47. 18 About the distinctiveness of organic activity in comparison to physical mechanisms, see Lotze, System der Philosophie (n. 3), at 445-447. 19 Dessauer, Die Teleologie in der Natur (n. 1), at 25-29; explanation and discussion of different conceptions of entropy in Henri Bergson, L'évolution créatrice, 24th ed. (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1921), at 264-268. This understanding of entropy will be complemented in part 1.16, below. 20 "If we observe how the lungs aerate the blood which the heart sends to them; how heart and lungs together supply aerated blood to the stomach, and so enable it to do its work; how these co-operate with sundry secreting and excreting glands to further digestion and to remove waste matter; and how all of them join to keep the brain in a fit condition for carrying on those actions which indirectly conduce to maintenance of the life at large; we are dealing with functions", Herbert Spencer, The Data of Ethics (London: Williams and Nordgate, 1879), at 9. 21 Contingency is a relational property that means the absence or insufficiency of a certain order, but the presence of another one. Bergson calls it hasard and formulates it as follows: "nous dision en effet que tout ordre apparaît nécessairement comme contingent. S'il y a deux espèces d'ordre, cette contingence de l'ordre s'explique: l'une des forms est contingente par rapport à l'autre", Bergson, L'évolution créatrice (n. 19), at 254. The same idea is present in Hegel's interpretation of Aristotle in relation to the concept of chance (Zufall): "Es ist Zufall; d. h., es hat einen Zusammenhang der Notwendigkeit, der aber ein äusserliches Verhältnis ist, und dies ist die Zufälligkeit", Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie II, 2nd ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1993), at 174. 22 Georg Toepfer, Zweckbegriff und Organismus: über die teleologische Beurteilung biologischer Systeme (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2004), at 22. 12 disease, injury or bandage prevents the blood from reaching some organ, although the heart keeps beating even though. In most cases, however, when the result 'organs are provided with blood' occurs, it has been caused by the action of the heart, for if the heart would not have functioned, the organs would not have received fresh blood, or at least not exactly as they have received. Thus, there is a causal nexus between A and B whose result is not necessary ('if A, then necessarily B' in a temporal sense) and that is, rather, a strive. In the cases in which the result is accomplished, the activity of the heart is a necessary condition for the result to happen in the exact way as it happens. Thus, organic activity does not operate by mere chance, which means in traditional philosophical terminology: it is not chaotic, i. e., organic activity happens according to principles.23 This is one of the reasons why the nexus between the organic activity and the results that it produces are intelligible in the first place and why scientific explanations and manipulations of them, e. g. for the production of medicines, are possible at all.24 That is also why Biology and Medicine as sciences cannot 23 This point has been extensively clarified by Aristotle, as Andrés Jaume explains: "El principal recurso que le queda al atomista contra la finalidad intrínseca de la naturaleza defendida por Aristóteles es la explicación de la disposición actual de animales y plantas a través de la coincidencia causal. El partidario del materialismo podría contraargumentar que por coincidencia plantas y animales tienen la disposición que tienen y que, por lo tanto, no opera ningún principio teleológico en las entidades naturales. Contra estas razones Aristóteles procede a aplicar su análisis de la casualidad que anteriormente había desarrollado en el capítulo 620 del libro II de la Física. Por casualidad no ocurre lo que ocurre siempre o en la mayoría de los casos. De la casualidad no se infieren las regularidades que observamos en la naturaleza, de una bellota no nace un olivo, del mismo modo que de un hombre no nace un gato. Las entidades naturales siguen una pauta de desarrollo regular que queda insuficientemente explicada por medio del recurso a la casualidad", Andrés L. Jaume, ʻLa teleología aristotélica como una inferencia a la mejor explicación. Un análisis epistemológico del principio de finalidad en el libro II de la física de Aristótelesʼ, Ágora. Papeles de Filosofia, 32, 2 (2013), 29–47, at 39. The non-random character of teleological motion is what Aquinas calls the 'natural inclination' or 'natural appetite' (appetitus naturalis) in the case of vegetative activity, and 'will' or 'rational appetite' (appetitus rationalis) in the case of will, since in both cases some end at t2 (among many other possible ends) is chosen at t1 and tentatively realized. See Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae (Lander (Wyoming): The Aquinas Institute for the Study of the Sacred Doctrine, 2012), prima secondae, question 1, article 2. The principles of motion of organic beings and their property of having a behaviour that is not determined by physical laws or by 'laws' whatsoever are called by Hegel 'organic freedom' (organische Freiheit): "Allein solche Gesetze, dass die Tiere, welche der Luft angehören, von der Beschaffenheit der Vögel, welche dem Wasser, von der Beschaffenheit der Fische sind, nordische Tiere ein dickbehaartes Fell haben usf., zeigen sogleich eine Armut, welche der organischen Mannigfaltigkeit nicht entspricht. Ausserdem dass die organische Freiheit diesen Bestimmungen ihre Formen wieder zu entziehen weiss und notwendig allenthalben Ausnahmen solcher Gesetze oder Regeln, wie man sie nennen wollte, darbietet, so bleibt dies an denjenigen selbst, welche unter sie fallen, eine so oberflächliche Bestimmung, dass auch der Ausdruck ihrer Notwendigkeit nicht anders sein kann und es nicht über den grossen Einfluss hinausbringt; wobei man nicht weiss, was diesem Einflüsse eigentlich angehört und was nicht. Dergleichen Beziehungen des Organischen auf das Elementarische sind daher in der Tat nicht Gesetze zu nennen; denn teils erschöpft, wie erinnert, eine solche Beziehung ihrem Inhalte nach gar nicht den Umfang des Organischen, teils bleiben aber auch die Momente der Beziehung selbst gleichgültig gegeneinander und drücken keine Notwendigkeit aus", Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, 2nd ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989), at 197. In this context, it is worth mentioning Thomas Nagel's speculationg that teleology in nature could mean that biotic behaviour is "biased towards the marvelous". See Thomas Nagel, Mind & Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012), at 92. 24 As Hegel correctly states, "wer in dieser Wirklichkeit handeln will, hat sich eben damit ihren Gesetzen unterworfen und das Recht der Objektivität anerkannt", Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, 4th ed. (Hamburg: Meiner, 1955), §132. 13 dispense the use of functional terminology for the description of organic activity,25 and thereby presuppose non-determination by physical laws exclusively, and thus the incompleteness of Physics. 'Fitness', 'error'26, 'error of replication', 'genetic program', 'genetic control of transcriptions', 'adaptation', 'evolutionary advantage', 'propensity', 'instinct' and 'behaviour' are examples of indispensable categories of those sciences that describe functions and that cannot be reduced to or substituted by non-functional or inorganic vocabulary, as will be shown below (2.3). Most remarkably, the category of 'gene' is inherently functional:27 genes contain programs28 for the production of immunoglobulin, protein etc., and are active in the organic being even if the results programed are not accomplished due to some obstacle, for example other genes creating opposite tendencies29 or the inception of substances in the body that prevent the results that some gene tends to produce. The structure of function is teleological. Every functional structure and activity is oriented towards some purpose (or end, goal, aim, sake, τέλος, finis, Zweck), and this is what it ultimately means for it to be functional. "There is no difference between asking oneself what the function of an organ is, that for which 'it is useful', and asking what its end is."30 The purpose may be the production of protein as in the case of some genes, the delivery of blood in the case of the heart, or to react fast to some adverse situation in the case of instinct. 25 The indispensability of functional terminology in science has been widely recognized. See for example Thure von Uexküll, ʻDer Begriff der "Funktion" und seine Bedeutung für unsere Vorstellung von der Wirklichkeit des Lebensvorgangesʼ, Studium Generale, 2, 1 (1949), 13–21, at 18-19; Werner Heisenberg, Physik und Philosophie (Darmstadt: Ullstein, 1959), at 126-127; Raymond Jahae, Finality in Nature According to Kant and Blondel (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2004), at 95; and Gerhard Schlosser and Michael Weingarten, ʻEinleitungʼ, in Gerhard Schlosser and Michael Weingarten, eds., Formen der Erklärung in der Biologie (Berlin: Primus Solvero, 2002), 7–16; Toepfer, Zweckbegriff und Organismus (n. 22). 26 An error is an action that does not fulfil the pursued purpose. Thus, error is a functional category and cannot be used without functional presuppositions, although such a 'deflationary' use is often attempted within modern biology due to its hostility towards teleology, as explained below (2.3) and in Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie II (n. 21), at 178. 27 Dessauer, Die Teleologie in der Natur (n. 1), at 31. 28 From the ancient Greek πρόγραμμα, which means what has been previously written or announced. 29 "As far as a gene is concerned, its alleles are its deadly rivals, but other genes are just a part of its environment, comparable to temperature, food, predators, or companions. The effect of the gene depends on its environment, and this includes other genes. Sometimes a gene has one effect in the presence of a particular other gene, and a completely different effect in the presence of another set of companion genes. The whole set of genes in a body constitutes a kind of genetic climate or background, modifying and influencing the effects of any particular gene", Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 40th ed. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2016), at 47. 30 Etienne Gilson, From Aristotle to Darwin and back again: A journey in final causality, species, and evolution (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2009), at 123-124, in regard to the distinction between organisms and machines. It would be, therefore, fundamentally mistaken to assert that function would be 'teleology without purpose', for example as held by logical positivist Ernest Nagel: "a great many explanations counted as teleological do not postulate any purposes or ends-in-view; for explanations are often said to be 'teleological' only in the sense that they specify the functions which things or processes possess. ... We shall therefore assume that teleological (or functional) statements in biology normally neither assert nor presuppose in the materials under discussion either manifest or latent purposes, aims, objectives, or goals", Nagel, The Structure of Science (n. 8), at 402. 14 Whether the purpose is to be accomplished in the long or in the short run; whether it is connected with previous or future purposes; or whether it is ethically relevant or not does not matter for the fact that at least a local purpose is factually being pursued with the organic activity. For this reason, the way in which an organic structure acts can be called teleological causation: a causal nexus between antecedent and consequent that is neither a law of necessity nor chaos (randomness, mere chance). It can be represented with the formula 'A in order to B': at t1 some entity strives for something to happen at t2, i. e., at t1 there is an abstract anticipation of something qualitatively delimited at t2. Of course, 'anticipation' does not mean that what is posterior would cause something prior, because the effective nexus is an activity that takes place at the same time of the existence of the thing or event that is being trans-formed, and the posterior event does not have even to occur in order the orientation towards it to be real.31 These are some reasons why teleology is a form of causality in a proper sense rather than something different from causality.32 31 About this last point, See also Toepfer, Zweckbegriff und Organismus (n. 22), at 22. 32 Especially due to the abstract anticipation of a purpose that characterizes teleology, many thinkers have committed the mistake of not recognizing its causal character. A frequent misunderstanding is to say that the time course would be 'inverted' in teleology and that is why it would not be a form of causality. For Spinoza for example, "hanc de fine doctrinam naturam omninò evertere. Nam id, quod reverâ causa est, ut effectum considerat, et contra. Deinde id, quod naturâ prius est, facit posterius. Et denique id, quod supremum, et perfectissimum est, reddit imperfectissimum", Spinoza, Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata: in: Spinoza, Werke lateinisch und deutsch (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1980), at 150. In contemporary biology, see the example of Georg Toepfer's position according to which teleology would not be a form of causality because of its abstract anticipation of a situation, in Toepfer, Zweckbegriff und Organismus (n. 22), at 24. A distinction between teleology and causality for another reason is provided by G. H. von Wright, who holds that some purposes would be only "quasi-teleological" explanations, although they are described with teleological terminology. Functional explanations in biology and natural history would only be "quasi-causal" because, in his terminology, they do not depend on a "nomic" connection of necessity. In this way, teleological explanations would be outside of the realm of science. See Georg Henrik von Wright, Explanation and Understanding (New York: Cornell UP, 1971), at 84-85 and 166. Teleology has been claimed to be something different from causality also because of the (most frequently) modern preconception that only mechanism (i. e., a necessary connection between antecedent and consequent in a temporal manner) could be considered as a cause. About causality as contraposed to teleology on the basis of different patterns of 'judgment' in a Kantian sense, see Josef Simon, ʻTeleologisches Reflektieren und kausales Bestimmenʼ, Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung, 30, 3 (1976), 369–388, at 386. For a distinction between causal and teleological explanation also as different realms of questions and different 'means of theoretical modelling', see Matthias Gutmann: "Die Differenz von funktionaler und kausaler Erklärung ist also eine analytische an der Tätigkeit des Erklärens, deren Verhältnis durch Fragestellung und Modellierungsmittel bestimmt wird. ...", Matthias Gutmann, ʻÜber 'Funktion'ʼ, Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie, 63, 2 (2015), 339–357, at 351. Discussion and critique of teleology as a form of causation in Nicolai Hartmann, Ethik, 4th ed. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1962), at 193: "Der eigentliche Prozess des realen Geschehens, auch wenn er final determiniert, d. h. an das Endglied gebunden ist, läuft in der Zeit ab und teilt ihre Richtung vom Früheren zum Späteren. In ihm sind die ‚Mittel' reale Ursachen, die von Schritt zu Schritt das Bezweckte ‚bewirken'. Der Prozess des realen Geschehens in der Verwirklichung seines Zweckes ist also unbeschadet der Finaldetermination ein kausaler Prozess". For an analysis and critique of Hartmann's conception of teleology, see Toepfer, Zweckbegriff und Organismus (n. 22), at 56-61. For an extensive analysis of the causal character of teleology (however concerning only purposes settled by human thinking), see Hans Kelsen, Hauptprobleme der Staatsrechtslehre: Entwickelt aus der Lehre vom Rechtssatze (1923) (Tübingen: Scientia Aalen, 1960), at 57-68. In relation to the teleological character of human agency, Aquinas puts the problem (as a question to be solved) as follows: "It would seem that it does not belong to man to act for an end. For a cause is naturally first. But an end, in its very name, implies something that is last. Therefore an end is not a cause. But that for which a man acts, is the cause of his action; since this 15 Another reason why organic activity is teleological is the fact that the activity of an organ is part of a coordinated whole, the organism,33 and that is why for example an organ can become dysfunctional even if it keeps working as it normally works and, conversely, it can preposition for indicates a relation of causality. Therefore it does not belong to man to act for an end. ... Further, then does a man seem to act for an end, when he acts deliberately. But man does many things without deliberation, sometimes not even thinking of what he is doing; for instance when one moves one's foot or hand, or scratches one's beard, while intent on something else. Therefore man does not do everything for an end", Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae (n. 23), prima secondae, question 1, article 1. About the logical form and the proper causal character of final nexuses, he states that "Although the end be last in the order of execution, yet it is first in the order of the agent's intention. And it is this way that it is a cause. ... For if the agent were not determinate to some particular effect, it would not do one thing rather than another: consequently in order that it produce a determinate effect, it must, of necessity, be determined to some certain one, which has the nature of an end", ibid., prima secondae, question 1, articles 1 and 2. See also ibid., prima pars, question 5, article 4. The way how teleological causality takes place without the inversion of time is also detailed explained and exemplified in Karen Neander, ʻWarum Geschichte zählt. Vier Theorien über Funktionenʼ, in Gerhard Schlosser and Michael Weingarten, eds., Formen der Erklärung in der Biologie (Berlin: Primus Solvero, 2002), 91–120, at 112-115. Also for Aristotle, the teleological cause is not retroactive within time. See René Thom, Semio physics: a sketch (Redwood etc.: Addison-Wesley, 1990), at 216 and Naeve, Naturteleologie bei Aristoteles, Leibniz, Kant und Hegel (n. 16), at 29. As T. L. Short states, "For Peirce and for Aristotle, no final cause is actual; every final cause is a general type. Actual instances of this type might be produced in the future. However, it is at best misleading to describe teleology as the doctrine that the future exerts a causal influence in the present. For it is not to future actualities but to present possiblities that Aristotle and Peirce attribute such potency", T. L. Short, ʻPeirce's Concept of Final Causationʼ, Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 17, 4 (1981), 369–382, at 369. 33 Bergson, L'évolution créatrice (n. 19), at 44-45. René Thom calls this coordination the "substrat dynamique sous-jacent à tout animal" in René Thom, Esquisse d'une Sémiophysique: Physique aristotélicienne et Théorie des Catastrophes (Paris: Inter Editions, 1988), at 117. About the need of considering the whole of the organism and its environment in order to understand function, see the instructive considerations of Herbert Spencer: "If the part is conceived without any reference to the whole, it becomes itself a whole -an independent entity; and its relation to existence in general are misapprehended. Further, the size of the part as compared with the size of the whole, must be misapprehended unless the whole is not only recognized as including it, but is figured in its total extent. And again, the position which the part occupies in relation to other parts, cannot be rightly conceived unless there is some conception of the whole in its distribution as well as in its amount. Still more when part and whole, instead of being statically related only, are dynamically related, must there be a general understanding of the whole before the part can be understood. By a savage who has never seen a vehicle, no idea can be formed of the use and action of a wheel. To the unsymmetrically-pierced disk of an eccentric, no place or purpose can be ascribed by a rustic unacquainted with machinery. Even a mechanician, if he has never looked into a piano, will, if shown a damper, be unable to conceive its function or relative value. Most of all, however, where the whole is organic, does complete comprehension of a part imply extensive comprehension of the whole. Suppose a being ignorant of the human body to find a detached arm. If not misconceived by him as a supposed whole, instead of being conceived as a part, still its relations to other parts, and its structure, would be wholly inexplicable. Admitting that the co-operation of its bones and muscles might be divined, yet no thought could be framed of the share taken by the arm in the actions of the unknown whole it belonged to ; nor could any interpretation be put upon the nerves and vessels ramifying through it, which severally refer to certain central organs. A theory of the structure of the arm implies a theory of the structure of the body at large", Spencer, The Data of Ethics (n. 20), at 3-4. About the relation of parts and the whole of the organism, see also Immanuel Kant: "zu einem Dinge als Naturzwecke wird nun erstlich erfordert, dass die Teile (ihrem Dasein und der Form nach) nur durch ihre Beziehung auf das Ganze möglich sind. ... Soll aber ein Ding, als Naturprodukt, in sich selbst und seiner innern Möglichkeit doch eine Beziehung auf Zwecke enthalten, d.i. nur als Naturzweck und ohne die Kausalität der Begriffe von vernünftigen Wesen ausser ihm möglich sein: so wird zweitens dazu erfordert: dass die Teile desselben sich dadurch zur Einheit eines Ganzen verbinden, dass sie von einander wechselseitig Ursache und Wirkung ihrer Form sind. ... In einem solchen Produkte der Natur wird ein jeder Teil, so, wie er nur durch alle übrige da ist, auch als um der andern und des Ganzen willen existierend, d. i. als Werkzeug (Organ) gedacht: welches aber nicht genug ist (denn er könnte auch Werkzeug der Kunst sein, und so nur als Zweck überhaupt möglich vorgestellt werden); sondern als ein die andern Teile (folglich jeder den andern wechselseitig) hervorbringendes Organ, dergleichen kein Werkzeug der Kunst, sondern nur der allen Stoff zu Werkzeugen (selbst denen der Kunst) liefernden Natur sein kann: und nur dann und darum wird ein solches Produkt, als organisiertes und sich selbst organisierendes Wesen, ein Naturzweck genannt werden können", Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft: in: Die Drei Kritiken (Cologne: Jokers, 2011), at 1171 (AA 05: 373-374). 16 become functional even if it keeps doing the same that it was doing when it was dysfunctional. For example: an eventual disturbance of an anatomic structure, say, the loss of an organ, the loss of blood, or the invasion of a mammal's organism by some worm that changes some structure, can be to some degree compensated by endoctrinous reactions with the additional production of some hormone and/or change in metabolism, so that the organism can maintain its normality to some extent. Under such circumstances, if some organs do not change their normal activity, they become dysfunctional precisely for this reason. If one cuts some legs of a water beetle only of one side, it does not start to swim in circles, as it would be expected if its legs were inanimate mechanisms, rather, the other legs compensate the loss, adapt themselves to the new circumstance, and the beetle keeps swimming forward, to its original direction.34 Thus, whether an organ is fulfilling its function or not depends on its orientation towards a contribution to the health of the whole organism and not only on its usual working mechanics;35 if it does not change its activity according to adverse circumstances in the sense of maintaining health within its realm of possibilities, it is not functional, and that is one of the reasons why teleology is not the same as statistic regularity or synonym of tendency in the sense of frequency36, although it is also frequent. This shows that if someone wishes to find the 'laws', here said in an improper sense, according to which an organic structure functions, for example in order to develop a medicine, to save a plantation against a plague, or only to admire the wonder of natural organization and beauty, first he has to think teleologically, i. e. to understand for example what a structure works for, how the replication of some genes has to be in order not to incur in error, how the coordinated action of the structures result in equilibrium, or which traits provide the organism with an evolutionary advantage. Only after thinking teleologically one can try to find the eventual physical mechanisms that are related with the organic structure37 34 Uexküll, ʻDer Begriff der "Funktion" und seine Bedeutung für unsere Vorstellung von der Wirklichkeit des Lebensvorgangesʼ (n. 25), at 15-19. 35 See Thure von Uexkuell's detailed explanation about the distinction between the mechanical activity of organs (their "Prozess", as he called it) and their functional activity in a proper sense ("Verrichtung", "Werk") in ibid., at 15-19. He also shows that changes of morphology are not necessarily changes of function and vice-versa. The attempt of reducing functions to arguably non-teleological factors such as the shape, position or organization of an organic structure would also fail due to the fact that two structures that are identical in these respects can still differ in relation to their functions, for example a dead and a living body, or a functional or dysfunctional heart. See Aristotle's position and analysis in Naeve, Naturteleologie bei Aristoteles, Leibniz, Kant und Hegel (n. 16), at 61. 36 The difference between teleology and probability is explained at length below, at 1.15.3. 37 "Biology, the scientific investigation of organic life, cannot avoid speaking of purposefulness in the study of organisms since such speaking enables the discovery of the rules that underlie their functioning", Jahae, Finality in Nature According to Kant and Blondel (n. 25), at 12. See also p. 81 and 217. About the applicability of the method of final causes to scientific discoveries in physics (concerning optics and the Snell's law), see Marcelo Dascal and Erez Firt, ʻLeibniz's conciliatory approaches in scientific controversiesʼ 137–167, at 140-146. About the priority of teleological thinking for scientific explanation of organic activity, see also Thure von Uexküll: 17 and that will eventually enable the conduction of the organism to some other purpose that it is not following by its own. For the scientific understanding of organisms, teleology is epistemologically prior to mechanism; teleological causality is the explicit or implicit pattern of explanation in scientific practice. 1.2.1 The necessity of teleology for evolution Hence, the events that happen after the action of an organism and as its consequence are neither exclusively caused by other previous things and events nor exclusively by physical laws, but necessarily also by its biotic activity. If a bird had not built a nest, the grass, leaves and mud that it is made of would not be in the position that they are now up on the tree; for that, the exclusive action of physical laws upon non-living beings would not suffice.38 This means that the consequent of its action is caused by a particularly organic principle of motion and that not only its internal organs function teleologically and coordinately, but also the whole individual by causing results outside of itself.39 Certainly, this individual and, therefore, the nest that it builds, exist partially due to a chain of causality established by evolution and natural selection, i. e., some of the causes why it has precisely these organic structures instead of others are the characteristics and changes of its environment throughout "Bedenken wir aber, dass die Entdeckung des Leberglykogens ohne die Frage nach dem Sinn niemals zu der Auffindung der Bedeutung des Leberglykogens als Energiespeicher für die Muskelzelle geführt hätte – der Befund des Glykogengehaltes der Leberzelle wäre als unbegriffenes Kuriosum der Physiologie liegengeblieben –, so sehen wir, wie auch die scheinbar rein kausal analysierende Physiologie nie ohne den Sinn-Begriff auskommt", at 18. About this point see also Dessauer, Die Teleologie in der Natur (n. 1), at 31. In this vein, not to consider final causality within a scientific explanation of organic behaviour would be the actual fiction. For an argument in this sense, see Hans Jonas, Das Prinzip Verantwortung: Versuch einer Ethik für die technologische Zivilisation (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979, reprint 2003), at 137-138. It would be, therefore, incorrect to state that "science has no need for final causes", as stated by Gilson, From Aristotle to Darwin and back again (n. 30), at 124, while however and paradoxically recognizing that finality exists in reality. 38 As Immanuel Kant points out, a tree "erzeugt ... sich auch selbst als Individuum. Diese Art von Wirkung nennen wir zwar nur das Wachstum; aber dieses ist in solchem Sinne zu nehmen, dass es von jeder andern Grössenzunahme nach mechanischen Gesetzen gänzlich unterschieden, und einer Zeugung, wiewohl unter einem andern Namen, gleich zu achten ist. Die Materie, die er zu sich hinzusetzt, verarbeitet dieses Gewächs vorher zu spezifisch-eigentümlicher Qualität, welche der Naturmechanism ausser ihr nicht liefern kann, und bildet sich selbst weiter aus, vermittelst eines Stoffes, der, seiner Mischung nach, sein eignes Produkt ist. ... Ein organisiertes Wesen ist also nicht bloss Maschine: denn die hat lediglich bewegende Kraft; sondern sie besitzt in sich bildende Kraft, und zwar eine solche, die sie den Materien mitteilt, welche sie nicht haben (sie organisiert): also eine sich fortpflanzende bildende Kraft, welche durch das Bewegungsvermögen allein (den Mechanism) nicht erklärt werden kann", Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft (n. 33), at 1169, 1173 (AA 05: 371, 375). 39 This is what Herbert Spencer has described as the transition from 'function' to 'conduct', which correlates to his definition of life as "the continuous adjustment of internal relations to external relations", Spencer, The Data of Ethics (n. 20), at 19. "Even when considering how parts that act directly on the environment legs, arms, wings--perform their duties, we are still concerned with functions in that aspect of them constituting physiology, so long as we restrict our attention to internal processes, and to internal combinations of them. But we enter on the subject of conduct when we begin to study such combinations among the actions of sensory and motor organs as are externally manifested. ... Types above these [of Protozoa], as fish which choose fit places in which to deposit their ova, or as the higher crustaceans which carry masses of ova about until they are hatched, exhibit adjustments of acts to ends which we may properly call conduct", ibid., at 9, 16. 18 the history of evolution. Indeed, the complexity of organic structures such as eyes and wings arose out of a long history of genetic mutation, environmental changes and long-term selection according to fitness. However, as already shown, previous things and events per se can never sufficiently cause posterior ones; additionally to them, in order something to happen there must be an effective nexus that realizes the transition from the things and events in every moment towards something qualitatively different in the next moment. Although this particular nest would not have existed precisely in this way if the history of evolution of the species had been in a certain way different, it would also not have existed if this particular bird would not have built it with its own organic energy. It would be, therefore, mistaken to assert that "how the simple organism interacts with the environment is solely dependent on its selection history"40, that "organisms are ultimately driven by adaptations that have been shaped by natural selection because in the past they eventually lead to reproduction"41, or, analytically, that an organism A acts like X in the present because all As that did not act like X in the past were selected out42, since in these mere indications of previous events the effective nexus, the actual energy of the living being, its effective nexus that generates movement and that anticipates a quality (in this case, the nest), would be missing. The identification of a nonteleological cause of the emergence of a structure or organism does not eliminate its teleological character, since it is not the story behind the functional entity that makes it functional.43 Furthermore, the present state of a species and, by consequence, this particular 40 Mark Okrent, Nature and Normativity: Biology, Teleology, and Meaning (NY and London: Routledge, 2018), at 69. 41 Hendrik Gommer, ʻFrom genes to legal norms. Cooperation as a pivot pointʼ, Rechtstheorie, 46 (2015), 115– 138, at 127, ipsis literis: "How can we translate the need for stability, reproduction and nutrients into normative expressions? Far from being consciously aware of it, organisms are ultimately driven by adaptations that have been shaped by natural selection because in the past they eventually lead to reproduction. This biological principle permeates all actions of all organisms, but the outcome depends on the circumstances", in reference to Gorge Williams' Adaptation and Natural Selection, Princeton 1966. 42 Okrent, Nature and Normativity (n. 40), at 67. 43 Georg Toepfer, Historisches Wörterbuch der Biologie: Geschichte und Theorie der biologischen Grundbegriffe (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2011), keyword 'Funktion', at 663. As FizPatrick points out, "an entity X can have a function Z quite apart from whether or not Z enters into a causal explanation of how X came to be there; the turtle's tail, for example, can have the function of protecting the eggs, even if this is not the effect that enters into the natural selection explanation of the presence of the tail (whether of its initial fixation in the population, or even of its maintenance). This, I think, is a significant advantage, since such functional claims are indeed plausible, and so ought to be accommodated by a satisfactory account", William J. FitzPatrick, Teleology and the Norms of Nature (New York: Garland Publishing, 2000), at 234. To have a function does not depend on the causal history behind the organ, but, of course, since the organ has, indeed, a causal history and exists because of the causes that led to its emergence, its causal history is also the (spatial-temporal) cause of it having the function (see Neander, ʻWarum Geschichte zählt. Vier Theorien über Funktionenʼ (n. 32), at 116), though not the reason or conceptual justification for why it is functional. In short, the causal history does not determine the function conceptually. For a detailed analysis of diverse reasons why the selection history is neither necessary nor sufficient for determining the functionality of an organic structure, see Toepfer, Zweckbegriff und Organismus (n. 22), at 295-319. Even in the purely hypothetical case that an 19 nest, are not only caused by the environment or by anatomic structure, but also by the behaviour of the predecessor individuals,44 which is also an organic principle of motion. The relationship between natural selection and organic functionality is not of historical or logical priority of the former over the latter: selection did not originally cause organic functionality; rather, functionality is a requirement for natural selection. 45 The evolution of the species happens at the same time as teleological causality takes place, teleological behaviour being thereby one of the very causes of evolution rather than a contraposition to it. As an example of something that occurs due to both evolutionary and teleological causes one can mention incest avoidance. Incest can be defined as the heterosexual intercourse between close relatives who have 25% or more genetic similarity, which are in terms of human parenthood: mother and son, father and daughter, brother and sister, uncle and organism would not have any selection history, there would be no reason to deny that it would have functional structures. This is what can be called the 'primacy of organization over evolution or selection'. See ibid., at 423424. Thus, organic structures can be functional even when they appear for the first time in history and do not have, therefore, a 'selection history'. See Kenneth F. Schaffner, ʻFunktionsanalyse und teleologische Erklärungʼ, in Gerhard Schlosser and Michael Weingarten, eds., Formen der Erklärung in der Biologie (Berlin: Primus Solvero, 2002), 47–90, at 69. The terms that have been employed for the thought experiment of an imaginary living being that does not have any selection history go through "accidental double", "swamp mule", "swamp man", "instant lions" etc. See Toepfer, Zweckbegriff und Organismus (n. 22), at 298. For all these reasons, it would be a mistake to make the conceptual reason why something is functional depend on the history of the thing, as ultimately done by Neander, ʻWarum Geschichte zählt. Vier Theorien über Funktionenʼ (n. 32), at 117. In Toepfer's words about her approach, "Neanders Fehler besteht nun darin, die Selektion von einem Gegenstand, d. h. die tatsächliche Änderung seiner Häufigkeit in der Population, zum Kriterium des Funktionsbegriffs zu machen. Denn nicht jede Funktion eines Merkmals muss sich tatsächlich in einer Zunahme dieses Merkmals in der Population äussern", Toepfer, Zweckbegriff und Organismus (n. 22), at 287. As Toepfer also points out, "selbst vorhandene Einsichten in die Entstehungsgeschichte eines Teils sind für die Physiologie oft irrelevant: Die Funktion eines Teils wird physiologisch an seinem gegenwärtigen Beitrag für das System fest gemacht, nicht an dem Beitrag, den er früher einmal geleistet hat. Physiologisch ist es die Funktion des Harnleiters, wie sein Name sagt, Harn zu leiten, auch wenn er bei männlichen Säugetieren ursprünglich als Spermienleiter entstanden ist und diese Funktion der Grund dafür ist, warum dieser Leiter im Organismus vorhanden ist", Toepfer, Historisches Wörterbuch der Biologie (n. 43), at 663. About the independence of a functional description of a structure from its evolutionary description, see also Gutmann, ʻÜber 'Funktion'ʼ (n. 32), at 351-353. 44 Note that the functionality of behaviours and of structures are not the same. In evolution, change in behaviour is prior to change in anatomic structure: "when evolution involves both structure and behaviour, behaviour should change first and then structure. ... Dhorn postulated that the function of an organ, which in retrospect we can view to be most clearly expressed in its behaviour, is continually changing and dichotomizing over many generations according to the experience of the organism. Changes in the structure of the organ represent accommodations to these functional shifts.... The entire process of ritualization, during which a behaviour is transformed by evolution into a more efficient signaling device, typically involves a behavioural change followed by morphological alterations that enhance the visibility and distinctiveness of the behaviour", Edward O. Wilson, Sociobiology: The New Systhesis (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000), at 13. 45 As Toepfer explains, "über Selektion kann im Rahmen einer Evolutionstheorie zwar beansprucht werden, die besondere Form jedes einzelnen Merkmals eines Organismus als das Ergebnis einer Anpassung zu erklären – der Begriff der Funktion wird damit aber nicht geklärt, sondern immer schon vorausgesetzt", Toepfer, Zweckbegriff und Organismus (n. 22), at 308. See also Naeve, Naturteleologie bei Aristoteles, Leibniz, Kant und Hegel (n. 16), at 410-411. "Die Einsicht in das evolutionstheoretische Letzterklärungsdefizit bezüglich der Entstehung organischer Zweckmässigkeit zwingt dazu, das Bedingungsverhältnis zwischen Selektion und Zweckmässigkeit umzukehren", ibid., at 411. 20 niece, aunt and nephew.46 Incest is avoided by a multitude of species of plants and animals.47 Incest avoidance has also been a constant custom of apes and of early humans since the beginning of the human species. There existed incest taboos and prohibitions in hunters and gatherers societies,48 among the Australian aborigines,49 in ancient Greece and ancient Rome,50 in the Christian middle ages51 and in the German territory since at least the sixth century.52 In some branches of Christian theology, incest has been prohibited also indirectly by means of the prohibition of polygamy.53 In some contemporary societies, incest is a criminal offense;54 in some legal orders it appears only as the prohibition against marriage between close relatives in private law.55 In the West, incest is also indirectly avoided among parents and children due to the moral belief that the latter should not be sexually available until adulthood, a belief that resulted in many legal norms for the protection of family and the 46 Hans-Jörg Albrecht, Kriminologischer Teil, in: Stellungnahme zu dem Fragenkatalog des Bundesverfassungsgerichts in dem Verfahren 2 BvR 392/07 zu § 173 Abs. 2 S. 2: Gutachten des Max-PlanckInstituts für ausländisches und internationales Strafrecht vom 19.11.2007 , at 112. In the same sense, Jörg Klein, Inzest. Kulturelles Verbot und natürliche Scheu (Opladen: Westdt. Verl., 1991), at 10, and David F. Aberle and et al., ʻThe Incest Taboo and the Mating Patterns of Animalsʼ, American Anthropologist, 92 (1990), 253–265, at 254. 47 About the incest avoidance of birds and mammals, see ibid.; see also Klein, Inzest. Kulturelles Verbot und natürliche Scheu (n. 46), at 76-84 and Jonathan H. Turner and Alexandra Maryanski, Incest. Origins of the taboo (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2005), at 115-120. About the incest avoidance of animals, see also Irenäus EiblEibesfeldt, Grundriss der vergleichenden Verhaltensforschung: Ethologie, 7th ed. (Munich: Piper, 1987), at 593594 and Wilson, Sociobiology (n. 44), at 79. About inbreeding avoidance by plants: "Genetically determined self-incompatibility (SI) systems ensure high rates of out-crossing because they allow the pistil to recognize and reject genetically identical pollen. As such, SI systems are thought to be advantageous because populations with high levels of polymorphism have the genetic variability required for withstanding a wide range of environmental challenges", S. Sherman-Broyles and J. B. Nasrallah, ʻSelf-Incompatibility and Evolution of Mating Systems in the Brassicaceaeʼ, in Vernonica E. Franklin-Tong, ed., Self-Incompatibility in Flowering Plants: Evolution, Diversity, and Mechanisms (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer, 2008), 123–141, at 123. 48 Uwe Wesel, Geschichte des Rechts. Von den Frühformen bis zur Gegenwart, 3rd ed. (München: C. H. Beck, 2006), marginal notes 11 and 16. 49 Sigmund Freud, Totem und Tabu (1913): in: Gesammelte Werke (Köln: Anaconda, 2014), at 613-628. 50 Turner and Maryanski, Incest. Origins of the taboo (n. 47), at 3; Herbert Maisch, Inzest (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1968), at 46-47. 51 Ines Weber, Ein Gesetz für Männer und Frauen. Die frümittelalterliche Ehe zwischen Religion, Gesellschaft und Kultur (Ostfildern: Jan Thorbecke Verlag, 2008), at 210-233. 52 Sami Bdeiwi, Beischlaf zwischen Verwandten (§ 173 StGB). Reform und Gesetzgebung seit 1870 (Berlin u.a.: de Gruyter, 2014), at 253. 53 The rationale is that, by prohibiting polygamy, also sexual relationships between relatives within the nuclear family are prohibited and thereby diminish in frequency. 54 See for example Section 173 of the German Penal Code ("Sexual intercourse between relatives"): "(1) Whoever has sexual intercourse with a descendant by blood incurs a penalty of imprisonment for a term not exceeding three years or a fine. (2) Whoever has sexual intercourse with a blood relative in the ascending line incurs a penalty of imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years or a fine; this also applies if the familial relationship has ceased to exist. Natural siblings who have sexual intercourse with each other incur the same penalty. (3) Descendants and siblings do not incur a penalty under this provision if they were under 18 years of age at the time of the act." Translation by Prof. Dr. Michael Bohlander. Available at https://www.gesetze-iminternet.de/englisch_stgb/englisch_stgb.html 55 See for example §1307 of the German Civil Code ("Relationship by blood"): "A marriage may not be entered into between relatives in direct line and between brothers and sisters of the whole blood and of the half blood. This continues to apply if the relationship is extinguished as the result of adoption", translated by Langenscheidt Übersetzungsservice, available at https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_bgb/englisch_bgb.html#p4765. 21 sexual autonomy of individuals.56 Even in the merely hypothetical case that there were groups that did not have an explicit prohibition of incest in their law or moral consciousness, as some researchers have claimed in relation to custom in ancient Persia,57 that does not mean that the individuals did not have an incest inhibition, and by far it does not imply any prevalent incest practice within that group.58 There has never been any society in which incest practice would have been the normality since immemorial times.59 Incest avoidance was already the normality of most species, including human predecessors, before language and culture emerged on Earth60 and, therefore, it cannot be considered to be a human social construction from its very beginning, as it would be the case if incest avoidance had been started at a time in history when some community created a taboo. Rather, there are natural causes why cultural elements such as taboos are created in the first place. Indeed, incest avoidance provides a considerable evolutionary advantage because incest generates deleterious homozygosity with a probability of 50%, which results in serious phenotypic damages already in the first generation.61 Some frequent degenerative effects of incest in humans are epilepsy, diverse malformations62 and lower intelligence,63 consequences that in general can be called "inbreeding depression"64. Thus, the incest offspring has considerably less chances to reproduce, and this is one of the causes why the genes that lead to incest remain rare in the respective group, i. e., incest avoiding individuals and groups prevail in the long run by means of natural selection.65 However, the history of evolution, i. e., the mere existence of previous events is not a sufficient cause of any particular incest avoidance (or incest practice) by any individual. 56 As Claude Lévi-Strauss has pointed out, "Le fait de la règle, envisagé de façon entièrement indépendante de ses modalités, constitue, en effet, l'essence même de la prohibition de l'inceste", Claude Lévi-Strauss, Les structures élémentaires de la parenté, 2nd ed. (Paris: Mouton & Co, 1967), at 37. 57 For a discussion about these claims, see Nikolaus Sidler, Zur Universalität des Inzesttabu. Eine kritische Unterschung der These und der Einwände (Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke, 1971), at 86-122. 58 Ibid., at 86-122. 59 Ibid., at 153. 60 Turner and Maryanski, Incest. Origins of the taboo (n. 47), at 27-28, 39, 170, 173. 61 Ibid., at 37. 62 Ibid., at 35. 63 Ibid., at 36. 64 Wilson, Sociobiology (n. 44), at 79. "If some trait, such as size, intelligence, motor skill, sociability, or whatever, possesses a degree of heritability, and if some of the loci display either dominance of superior heterozygote performance, or both, inbreeding will cause a decline of the trait within the population. The decline will affect not only the trait averaged over the population as a whole, but also the performance of an increasing number of individuals", ibid., at 78. 65 Turner and Maryanski, Incest. Origins of the taboo (n. 47), at 34-35. For further evolutionary advantages of incest avoidance, see Aberle and et al., ʻThe Incest Taboo and the Mating Patterns of Animalsʼ (n. 46), at 262263; Klein, Inzest. Kulturelles Verbot und natürliche Scheu (n. 46), at 85-96; and Wilson, Sociobiology (n. 44), at 79: "The loss of heterozygosity reduces the ability to buffer the development of structures against fluctuations in the environment. Hence less heterosigosity increases the chance of producing less adaptive variants such as phenodeviants. It further reduces the genetic diversity of offspring, a loss that can result in the loss of entire blood lines, or even social groups, when the environment changes". 22 Nothing can happen without motion that brings it about, i. e., the mere existence of things and events at t1 is not a sufficient cause of what happens at t2, whereas neither 'evolution' nor 'natural selection' per se are principles of motion, they are not forces in a proper physical sense such as gravitation or an electric field that could move things from a spatial position to another. Evolution and natural selection are, rather, the fact that the species emerge, survive and change over time according to their fitness in relation to their environment, and this is an aggregation of successive states that contains the emergence and perishment of organisms and structures over time, but does not move them. In other words, evolution and natural selection are not effective nexuses. In the common expressions 'mechanical laws of natural selection' and 'evolutionary pressure', the terms 'mechanical', 'law' and 'pressure' are actually meant in an improper sense (lex impropria), not in the sense of mechanical physical laws, nor as principles of motion, not as forces and, as shown above, certainly not as oppositions to teleology. Incest avoidance is not a mechanical law of physics; incest is, rather, very well possible and is indeed practiced, if only in exceptional cases.66 Indeed, some animals (including humans) sometimes practice incest, but most often they do not. Therefore, incest avoidance is a behaviour in the realm of possibilities of physical laws that is neither physically necessary nor impossible, i. e., in relation to physics it is contingent, but absolutely considered it is not merely contingent, but in accordance with biotic principles of motion, for example with genes. The genes that lead to incest avoidance, as is the case of all genes, are immaterial principles of motion that transcend the individuals upon which they are effective. As a principle of motion and exactly as it is the case of physical laws, genes are supraindividual because the very same gene is effective for many individuals (likewise the same physical law is valid for many physical bodies), i. e., the same kind of program is instantiated 66 See Norbert Bischof, ʻDie biologischen Grundlagen des Inzesttabusʼ, in Günther Reinart, ed., Bericht über den 27. Kongress der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Psychologie in Kiel 1970 (Göttingen: Verlag für Psychologie, 1973), 115–142, at 137-138. See also Turner and Maryanski, Incest. Origins of the taboo (n. 47), at 3-4. About 'dinastic incest' and ritual incest, see Klein, Inzest. Kulturelles Verbot und natürliche Scheu (n. 46), at 101. About incest in Egypt, see Maisch, Inzest (n. 50), at 56. About incest in ancient mythologies, see Johann Jakob Bachofen, Das Mutterrecht: Eine Untersuchung über die Gynaikokratie der alten Welt nach ihrer religiösen und rechtlichen Natur, 3rd ed. (Basel: Benno Schwabe, 1948), at 283. About the incest as a ritual, see also Aberle and et al., ʻThe Incest Taboo and the Mating Patterns of Animalsʼ (n. 46), at 253. About other exceptional practices of incest, see Gregory C. Leavitt, ʻSociobiological Explanations of Incest Avoidance: A Critical Review of Evidential Claimsʼ, American Anthropologist, 92 (1990), 971–993, at 973. About some social advantages of consanguineous marriage, see Bittles: "Preferential consanguineous marriage is mainly explained in social and economic terms, and the reasons given include the strengthening of family relationships and the maintenance of family property, including landholdings. Prenuptial arrangements also are greatly simplified, and the security of marrying a partner whose entire family background is known is perceived as a major benefit in ensuring the success and stability of the union, with lower divorce rates among consanguineous couples", Alan H. Bittles, ʻGenetic Aspects of Inbreeding and Incestʼ, in William H. Durham and Arthur P. Wolf, eds., Inbreeding, Incest, and the Incest Taboo. The state of knowledge at the turn of the century (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005), 38–60, at 43. 23 within many individuals.67 Clearly, gene is not equal chromosome; a gene is not a strand of DNA or any other material entity. In relation to the structure of the DNA, a gene or 'genetic code' consists in a certain sequence of bases (in chemical sense) and not in the bases and nucleotides themselves; the same sequence is present in many parts of the organism and many different organisms.68 Although a gene is effective for the matter that is located within certain regions of the space, namely some portions of the matter of biotic bodies, it does not have per se extension. A gene does not have three dimensions in space, it does not prevent other things from occupying the same space, it does not have a size that could be measured or estimated or a material structure that could be observed with a microscope and shown and colored on a monitor next to other organic structures,69 and this is a common feature with all principles of motion in nature. The conclusion is that the fact that at t3-n the relatives A and B do not mate is not sufficiently caused by what has happened at t1 (including the whole history of evolution), since the organic (including genetic) activity of the individuals at t2 towards this result at t3 is a necessary cause of the result. 67 "The combination of genes that is any one individual may be short-lived, but the genes themselves are potentially very long-lived. Their paths constantly cross and recross down the generations. One gene may be regarded as a unit that survives through a large number of successive individual bodies", Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (n. 29), at 31. It would be, therefore, mistaken to understand genes as a merely internal determination of the individual's behaviour and as a form of individual autonomy, as conjectured for example by Toepfer, Historisches Wörterbuch der Biologie (n. 43), keyword 'Gen', at 34. According to Edward Wilson, "in a Darwinist sense the organism does not live for itself. Its primary function is not even to reproduce other organisms; it reproduces genes, and it serves as their temporary carrier. Each organism generated by sexual reproduction is a unique accidental subset of all the genes constituting the species", Wilson, Sociobiology (n. 44), at 3. The continuity of genes throughout generations resembles what Henri Bergson calls 'the unity of the élan vital': "l'unité de l'élan [vital] qui, traversant les générations, relie les individus aux individus, les espèces aux espèces, et fait de la série entière des vivants une seule immense vague courant sur la matière, mais chaque individu lui-même nous apparaît comme un agrégat, agrégat de molécules et agrégat de faits", Bergson, L'évolution créatrice (n. 19), at 271-272. He immateriality of genes is an instantiation of the general principle that life itself is not made of matter (it does not have size, weight etc.). About the inexistence of a 'matter of life' in literary sense (Lebensstoff), see Hans Driesch, Der Vitalismus als Geschichte und als Lehre (Leipzig: Verlag von Johann Ambrosius Barth, 1905), at 240-241. 68 When geneticists use the word gene to refer to a part of the DNA and say that the gene is 'within' the DNA, which is justifiable for pragmatic investigation purposes, the fact that the gene actually transcends the material structure referred to should be kept in mind. For an example of correct definition of gene combined with the pragmatics of materialist geneticist vocabulary, see Wilfried Jannig and Elisabeth Knust, Genetik: Allgemeine Genetik Molekulare Genetik Entwicklungsgenetik (Stuttgart: Thieme, 2004), at 8. 69 Genes are not 'materially specified' and for this reason some scientists suggest the term 'informational gene': "Ein Gen ist eine abstrakte mathematische Rechnungseinheit, deren materielle Realisierung nicht spezifiziert wird. ... Als eine von einem Individuum auf seine Nachkommen weitergegebene Einheit bleibt ein Gen über die Generationen hinweg erhalten und kann die Fitnessdifferenzen von Individuen verschiedener Typen erklären. ... Weil ein (funktionales) Gen jedenfalls nicht als physische Einheit im Genom vorliegt, wird der Begriff des informationalen Gens (»informational gene«) vorgeschlagen", Toepfer, Historisches Wörterbuch der Biologie (n. 43), keyword 'Gen', at 29. 24 1.2.2 The Sociobiological Enlightenment One of the results pursued by the behaviour of incest avoidance is the preservation of the group, which can be a family, a tribe, a race, the whole species or life in general. There are at least three reasons why individual welfare and survival are not purposes of incest avoidance. Firstly, because incest avoidance is a renounce of sexual pleasure that, if practiced, does not have per se any damaging consequence for the organic functions of the individuals that practice it. Secondly, because most individuals of most species do not know its negative consequences for the offspring. Most individuals of most species avoid incest not due to some "clairvoyance eugénique"70, i. e., not due to some knowledge about the group-degenerating consequences of its practice, but instinctively. Humans have not known it for the longest time of their history and many still do not know or deny it due to normally leftist (including liberal71) political ideologies.72 The rationale is that the individual who does not know about the consequences of incest cannot anticipate any suffering due to unsuccessful reproduction or debilitated offspring, which is why these factors cannot motivate selfish behaviour. Thirdly, because the fear of punishment by the group for the violation of a social norm, which would be indeed in the individual's interest, only exists since the time in history in which the incest prohibition exists, while the incest inhibition that is in question here is historically and causally prior to its prohibition. Thus, the teleology of incest avoidance is not the individual pleasure, happiness or self-preservation; rather, it is beyond the individual level, although it is, still, realized by individuals. Since incest avoidance is a behaviour of individual selflimitation, of renouncement of immediate sexual satisfaction in favor of a collectivist purpose, it is an example, probably the most fundamental one, of natural altruism that is not ultimately 70 Lévi-Strauss, Les structures élémentaires de la parenté (n. 56), at 15. 71 Political liberalism belongs to the left wing of the political spectrum. For a clarification of the many misunderstandings of late-modern political thought in defining liberalism as being right wing, see Julius Evola, Gli uomini e le rovine, 3rd ed. (Rome: Giovanne Volpe, 1972), at 45-64. Doubts about the degenerating effects of incest combined with leftist and liberal claims are expressed for example by the lawyers Panagiotis Karkatsoulis, Inzest und Strafrecht: Die Bedeutung des Strafrechts am Beispiel des Inzesttatbestandes (§173 StGB) (Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus-Verlagsgesellschaft, 1987), at 10; Karl Klöpper, Das Verhältnis von § 173 StGB zu Art. 6 Abs. 1 GG (München: Vahlen, 1995), at 103; Tatjana Hörnle, Grob anstössiges Verhalten: Strafrechtlicher Schutz von Moral, Gefühlen und Tabus (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2005), at 455, and Benno Zabel, ʻDie Grenzen des Tabuschutzes im Strafrecht. Zur Vereinbarkeit von § 173 Abs. 2 S. 2 StGB mit dem Grundgesetz zugleich Besprechung des Beschlusses des BVerfG v. 26.2.2008ʼ, Juristische Rundschau, 453, 11 (2008), 453–457, at 456. 72 About natural selection in general, "students have been taught that group selection is possible in principle, but can be ignored in practice. ... but today it is the naïve assumption that group selection can be consistently ignored", David Sloan Wilson and Edward O. Wilson, ʻRethinking the theoretical foundation of sociobiologyʼ, The Quarterly Review of Biology, 82, 4 (2007), 327–348, at 331-332. 25 caused by selfish individual behaviour and not even explainable by it,73 and that, together with many other natural altruistic behaviours,74 defeats (1) the anthropological fundament of theories that claim that the nature of men (or men in a 'state of nature') would be selfish individualism (bellum omnium contra omnes),75 as well as (2) the fundament of political theories that see the individual as the most basic or only real principle of agency in society76 and (3) of theories that claim that the most basic purpose naturally striven for by human beings would be individual welfare such as happiness77 or pleasure, even if the welfare of all 73 Before the Sociobiological Enlightenment, many theories of Biology, Evolutionary Psychology and Sociology attempted to explain altruism and cooperative behaviour as being ultimately grounded on indirect and sophisticated mechanisms of individual selfishness. 74 Another example of natural altruism is the behaviour of warning the other individuals of the group when a predator approaches them, and thereby attracting the predator's attention to oneself and therefore enhancing the probability of the own death, but also the probability of spreading the genes of close relatives and favoring the survival of the group. As Toepfer states, "Organismen verhalten sich also regelhaft und systematisch nicht so, dass sie ihr eigenes Überleben befördern – grundsätzlich ist ihr Streben vielmehr auf die Vermehrung ihrer Nachkommen gerichtet, auch unter Aufopferung des eigenen Lebens. Biologisch läuft das Gute als das Funktionale auf eine Maximierung des Reproduktionserfolgs hinaus, und nicht auf die Beförderung des Überlebens einzelner Organismen", Toepfer, Historisches Wörterbuch der Biologie (n. 43), keyword 'Funktion', at 658. For an empirical description of many kinds of human behaviour that are naturally oriented towards the preservation of the group rather than for individual preservation, see also Pflüger: "Der Mann ist im ernstesten Gespräch mit dem Weibe im Denken und Handeln instinctiv ein A n d e r e r als im Umgang mit seinem Geschlecht. So lange die Zeugungskraft währt, putzen sich beide Geschlechter und behangen sich mit allerlei Zierrath, Fliter und Tand. Sie ertragen im Dienste der Gefallsucht die grössten Unbequemlichkeiten, ja sogar bedeutende Schmerzen, wie die Durchbohrung der Ohren, Nase, Lippen und das zur ‚Verschönerung' auch geübte Ausbrechen der Zähne u. s. w. bezeugt. ...", E. F. Pflüger, Die teleologische Mechanik der lebendigen Natur: in: Grundlagenstudien aus Kybernetik und Geisteswissenschaft, vol. 11 (Quickborn: Schnelle GmbH, 1970), at 25. About many reasons why the welfare of the individual and even of other individuals of the same species are not the ultimate ends of organic functions, see FitzPatrick, Teleology and the Norms of Nature (n. 43), at 114-118. 75 For instance Schopenhauer: "Die Hauptund Grundtriebfeder im Menschen, wie im Tiere, ist der Egoismus, d. h. der Drang zum Dasein und Wohlsein. ... Der Egoismus also ist die erste und hauptsächlichste, wiewohl nicht die einzige Macht, welche die moralische Triebfeder zu bekämpfen hat", Arthur Schopenhauer, Preisschrift über die Grundlage der Moral: 1840, in: Sämtliche Werke. Naturphilosophie und Ethik, vol. 4 (Mundus Verlag, 1999), § 14, p. 321, 323. 76 As a representative example one can mention Ludwig von Mises and the idea of 'methodological individualism' that is widespread in the philosophy of political liberalism: "The hangman, not the state, executes a criminal. It is the meaning of those concerned that discerns in the hangman's action an action of the state. A group of armed men occupies a place. It is the meaning of those concerned which imputes this occupation not to the officers and soldiers on the spot, but to their nation. If we scrutinize the meaning of the various actions performed by individuals we must necessarily learn everything about the actions of collective wholes. For a social collective has no existence and reality outside of the individual members' actions. The life of a collective is lived in the actions of the individuals constituting its body. There is no social collective conceivable which is not operative in the actions of some individuals. The reality of a social integer consists in its directing and releasing definite actions on the part of individuals. ... There is no substratum of society other than the actions of individuals", Ludwig von Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics, 4th ed. (San Francisco: Fox & Wilkes, 1963), at 42-43. Although von Mises is right when he states that "the way to a cognition of collective wholes is through an analysis of the individuals' actions. ... Nobody ever perceived a nation without perceiving its members" (ibid., at 42-43), methodological individualism loses its priority in relation to methodological collectivism if it is also true that in order to understand, explain and foresee individuals' actions, one has to make a biological and cultural analysis of the group which he is inserted in or comes from, for example his race, nation or corporation. 77 Ludwig von Mises for example states that there is "no valid objection to a usage that defines human action as the striving for happiness", and even that "every instinct is an instinct to happiness". See ibid., at 14-15. Immanuel Kant's ethics is also an example of ethical system based on an individualist anthropological understanding of human nature. According to Kant, all principles of action that involve the desire for any 26 individuals is concerned.78 Rather, the universal existence of incest avoidance in human societies, for a long time supported with heavy punishments for deviation,79 afterwards adopted by penal legislation and prohibition against marriage between close relatives in private law, is an example of a supra-individual principle of motion that, although followed by individuals, is the very same one among them and whose purpose is not their own welfare or survival. These evidences are part of the Sociobiological Enlightenment of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the West,80 which brought about additional philosophical reasons empirical things ("materiale praktische Prinzipien") are of 'only one kind' ("einerlei Art"): they are a pursuit of the individual's own bliss: "Alle materiale praktische Prinzipien sind, als solche, insgesamt von einer und derselben Art und gehören unter das allgemeine Prinzip der Selbstliebe oder der eigenen Glückseligkeit", Immanuel Kant, Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, 8th ed. (Leipzig: Felix Meiner, 1922), at 27 (AA 22), see also 44 (AA 34). According to him, satisfaction of the own happiness is the 'sum of all inclinations' of men. Immanuel Kant, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten: in: Werke in sechs Bänden (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1963), at 25 (BA 13). Thomas Hobbes has assumed an egalitarian comprehension of human nature and committed thereby many mistakes such as the claim to "equality of ability" of men (chapter XIII, p. 83) according to which the principal ends of men would be their "own conservation, and sometimes their delectation" (chapter 13, p. 83) and the claim that "of the voluntary acts of every man, the object is some good to himself" (ch. 14, p. 66). Natural selfishness would be ultimately the reason why men create a central power of such greatness that could not be endangered (chapter XIII, p. 83). Hobbes' mistaken anthropology should not be considered as an isolated philosophical phenomenon. It is an expression of the English culture of that time, in which public affairs were indeed managed by private men as a result of agreements and compromises, which, in its turn, was a continuation of many forms of properties of Viking social organization. For a cultural comparison of English and continental European, especially Prussian, ways of organization of public affairs see Oswald Spengler, Preussentum und Sozialismus (Munich: CH Beck, 1920), at 26-67. 78 For example Stuart Mill's utilitarianism. Although Mill's utilitarianism is primarily a normative ethics that aims to define what should be sought as an end of human conduct rather than what is really pursued, it has been developed out of observations of what according to his view is really pursued by individuals in the majority of cases, and this is what provides a basis for his inductive generalization and transformation of the empirical observation of what normally 'is' into a normative statement of what 'ought to be'. According to him, "the creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, Utility, or the Greatest Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure. ... the happiness which forms the utilitarian standard of what is right in conduct, is not the agent's own happiness, but that of all concerned", John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism (Portland, OR: The Floating Press, 1879, ed. 2009), at 14, 31. For the establishment of individual happiness as the ultimate end of human conduct, he departs from a "theory of life" (p. 14) that assumes that this end is, indeed, what individuals really pursue. However, if this individualist anthropological fundament is mistaken, as sociobiology shows it to be, any normative ethics based on it must be revised. 79 Ethnographical analysis in Lévi-Strauss, Les structures élémentaires de la parenté (n. 56). 80 The philosophical bases of natural group-selection throughout history among humans have been laid by Friedrich Nietzsche, whose psychological philosophy was the most fundamental and influential work of the Sociobiological Enlightenment. He has analyzed the 'natural history of morals' and showed how morality can be established by a group for its survival, welfare and reproduction, which has been called after him 'psychological evolutionary strategy'. He has also shown how individuals contain contrary principles of motion called 'battle of instincts' and how systems of unconditional morality establish purposes of survival of their defenders in conscious and unconscious ways. As he puts it, "mein Gedanke ist, wie man sieht: dass das Bewusstsein nicht eigentlich zur Individual−Existenz des Menschen gehört, vielmehr zu dem, was an ihm Gemeinschafts− und Heerden−Natur ist; dass es, wie daraus folgt, auch nur in Bezug auf Gemeinschafts− und Heerden−Nützlichkeit fein entwickelt ist, und dass folglich Jeder von uns, beim besten Willen, sich selbst so individuell wie möglich zu verstehen, "sich selbst zu kennen", doch immer nur gerade das Nicht−Individuelle an sich zum Bewusstsein bringen wird, sein "Durchschnittliches", − dass unser Gedanke selbst fortwährend durch den Charakter des Bewusstseins − durch den in ihm gebietenden "Genius der Gattung" − gleichsam majorisirt und in die Heerden−Perspektive zurück−übersetzt wird", Friedrich Nietzsche, Die fröhliche Wissenschaft: in: Kritische Studienausgabe (eds. Giorgio Colli, Mazzino Montinari, Munich: DTV, 1999), book 5, §354. See also Friedrich 27 and empirical research about the facts that (1) 'higher-level units' such as social insect colonies can become endowed with the same adaptive properties of single organisms;81 and that (2) there is, additionally to the selection of individuals, a higher-level-selection throughout the history of evolution, i. e., kin selection and gene selection, all of which are kinds of group selection82, so that neither the individual nor the gene83 nor the species are the most basic unities of evolution, rather multi-level selection takes place between individuals, genes and groups.84 Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse: in: Kritische Studienausgabe (eds. Giorgio Colli, Mazzino Montinari, Munich: DTV, 1999), at §186, 192, 199, 200, 201 and Friedrich Nietzsche, Zur Genealogie der Moral: in: Kritische Studienausgabe (eds. Giorgio Colli, Mazzino Montinari, Munich: DTV, 1999). Major contributions to the Sociobiological Enlightenment include Spencer, The Data of Ethics (n. 20) and Wilson, Sociobiology (n. 44). In Legal Theory, one could mention the productive efforts of Hendrik Gommer's Biological Theory of Law and its application of evolutionary psychology to normative problems in the legal field. See for example Hendrik Gommer, ʻFrom the 'Is' to the 'Ought'. A Biological Theory of Lawʼ, ARSP, 96, 4 (2010), 449–468, at 464, Gommer, ʻFrom genes to legal norms. Cooperation as a pivot pointʼ (n. 41) and Hendrik Gommer, ʻThe Biological Foundations of Global Ethics and Lawʼ, ARSP, 100, 2 (2014), 151–175. Gommer's biological theory of law makes the relevant steps of (1) overcoming methodological individualism and showing natural altruism in human agency; (2) analyzing the structure of agency and connecting it to the fundamentals of normativity; (3) reinforcing natural law with grounds from modern science; (4) attempting to overcome the dualism of deontology and teleology and, consequently, (5) showing causal connections between fact and value, which results in an ontological monism. However, his theory has the following general problems hat are worth mentioning: (1) natural teleology seems not to be acknowledged; (2) biotic activity is understood basically in terms of statistical mechanism; (3) genetics is seen as providing ultimate explanations for biotic behaviour; (4) the dualism between is and ought is not really overcome, since ought is reduced to mental states or feelings of agents and, as such, falls into the contradictions that I will discuss below (1.14); (5) the underlying conception of nature is materialistic: nature would be basically about food, sex and emotions rather than qualities, principles, teleology and spirit, as will be seen below, 1.16, 1.17, 1.18, 2.2. 81 This is the logic of the so-called "superorganisms". See Wilson and Wilson, ʻRethinking the theoretical foundation of sociobiologyʼ (n. 72), at 330. See also the homeostasis of insect colony populations in Wilson, Sociobiology (n. 44), at 11. 82 About this claim see Wilson and Wilson, ʻRethinking the theoretical foundation of sociobiologyʼ (n. 72), at 334-336. 83 In contrast to the idea that the replication of genes would provide the ultimate explanation of organic behaviour, as previously asserted by many. See for example Dawkins: "the basic unit of natural selection is best regarded not as the species, nor as the population, nor even as the individual, but as some small unit of genetic material which it is convenient to label the gene", Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (n. 29), at 50. See also FitzPatrick: "An organism is a complex system of integrated parts and features that non-accidentally works ultimately to promote the inter-generational replication of certain germ-line 'copies' of the genes belonging to its co-adapted genome", FitzPatrick, Teleology and the Norms of Nature (n. 43), at 93. For an application in legal theory of the centrality of gene for evolution, see also Hendrik Gommer: "In evolutionary psychology, a proximate explanation considers the 'immediate cause of the behaviour'. For example, children need to drink orange juice because it makes them healthier. Translating the explanation into a norm: Children ought to drink orange juice in order to stay healthy. In contrast, an ultimate statement refers to survival, reproduction or the spreading of genes. For example, children need to drink orange juice because they will have a better chance to eventually spread their genes. Translating this explanation into a norm: Children ought to drink orange juice in order to have a better chance to spread their genes. The focus on genes, whose main characteristics are that they replicate and spread, provides ultimate explanations", Gommer, ʻFrom genes to legal norms. Cooperation as a pivot pointʼ (n. 41), at 131. 84 "...for a social group to function as an adaptive unit, its members must do things for each other. Yet, these group-advantageous behaviours seldom maximize relative fitness within the social group. The solution, according to Darwin, is that natural selection takes place at more than one level of the biological hierarchy. Selfish individuals might out-compete altruists within groups, but internally altruistic groups out-compete selfish groups. This is the essential logic of what has become known as multilevel selection theory", Wilson and Wilson, ʻRethinking the theoretical foundation of sociobiologyʼ (n. 72), at 328. 28 1.2.3 Fallibility in nature If both incest practice and incest avoidance are natural tendencies, even with respectively considerably different rates of frequency, there are contrary tendencies in nature.85 The contrary tendencies of organic activity consist in the fact that different organs and organisms frequently act in accordance with different purposes that cannot be all attained: genes are the environment of other genes and produce opposite tendencies; while a lion employs energy towards hunting a deer, the deer employs energy in the sense of not becoming a prey.86 In general terms, different organisms often act according to contrary principles of motion that cannot be both realized in the same reality. Analytically speaking, the anticipated purpose that is present in the organic being as its principle of motion ('B' in: 'A in order to B') may be incompatible with an anticipated purpose followed by another organism as its own principle of motion ('C in order to non-B'). Nevertheless, both purposes and the motion that happens toward them are equally real and equally causes of what happens in the next moment: the lion catches the deer exactly in that particular position in time and space because of the peculiar way how both animals acted. Now, the contrary purposes that are pursued by living beings are only instances of the contrarieties that exist within reality in general. The tendency of not getting into complete physical entropy with the environment is an example of activity of organisms that counters some forces, though not the laws, of physics. Moreover, the contrariety of forces and of movements are also ubiquitous in the inorganic reality itself: different forces have different vectors that tend to generate movement of bodies and particles in contrary directions, but in fact generate movement only in one direction among contrary ones each time: a body tends to continue in its linear direction of movement indefinitely, but that tendency is not continued if there is a collision with other body or if it is moved by another thing and force. Equally, a body in rotation tends to develop a centrifugal movement and, in fact, develops such a 85 Lotze calls them 'the conflict of forces in nature' ("den Widerstreit der Kräfte in der Natur") in Lotze, System der Philosophie (n. 3), at 458. Henri Bergson calls them "tendances antagonistes", for example the tendency of living beings to preserve their individuality, and, concomitantly, to lose their individuality by means of reproduction. See Bergson, L'évolution créatrice (n. 19), at 14. 86 In Herbert Spencer's words, "The multitudinous creatures of all kinds which fill the Earth, cannot live wholly apart from one another, but are more or less in presence of one another, are interfered with by one another. In large measure the adjustments of acts to ends which we have been considering, are components of that "struggle for existence" carried on both between members of the same species and between members of different species; and, very generally, a successful adjustment made by one creature involves an unsuccessful adjustment made by another creature, either of the same kind or of a different kind. That the carnivore may live herbivores must die; and that its young may be reared the young of weaker creatures must be orphaned. Maintenance of the hawk and its brood involves the deaths of many small birds; and that small birds may multiply, their progeny must be fed with innumerable sacrificed worms and larvae. Competition among members of the same species has allied, though less conspicuous, results. The stronger often carries off by force the prey which the weaker has caught", Spencer, The Data of Ethics (n. 20), at 17. 29 movement when the centripetal force ceases or diminishes. All these organic and inorganic tendencies and movements towards some specific situation occur independently of the real possibility or, in traditional philosophical terminology, of the potency of the situation. In other words, not even the impossibility of an event at t2 excludes the fact of the orientation of something at t1 towards it. The real orientation towards some event that (1) is still not realized and that (2.a) might not be realized in the next moment in time or (2.b) might be even unrealizable at all is, then, fallible.87 In other words, both organic behaviour and inorganic movement have an orientation within time towards events that might be realized or not, and that might be necessarily or impossibly realized. How fallibility in inorganic nature relates with teleology will be addressed below, at 1.15. 1.3 The teleological origin of deontology Physical movement and biotic activity are causes of the emergence and maintenance of societies and social norms. Incest inhibition for example was a cause of the emergence and maintenance of diverse norms in ancient and contemporary societies, most remarkably, as already mentioned, the many legal prohibitions against marriage between relatives. All these social norms have previous biotic activity as one of the causes of their emergence in cultures, as well as actual biotic activity as one of the causes of their maintenance in present cultures. In this respect, moral and legal norms are psychic evolutionary strategies that are much more complex than other evolutionary strategies based on instinct88 and that are only possible due to the complex properties of the human brain.89 From that it is clear that human thinking and consciousness are not conceptually or factually contraposed to natural tendencies; rather, they are themselves natural, tendential and part of natural teleology. Human thinking and will can be caused by previous things and events, including the physiology of the individual's own body, his thinking being in this case a 'physiological requirement'90 for the maintenance of a certain way of life, which does not prevent it from being the individual's internal thinking and 87 In Analytical Legal Theory, the most frequently used term for that is 'counterfactualness'. Since the talk here is, however, about real processes and, therefore, about facts, the term counterfactual would be misleading. Frequently, also the term 'normative' is used as a synonym for fallible. In the following it will be shown why this equalization is incorrect. 88 Other strategies for incest avoidance in the animal kingdom are for example: (1) to spread the offspring in the environment in order to reduce the probability that they meet each other, as it is the case of fish; (2) to evict the individuals that achieve the sexual maturity from the group, and (3) to have structures that create a feeling of unattractiveness between close relatives. See Turner and Maryanski, Incest. Origins of the taboo (n. 47), at 2830; Klein, Inzest. Kulturelles Verbot und natürliche Scheu (n. 46), at 78-87; and Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Grundriss der vergleichenden Verhaltensforschung (n. 47), at 594. 89 Turner and Maryanski, Incest. Origins of the taboo (n. 47), at 40-41. 90 Nietzsche, Zur Genealogie der Moral (n. 80), at 17. 30 an own principle of motion.91 In any case, already for these reasons it would be mistaken to assert that humankind could 'leave the state of nature' by regulating society on the sole basis of positive law (such as a social contract, a constitution, or a declaration of rights) or by acting on the sole basis of moral reasons that individuals can consciously reflect about and agree upon. Even if totemism, mythology and natural right cease to be used as explicit patterns of justification of beliefs, which has been increasingly the case in late Western Modernity due to the dominant ideology of materialism and the cultural influence of atheist science, individuals and groups remain in the 'state of nature' as long as their structures and behaviours are caused by natural teleology, evolution and genetics, which is to say, as long as they exist as individuals and groups of human kind. Under these circumstances, legal, moral, political and religious norms are still established as means to natural ends. 1.4 The teleological structure of normativity It is indeed the case that not all purposes of a human action are necessarily known by the respective individual or group that acts. As already mentioned, incest avoidance for example operates most often without 'clairvoyance eugénique': most members of most societies have not known for the most time of human history the life-preserving purpose of incest avoidance, that is, they have not known the real purpose of their own behaviour. It is because of the functionality of the behaviour on the one hand and of the lack of knowledge about its functionality on the other hand that they established imperatives that were considered to be unconditionally valid, i. e., not purpose-oriented; imperatives that consisted in norms that command or prohibit actions as valuable or rejectable in themselves, and whose value was not derived from their purposes. This characterizes a kind of unconditional deontology that was consubstantiated firstly in many sexual taboos and later in the incest prohibiting norms of contemporary legal orders and moral consciousness. Although cultural norms may be unconditionally valid, they are always fallible: they specify an agent and an action to be carried out and are valid independently of being really followed or enforced,92 and independently of being able to be followed or enforced. Crimes do not invalidate criminal law, violation of procedures does not invalidate procedural rules 91 As Aquinas states, "Not every principle is a first principle. Therefore, although it is essential to the voluntary act that its principle be within the agent, nevertheless it is not contrary to the nature of the voluntary act that this intrinsic principle be caused or moved by an extrinsic principle: because it is not essential to the voluntary act that its intrinsic principle be a first principle", Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae (n. 23), prima secondae, question 6, article 1. 92 As Christoph Möllers puts it, "Normen mögen verwirklicht werden, aber dadurch treten sie nicht an die Stelle der Fakten, in denen sie sich verwirklichen", Christoph Möllers, Die Möglichkeit der Normen: Über eine Praxis jenseits von Moralität und Kausalität, 1st ed. (Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2015), at 131. 31 etc. Not even the impossibility of observance causes the norm to lose validity. Certainly, this idea has been challenged sometimes in the history of jurisprudence with the objection that what is impossible could not logically be prohibited, and what is necessary could not be obliged in a meaningful way. However, prohibition and impossibility are indeed combinable, although it does not happen frequently. A norm that prohibits to enter a church dressing a hat would be still existing and valid in a community after the only existing church is demolished; a norm that prohibits the theft of personal information would maintain its validity even if the technology of data protection is so developed that theft is rendered impossible. Now, the peculiarity of unconditional deontology is that the purpose of the norms and actions are not considered to be relevant for their justification. Analytically, a norm at t1 that states that something ought to be done at t2 is not considered to be valid with recourse to some consequence of the action at t3, nor is the action considered to be right because of this consequence. To follow the given example: many people consider the act of incest as something simply repulsive and offensive of moral feelings.93 Although many individuals act intentionally and on the basis of consciously considered reasons when they avoid incest, their intentionality is directed towards norms such as that the member of a totem94 should not marry a member of the same totem, or that it is simply wrong or legally prohibited to commit incest, thus norms and reasons that are (or have been for a long time) both created and followed in a non-consequentialist way. Similarly, in most of the contemporary legal orders, the prohibition against marriage between close relatives is mostly not explicitly justified for reasons of preventing genetic deterioration ('negative eugenics'95), but, if a justification is needed at all, which is rarely the case, it is done either on the basis of tradition or the mere authority of law, which is why many leftist (including liberal) scholars who hold antitraditionalist or allegedly progressive views in humanities have challenged the rationale of incest prohibitions by arguing that they would be mere social constructions that originated out 93 This is what Jeremy Bentham calls sympathy and antipathy based ethics, an ethics that holds up "approbation or disapprobation as a sufficient reason for itself, and [disclaims] the necessity of looking out for any extrinsic ground", Jeremy Bentham, An introduction to the principles of morals and legislation (1781) (Kitchener: Batoche Books, 2000), at chap II, XI, p. 23. 94 According to Sigmund Freud, a totem is "in der Regel ein Tier, ein essbares, harmloses oder gefährliches, gefürchtetes, seltener eine Pflanze oder eine Naturkraft (Regen, Wasser), welches in einem besonderen Verhältnis zu der ganzen Sippe steht. Der Totem ist erstens der Stammvater der Sippe, dann aber auch ihr Schutzgeist und Helfer, der ihnen Orakel sendet, und wenn er sonst gefährlich ist, seine Kinder kennt und verschont", Freud, Totem und Tabu (1913) (n. 49), at 614. 95 "Classical negative eugenics consists of measures designed to reduce the fertility of people with genetic disorders, low intelligence, and psychopathic personality. Programs to achieve this objective are of two general kinds. The first consists of the provision of information and services on contraception, abortion, and the like to these people to enable them to control their fertility more effectively. ... The second kind of classical negative eugenics consists of the provision of incentives and the application of coercion or compulsion...", Richard Lynn, Eugenics: A Reassessment (Westport, Connecticut, London: Praeger, 2001), at 12. 32 of mythologies and irrational moral choices.96 Indeed, "few discoveries are more irritating than those which expose the pedigree of ideas"97. Nevertheless, even if the purpose of an action is not considered by someone or by the whole community to be relevant for its justification, the structure of norms is implicitly and in reality teleological, and this not only because norms have purposes even if they are not known by the participants of a social practice, but for reasons of structure: the nexus between an initial state of affairs and what should be done in a certain posterior moment is per se fallible orientation and, thus, teleological.98 A norm can be generally represented by the formula 'if A, then B ought to be (or is permitted or prohibited or not prohibited)'99 or 'for all A it is valid that B ought to be', whereas A means its initial conditions in a temporal sense,100 and B what should be done if the initial conditions are satisfied. For example, 'if someone commits incest, he should be punished'. In all of these kinds of cases, it is meant that an agent should employ means to achieve an end in the next moment in time, i. e., he should (or, in cases of omissions and prohibitions, should not) carry out some preliminary actions, if only very small ones such as realizing body movements or saying something, in order the precise action commanded by the norm, its end, to be (or not) accomplished. The establishment of a directedness relationship between the person and his condition in one moment and what should happen in a posterior moment is teleological. Norms consist in the establishment of ends to be pursued, if only in the very short run. Another example would be the legal and moral norm: 'if someone 96 See for example Karkatsoulis, Inzest und Strafrecht (n. 71) and Zabel, ʻDie Grenzen des Tabuschutzes im Strafrecht. Zur Vereinbarkeit von § 173 Abs. 2 S. 2 StGB mit dem Grundgesetz zugleich Besprechung des Beschlusses des BVerfG v. 26.2.2008ʼ (n. 71). 97 Lord Acton's dictum, quoted after Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History: A cogent examination of one of the most significant issues in modern political and social philosophy (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1953), at 7. 98 The teleological structure of norms has been recognized by many thinkers from diverse points of view. Von Wright for example states that "the way in which norms come to exert a 'pressure' on agents has clearly teleological characteristics", Wright, Explanation and Understanding (n. 32), at 147. Czech legal philosopher Vladímir Kubeš has stated that "im Sollen ist nämlich der Zielpunkt, der festgesetzte Zweck gegeben; die reale Tendenz zu ihm ist freilich erst gefordert. Und gerade nur die finale Determination kann das Sollen in das Sein überführen", Vladímir Kubeš, Ontologie des Rechts (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1986), at 52. As Nicolai Hartmann explains, "eine Teleologie, die nicht nach Werten ginge, d. h. deren Zwecke nicht material durch Werte bestimmt wäre, ist an sich wohl denkbar, obgleich wir sie als Phänomen nicht kennen; eine Realisation des Seinsollenden aber, die einen anderen Weg einschlüge als den der Finaldetermination – wenn man von ‚zufälliger', nicht wertgeleiteter Realisation absieht – nicht möglich. ... Die reale Dynamik der Finalreihe entspricht der idealen des Seinsollens", Hartmann, Ethik (n. 32), at 198. About the teleological structure of norms see also Ernst-Joachim Lampe, Genetische Rechtstheorie. Recht, Evolution und Geschichte (Freiburg u.a.: Alber, 1987), at 79; Fernando Leal, Ziele und Autorität: Zu den Grenzen teleologischen Rechtsdenkens (BadenBaden: Nomos, 2014), at 49 and Kelsen, Hauptprobleme der Staatsrechtslehre (n. 32), at 51, 68-69. 99 The normative notion of ought expresses not only direct commands such as that someone ought to do something, but also permissions and prohibitions. As Hans Kelsen explains, "mit ‚Sollen' drückt man für gewöhnlich den Gedanken des Gebotenseins, nicht den des Ermächtigtoder Erlaubtseins aus. Das rechtliche Sollen, das ist die Kopula, die im Rechtssatz Bedingung mit Folge verknüpft, umfasst alle drei Bedeutungen: die eines Gebotenseins, die eines Ermächtigtseins und die eines (positiven) Erlaubtseins der Folge; das heisst: mit dem ‚Sollen', das der Rechtssatz aussagt, werden alle drei normativen Funktionen bezeichnet", Hans Kelsen, Reine Rechtslehre, 2nd ed. (Vienna: Verlag Österreich, 1960, reprint 2000), at 81. 100 In the context of Continental European jurisprudence, Germans call it Tatbestand and Italians fattispecie. 33 commits theft, he should give the thing back to its owner', which is a norm that establishes a particular end to be accomplished,101 namely that the thief gives the stolen thing back to its owner, and requires implicitly the adoption of adequate means for that end. All norms that command, permit or prohibit some action follow the same pattern. The consequence is that normativity has a teleological structure and that, therefore, there can be no fundamental opposition between teleology and normativity. They cannot be distinguished by the criteria of fact and fallibility102 because, firstly, as already said, not only norms, but also teleological nexuses are fallible, and, secondly, because not only teleological nexuses, but also norms have a factual existence; they have been caused by previous things, events and natural factors, as the example of the legal and moral incest prohibition shows, and have also causal effects in the posterior reality, which would be different as it is now if certain norms would not have been formulated and obeyed or disobeyed in the past.103 Thus, both normative and teleological nexuses are factual and fallible in the same sense. 1.5 On oppositions between norms and purposes Now, to assert that normativity is teleological does not mean that there could not be oppositions between norms and purposes. Indeed, from a single purpose isolated considered, it does not follow that a specific person should act in some way. While a purpose is the establishment of a situation (a very proper German word for that is Sachverhalt) to be accomplished or prevented, norms specify actions to be carried out by specified agents. If one states for example the purpose that 'sufferers of injuries receive financial support', this per se does not imply any specific obligation on the side of anyone. Even if someone's injury has been caused by someone in a tortious way, the mere statement of that purpose does not imply 101 This property of norms can be called the norm's forward-orientedness ("Vorgriff auf die Zukunft"). See Dieter Suhr, Die kognitiv-praktische Situation: Fundamentierungsprobleme in praktischer Philosophie, Sozialtechnik und Jurisprudenz, 1st ed. (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1977), at 68. 102 In contrast to Hans Kelsen's ascription of teleology to the exclusive dimension of being and of norms to the dimension of ought. See Kelsen, Hauptprobleme der Staatsrechtslehre (n. 32), at 63-64. Kelsen indeed recognizes the factual character of norms from the psychological and sociological points of view, but not the fallible character of teleology. 103 For a further investigation about the ways of existence of norms and causes and effects of normative facts, see André Ferreira Leite de Paula, ʻOn the Unities of Law, Practical Reason, and Right. Foundations of the Unity of Reason Beyond the Plurality of Knowledge and of Normative Ordersʼ, in André Ferreira Leite de Paula and Andrés Santacoloma Santacoloma, eds., Law and Morals ARSP 158 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2019), 15–115, at 87-102. See also the in-depth developed ontology of norms by Pontes de Miranda: "Os fatos que se passam no mundo jurídico, passam-se no mundo; portanto, são. O mundo não é mais do que o total dos fatos e, se excluíssemos os fatos jurídicos, que tecem, de si-mesmos, o mundo jurídico, o mundo não seria a totalidade dos fatos", Pontes de Miranda, Francisco Cavalcanti, Tratado de Direito Privado: Parte Geral. Tomo I. Pessoas físicas e jurídicas (São Paulo: Revista dos Tribunais, 1983, reprint 2012), at 65. About the existence and objectivity of legal norms, see also Adriano Soares da Costa, Teoria da incidência da norma jurídica: Crítica ao realismo lingüístico de Paulo de Barros Carvalho, 2nd ed. (São Paulo: Malheiros, 2009). 34 that it is the wrongdoer that should be charged instead of anyone else in society. This is so because an obligation is constituted by the relationship of an agent with a purpose and, in most cases but not necessarily, the relationship that two or more persons have entered into. It is their relationship and their claims against each other that characterize justice, in the case of this example, corrective justice.104 An eventual attempt of grounding tort law on the exclusive purpose of financial support for injured persons (or on any other purpose such as maximization or distribution of wealth) would generate mutually exclusive alternatives of action, since either one practices justice by enforcing the doer's liability, which bears the risk that the sufferer might not get the sufficient compensation due to the poverty of the wrongdoer or his negligence of not contracting an insurance, or one accomplishes the purpose in the most efficient way regardless of relationships between agents, which would mean for example to require from any person whatsoever, e. g. the richest person in the region or from the state (and, by reflex, from anonymous taxpayers), to bear the costs in the first place as genuine debtors. This is so because, considered isolated, a purpose cannot be logically limited to one single person or the two parties of a transaction: "the purpose must embrace all those who fall under it."105 In this way, the optimal accomplishment of a purpose, its rational 104 About the contrast between corrective and distributive justice (in the sense of Aristotle) in the context of tort law, see Ernest Weinrib: "These two forms of justice are categorically different and this difference can be expressed in terms of the distinct notions of equality that each employs. Corrective justice abstracts from the particular attributes of the parties that are not essential to the intelligibility of doing and suffering. Accordingly, whatever their social status or wealth or character, the parties are considered equal at the outset of the transaction. This notional equality represents the implicit rationality of the transaction. A wrong is conceptualized as one party's disturbance of this equality at the expense of the other. Corrective justice does not, therefore, refer merely to an official act of dispute settlement; rather, the court's intervention is intelligible as specifying what is implicit in the relationship that already exists between the parties. In reflecting this relationship through the interpretation and enforcement of its normative implications, the court is itself part of the justificatory structure applicable to the transaction that it judges. The function of the court is to preserve the initial equality by transferring from one party to the other the fixed quantity that marks the deviation from the transaction's implicit rationality. This sum represents either the plaintiff's loss or the defendant's gain, and in paradigmatic instances of restitution, gain and loss will be identical. Because it restores the notional antecedent equality between the parties by making one of them transfer a fixed quantity to the other, corrective justice construes the interaction as immediately pertaining to no more than two parties. In encompassing both the wrong that one party has done to the other and the juridical reflex rectifying the wrong, corrective justice represents the structure of adjudication between plaintiff and defendant in private law", Ernest J. Weinrib, ʻLegal Formalism: On the Immanent Rationality of Lawʼ, The Yale Law Journal, 97, 6 (1988), at 980-981. 105 Ibid., at 993, from whom I owe the example in its main lines. Possible oppositions between obligations and purposes have been shown in detail by Ernest Weinrib in regard to tort law: "neither is subordinate to the other or superfluous to their relationship. The second way in which the projection of an external purpose onto a transaction is incompatible with corrective justice is that the purpose in question cannot be necessarily limited to the interaction of the two parties to the transaction. The purpose must embrace all those who fail under it; the immediate link between plaintiff and defendant is irrelevant. Since a transaction does not realize a collective goal, there is no necessary reason that the scope of the transaction should be coextensive with the operation of any purpose. Take tort law again as an example. If the purpose of tort law is considered to be the provision of financial support to those who suffer from personal injuries, the claim of a plaintiff can be no stronger than the claim of any person who is injured even non-tortiously and who therefore fails within the ambit of the purpose. Similarly, if one conceives of the purpose of tort law as the deterrence of wrongful behaviour, there is no warrant for restricting the deterring sanction to those instances of wrongful behaviour which materialize in injury. The purpose as such is indifferent to the transactional context of the tortious injury", ibid., at 993. 35 realization in the strict sense of instrumental rationality (thinking of 'means to ends'), stays in contrast with the compliance with certain norms. The validity or existence of the norm seems not to be justifiable by any purpose, but to be grounded on a notion of justice, and justice, in its turn, seems to be a value that would be independent of consequences (fiat justitia et pereat mundus, as the Romans said), which characterizes, here again, a kind of unconditional deontology. Also here, normativity could seem to contrast with teleology, and the right seems to oppose the good. It could seem that one had to establish an order of preference between right and good, between norm and purpose. However, the oppositions between teleology and normativity, between right and good, are only local; they rest on an isolated consideration of purposes and norms. Norms contain purposes in their own structure and are themselves means to purposes.106 The norm-internal purpose is the 'B' in 'if A, then B ought to be'. Following the above-mentioned example, to provide financial support for victims of injuries is, indeed, one purpose of the mentioned norms of tort liability. The rationale is that the mere existence of a more efficient means to accomplish some purpose does not exclude the character of a norm or a behaviour as a means to that purpose; it does not eliminate the teleological character of the norm. Back to the example, the fact that there are in a society hypothetically more efficient means than tort liability to the end of financial support for victims of injuries does not mean that the norm would not serve that purpose, which, in most of cases, it in fact does: normally, the wrongdoer can indemnify the sufferer at least to some extent. Although the norm is not sufficiently justified on the basis of that purpose (and, conversely, the purpose might not be sufficiently attained by means of that norm), this specific action by this specific agent is also an adequate means for that purpose. Furthermore, norms also contribute as means to the accomplishment of innumerous implicit further purposes ('norm-external purposes'). For example, the norms of tort law have also, among others, the purposes of fostering legal certainty and of discouraging the same person and other persons to commit a tortious act in the future.107 In 106 From the point of view of legal ontology and artificial intelligence, see Čyras and Lachmayer: "Our focus is on immanent teleology of the norm (which is treated as an obligation). Here the norm is a teleological instrument to realize a certain action. The norm being a technical instrument leads to social techniques of normativity. Our starting axiom is that every norm has such a "teleological shadow"", Vytautas Čyras and Friedrich Lachmayer, ʻTeleological Networks in Normative Systemsʼ, in E. Schweighofer, A. Geist, G. Heindl and C. Szücs, eds., IRIS 2008, 11th International Legal Informatics Symposium: Komplexitätsgrenzen der Rechtsinformatik (Stuttgart: Richard Boorberg, 2008), 483–492, at 486. The authors also make a distinction and formalization of the 'internal teleology' and 'external teleology' or legal norms. 107 Certainly, each of these purposes could also be attained in a more efficient way than by means of tort law: for example, one could prevent the same person from committing further tortious acts simply by applying life-long custodial sentence or death-penalty. Here too, if purposes are considered in this isolated way, the limits for their accomplishment lay exclusively in the limits of possibility, for no relationship is established between persons and success is measured by efficiency of means. In general, norms are almost never the most efficient means to 36 this way, it is clear that, while the norm is an isolated specification of some actions to be carried on by some agents, a purpose is the isolated specification of the situation to be accomplished. Both are parts of the same nexus which includes agents, actions and purposes, and is teleological and normative at once. In this respect, right and good cannot be chosen against each other. 1.6 The apparent need for unconditional deontology due to the contingency of teleological justification If purposes are not sufficient reasons for motivation and justification of an action, it appears that they could not be reasons at all. Indeed, if the reason why X should be done is Y, but if it is also said that Y does not always require X, the real reason for X seems not to have been said at all. It seems that its real reason must be one that is valid for all cases, i. e., it must be unconditional: all actions that fall under the rule must be equally provided for, otherwise the rule is not a real, sufficient, or even sincere reason. In the case of a prohibition for example, it seems arbitrary to prohibit X for the reason that it causes Y if not all actions that cause Y are equally prohibited. Indeed, how could incest be coherently and justifiably prohibited for reasons of preventing unhealth and dysgenics if not all actions that cause the same results are or should be equally prohibited as well, for example the massive consumption of unhealthy food? Also here, it appears that the unsuitability of purposes for sufficient justification leads to the necessity of unconditional deontology: for an action to be right it would mean that it must follow from a general rule that would be valid for all cases under it.108 Then, by following that rule, an agent could have the certainty of a right action even if he cannot know for sure its consequences and whether they are good or bad.109 Since the agent must act here and now, which is a necessity derived from the nature of agency, whereas omissions are achieve any purpose whatsoever for the simple reason that they are forms of communication of thoughts and, therefore, do not coerce the addressee physically to some behaviour, which is why there is almost always the possibility of deviation. 108 As held for example by Franz von Kutschera in his normativist ethics: "Sinn einer normativen Auszeichnung von Handlungsweisen ist es aber, all ihre Realisierungen normativ in gleicher Weise auszuzeichnen. Eine Handlungsweise H ist also genau dann gut oder geboten, bzw. verboten oder erlaubt, wenn all ihre Realisierungen gut, bzw. geboten, verboten oder erlaubt sind", Franz von Kutschera, Grundlagen der Ethik (Berlin/NY: Walter de Gruyter, 1999), at 74. 109 Because this idea has been often held in the context of Christianity and Stoicism, Leibniz critically calls it fatum stoïcum or fatum christianum: "faites votre devoir, et soyez contents de ce qui en arrivera, non seulement parce que vous ne sauriez resister à la providence divine ou à la nature des choses, (ce qui peut suffire pour être tranquille et non pas pour être content) mais encore parce que vous avez affaire à un bon maître", Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Essai de Théodicée: Sur la bonté de dieu, la liberté de l'homme et l'origine du mal (1710) (Paris: Flammarion, 1969), at 31. 37 actions in a broad sense110 and suicide is also an action, what ought to be done must be itself necessary and not dependent on the consequences, since it is the consequences that depend on the action in the first place and are, therefore, at least for the agent himself, unforeseeable and contingent, and what is necessary cannot depend on what is contingent. Furthermore, since the consequences happen after the action and also depend on causal factors that are beyond the agent's realm of possibilities of action and knowledge, even if one knows the good one could not know whether the consequences of one's actions will really cause the good. This would also require the necessity of an unconditional norm111 such as 'to be sincere', 'to respect human dignity', 'to keep promises', "omnes quantum potes, juva"112, or 'not to act in an egoistic way'113, that would be valid without exception, even if the exceptions appear to be for the good. Also here, normativity and teleology seem to be, if not mutually exclusive, at least at different levels of priority for genuine motivation and justification, whereas the right action would prevail over the pursuit of an at least intendedly good purpose. 1.7 The impossibility of unconditional deontology However, exactly as it is the case of physics, in every normative order of human understanding (law, morality, politics, religion, etiquette) there is a difference of generality between laws and particular events, i. e., between norms and particular behaviours. From a single norm or from any combination of many or even of all norms it does not follow that a particular behaviour should be adopted. This is necessarily so because while norms are general, every behavioural situation is unique, for it takes place within a unique moment in time and a unique position in the space, both of which characterize the natural and social circumstance in which agents find themselves. If a norm were not general, it would not be a norm in the first place,114 it would be rather a sungular disposition hic et nunc about what 110 Naturally, the act of omitting something must be distinguished from the mere lack of an activity. While the former is purposeful, the latter is not necessarily so. Incest avoidance is an example of omission that is frequently purposeful, though not necessarily conscious about the evolutionary advantages of this behaviour, as shown above, 1.3. 111 This position is held, for example, by Kant, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (n. 77), at 27 (BA 15,16): "Es liegt also der moralische Wert der Handlung nicht in der Wirkung, die daraus erwartet wird... Denn all diese Wirkungen ... konnten auch durch andere Ursachen zu Stande gebracht werden, und es brauchte also dazu nicht des Willens eines vernünftigen Wesens". 112 See Schopenhauer's unconditional deontology of compassion in Schopenhauer, Preisschrift über die Grundlage der Moral (n. 75), §6 (p. 276), §7 (p. 293), §16 (p. 334). 113 According to Schopenhauer for example, egoistic actions are necessarily immoral, including those that aim at the individual's self perfection. See ibid., at 329-330. 114 Jurisprudence sometimes uses the term 'individual norm' to refer to acts such as someone's nomination to some position in a ministery or the entitlement of a judge to decide a case. Ascriptions of meaning such as that 'Paris is the capital of France' are also sometimes called norms, although they do not contain imperatives of action and do not refer to a repeatable number of cases. However, such acts are not norms in a proper sense. The former is a singular act, the latter consists of references to singular entities. 38 someone should do in this particular case, i. e., it would be merely the right ad hoc. While a norm governs many behaviours, every behaviour is governed by many norms: there is no norm that governs only one single behaviour and there is no single behaviour that would be governed by only one single norm. For example: the norm that 'the participant or witness of an accident ought to provide first aid to the victims' refers to an indeterminate number of accidents and to all those persons who are in the position of providing immediate assistance in all those accidents, while each single assistance provided by each person in each accident is governed at the same time by many other norms such as not putting the own life at serious risk, establishing an order of preference if there are many victims, not betraying the own side in case of war etc. Thus, the norm of providing assistance in accidents does not completely determine if a person should help another one at all, and if so, which person should help which others and with which order of preference according to age, sex, health etc., since this is governed by other norms. In general terms, a norm neither determines that, when, how and how often its 'initial conditions' are or should be fulfilled. Precisely this is meant by the particle 'if' in the formulation of a norm ('if A, than B ought to be'), which indicates a conditional situation whose fulfilment requires a certain behaviour. So, the reason why there is no norm that determines that a particular person in a particular situation of accident ought to help the victim is that the person is submitted at the same time to many other norms that may not characterize the fulfilment of the mentioned initial conditions. Following the example, it might be that the person should not help because he would put the own life at serious risk. Since this norm is also general and conditional, it does not state that, when and how its own initial conditions are satisfied: what counts as 'putting the own life at serious risk' can only be determined by other norms and considerations, which, in their turn, would be themselves general and not specify their own initial conditions, and so on ad infinitum. Of course, general norms can be specified with the addition of exceptions. However, the exceptions are also general norms that would have to be specified by other exceptions and so on ad infinitum, whereas if one specifies the norm to the extent that it embraces all the particularities of a single case, the result would be that the reason why the behaviour should be carried out is not a (general) norm at all, but an ad hoc determination only valid for the case, whereby the difference of generality between norms and particular cases would still remain. In other words, all norms that are valid for a particular behavioural situation have a general character and, therefore, do not contain any information about the deontological necessity of that particular behaviour (more precisely, any information that would be unique and, therefore, different from all other behaviours which the respective norms are valid for). 39 Thus, norms are deontologically necessary at the level of their abstraction, but only conditionally valid at the level of particular behaviours. Their instantiation in (or validity for) a particular situation is not due to any norm. The conclusion is that norms do not sufficiently require (and their observance does not sufficiently justify or motivate) any particular behaviour. To generally assert that an action should be carried on in all its instances, i. e., to establish an unconditional rule of action, is always self-contradictory because further specifications of its realm of applicability always exist. If 'you shall not violate the bodily integrity of human beings' is established as a rule of conduct, but in addition it is also meant that there may be situations in which it is justified to amputate an arm, for example when this is a necessary means to save the patient's life; or if 'you shall say the truth' is established as a rule, but it is also acknowledged that this is only valid when one wants to make an assertion, or not necessarily in theater, or when a physician talks with a patient about his real health condition115 etc., the specification of the rule is at the same time a limitation of it, for it is trivial that specifications are within the realm of instantiation of the rule and would not be possible or necessary at all if they were not limitations of the rule. Among many specifications that would be equally compatible with the rule, some are meant to be genuine instantiations and others do not. This distinction, however plausible it may appear, cannot be justified based on the rule itself, because it is trivial that all instantiations are, actually, genuine. It would be wrong to state that amputation is not a violation of bodily integrity or that lie in theater or by physicians to their patients is not a false statement and, therefore, that they would not be genuine violations of the respective rule.116 Since specifications are, therefore, always limitations, they must be based on another reason that, at least for a particular case, is above the rule to be specified. For example, a physician is allowed and, by medical ethic, obliged, to violate bodily integrity if this is necessary for the higher good of life. Now, a rule that is limited by another one is not unconditional; it does not always justify the action that falls under it. In the end, norms actually motivate and justify actions according 115 Example and discussion in Kutschera, Grundlagen der Ethik (n. 108), at 73. 116 In regard to the "unacknowledged influence of considerations of utility" that normally go along with theories of unconditional deontology, Stuart Mill has correctly stated that "it is not the fault of any creed, but of the complicated nature of human affairs, that rules of conduct cannot be so framed as to require no exceptions, and that hardly any kind of action can safely be laid down as either always obligatory or always condemnable. There is no ethical creed which does not temper the rigidity of its laws, by giving a certain latitude, under the moral responsibility of the agent, for accommodation to peculiarities of circumstances; and under every creed, at the opening thus made, self-deception and dishonest casuistry get in. There exists no moral system under which there do not arise unequivocal cases of conflicting obligation. ... There is no case of moral obligation in which some secondary principle is not involved; and if only one, there can seldom be any real doubt which one it is, in the mind of any person by whom the principle itself is recognized", Mill, Utilitarianism (n. 78), at 45-47. 40 to the same pattern as purposes, namely: X should be done because of Y, although Y does not always require X. It turns out that both deontology and teleology are ultimately a conditional pattern of justification. Therefore, for the aim of achieving unconditional ethical truth and limits for ethical action, deontology cannot be prioritized in relation to teleology.117 1.8 The contingency of values in relation to norms and purposes The reasons of a norm are provided by the value that it aims to realize. Norms are specifications of actions to be or not to be carried out due to some value. Thereby, the value itself is not the norm. While norms are connections of ideas that specify actions to be or not to be carried out, for example 'you shall not kill', a value is a simple idea that consists in the good aspect of some thing or, what is the same, the thing in relation to its goodness, the thing as a good, for example 'life', 'victory', or 'money'. While simple ideas are linguistically represented by nouns in the case of qualities or by verbs in the case of states and actions, a complex idea consists of nouns and verbs and is linguistically represented by a sentence. For the same reason, a value is also not a spatial-temporal situation: although 'health' and 'money' for example are parts of the future spatial-temporal situation striven for by an agent when he seeks to be healthy or to earn money, the values are not identical with the situation; the situation is not the value. Values can be instantiated or not. The instantiation of a value is the mere existence of something valuable within space and time. For example: to instantiate 117 Teleology (in moral philosophy often called consequentialism) is very often criticized for not providing limits for ethically admissible action, and, thus, for not providing criteria for action that would always be right or wrong, independently of the circumstances. However, what has been said above shows that any justification by general norms of action is necessarily conditional also and has, therefore, the same vagueness that is typical of consequentialism. An especially instructive and representative example of this can be seen in David Oderberg's moral theory. Oderberg has advanced a criticism of consequentialism from the point of view of (allegedly) nonconsequentialist moral theory. He argues that one of the flaws of consequentialism is that it is not able to conceive of or justify "plain and simple rights" such as the peaceful use and enjoyment of the own's chattels, since consequentialism always conditionalizes rights and makes them depend on some contribution to the maximization of some good (David Oderberg, Moral theory: A non-consequentialist approach (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), at 72). On the one hand, Oderberg states that "rights are inviolable" and that "they may be infringed in certain circumstances, but those circumstances are limited and well defined" (ibid., at 84). On the other hand, however, he states that "rights are not limitless" (76), that one should not make exaggerations in understanding rights (78), that the hierarchy of goods changes according to the circumstance (82), that infringements of rights are temporarily acceptable (85), and that for the definition of exceptions there are "difficulties of practical application" (84) that may make impossible a perfectly exact specification. These are caveats that every unconditional deontology ('non-consequentialism') must make and that, nevertheless, make deontology as conditional and as dependent on the circumstances as consequentialism typically is (tu quoque). The introduction of criteria for the solution of collisions of norms does not change the issue if the application of these criteria is also valid "in certain circumstances" (77) and not in others. Distinctions such as between "violation" and "infringement" of rights (78-79) and between 'prima facie' and 'definite' rights do not change the issue, but only postpone the same problems to another level. About real and apparent collisions between norms and rights and about the unity of practical reason including law, morality and politics, see my article Ferreira Leite de Paula, ʻOn the Unities of Law, Practical Reason, and Right. Foundations of the Unity of Reason Beyond the Plurality of Knowledge and of Normative Ordersʼ (n. 103), at 79-94, 100-114. 41 the value of money is to cause that money exists in the space and time; to instantiate decency is to act in a decent way. Due to the nature of values as the simple idea of the good of something, values actually do not 'require' anything specific if 'to require' is understood as the specification of a certain action to be or not to be carried out (=norm) or a certain spatial-temporal situation to be caused or prevented (=purpose). That is, values are contingent in relation to norms and purposes. An obvious illustration of this contingency is the fact that contrary norms and actions can be coherently justified by the very same value: for the sake of peace, war can be an adequate means;118 for the sake of war, peace can be an adequate means; for the sake of life, homicide can be an adequate means, for example in situations of self-defense or combat of terrorism. In general words, a value does not imply that actions that aim at its decrease in a certain circumstance are always undue. The homicide of a person, say, a mad shooter who is threatening other people's lives, can be justified for the sake of more life, but it is, still, a violation of life, a reduction of it in the present state of the world for the sake of a greater quantity in other states. This characterizes a kind of aggregative axiology: the reasoning on quantity of value within the same quality of value.119 In general, if it is possible at least in principle to coherently justify a decrease of the instantiation of some value for the sake of increasing its instantiation in other agents and circumstances, the value is not absolute or unconditional; its opposite is also a value and can be preferable under certain circumstances. In the example of life, this means that killing and death can be values or goods that axiologically, not only factually, limit the value of life and its instantiation in certain circumstances. Therefore, also the way in which values in general ground actions, norms and purposes in general is contingent: the action, norm or purpose X is required because of the value Y, although Y does not always require X. That is also why an exclusively value-based ethic cannot provide certainty in ethical action. In this respect, there is a difference between, on the one hand, a value or a good, and, on the other hand, the good: while it is possible to diminish the instantiation of values or goods (e. g., victory, life, human dignity) here and now in relation to one or a few persons for the sake of more of the same values overall, it is not possible to make the lesser good here and now in order to make the greater good overall. In the same way, it is not possible not to make 118 "Quare suscipienda quidem bella sunt o beam causam, ut sine iniuria in pace vivatur", Marcus Tullius Cicero, De officiis: Vom pflichtgemässen Handeln. Lateinisch/Deutsch (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2014), at 32. 119 Some introductory notions about the possibility of quantitative right within deontological ethics can be found in Schopenhauer, Preisschrift über die Grundlage der Moral (n. 75), at 339-340. The scholastic philosophical tradition also sees the good as aggregative. See for example Aquinas: "bonum dicitur secundum magis et minus", Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae (n. 23), prima pars, question 5, article 1. 42 the right here and now in order to make the right overall. If an action is the right and the greater good here and now, it is also the right and the greater good overall. These tautologies are variants of the unity of practical reason: what is the good is the good;120 what is ultimately right cannot be wrong. An absolute or unconditional value is only that which cannot be coherently limited or except by other value in any circumstance; absolute is only the value whose maximal instantiation is not limited by other values, but at most by factual impossibility. This is logically only valid for the good in itself, not for specific goods or values. The differences between norm, purpose and value can be summarized in the following way: (1) a norm is the specification of an action to be or not to be carried out without explicit consideration of its value and of its purpose; (2) a value is the good aspect of something without explicit consideration of the actions and norms that are required for its realization and without explicit consideration of a specific spatial-temporal situation to be achieved (=purpose); (3) a purpose is the anticipated specification of a spatial-temporal situation to be achieved or prevented without explicit consideration of value and of the actions and norms that are required as means. Yet, in spite of what remains implicit within norms, values and purposes respectively, they form together in every particular circumstance the same ethical events. 1.9 The contingency of norms in relation to purposes and their necessary connection in particular cases If a certain purpose is considered isolated, as already stated, many actions and, therefore, norms, are possible means for its realization, which means that, in relation to purposes, actions and norms are contingent. Conversely, if a certain norm is settled in general, many purposes, frequently incompatible with each other, can be thereby pursued, which means that, abstractly considered, purposes are contingent in relation to norms. However, since ethical events are always particular, i. e., since they are located within a certain time and space and, therefore, involved with causality, to adopt an action by following a certain norm implies to endorse a certain purpose, namely the purpose that in that 120 As Aquinas states, "that wherein consists the essence of goodness cannot be spoken of as evil", ibid., prima pars, question 5, article 5. 43 particular circumstance is causally related with the action in a foreseeable way.121 For example: the norm 'one ought to tell the truth' is normally not causally related with homicide, but it can lead to this result if the person who is willing to commit a homicide asks where his targeted victim is after declaring that he needs this information in order to commit the crime.122 Under this circumstance, someone who follows the norm and gives the information also seeks the purpose of homicide and someone who follows another norm, e. g., that the truth should not be told under this kind of circumstance, seeks another purpose. In none of these cases, the action and the norm followed are purposeless. Although life and sincerity as goods in themselves are not contraposed to each other, within particular ethical events they can collide, i. e., it may be impossible to realize both at once. This requires for action a coherent and hierarchical order of goods that can be called eschatology (from ἔσχατος, in non-Abrahamic sense123), even if in different cases a different eschatology is preferred. Conversely, to settle a certain purpose implies to endorse certain actions and norms, namely at least some of the actions and norms that are adequate means for, and causally related with, that purpose under the given circumstances. Although 'to provide financial support for victims of car accidents' is a purpose that can be attained by diverse means such as indemnification by the wrongdoer, by an insurance company, social assistance by nongovernmental organizations, by a religious community or the state, to define this support as a purpose in a particular case is to endorse at least one of the possible means, which implies that the respective action is required, and that will be a norm too. If, in contrast, no means is considered to be adequate for that purpose, it means that the purpose is not to be attained and the result is that none of the mentioned entities has the duty to indemnify or to provide assistance and that the victim, actually, does not have the respective right, both of which 121 An eventual lack of knowledge about causal nexuses is a possible source of ethical mistake rather than an argument against teleological ethics tout court. See Kutschera, Grundlagen der Ethik (n. 108), at 76. In regard to the possibility of foreseeing consequences, see Mill's defense of utilitarianism: "Again, defenders of utility often find themselves called upon to reply to such objections as this – that there is not time, previous to action, for calculating and weighing the effects of any line of conduct on the general happiness. This is exactly as if any one were to say that it is impossible to guide our conduct by Christianity, because there is not time, on every occasion on which anything has to be done, to read through the Old and New Testaments. The answer to the objection is, that there has been ample time, namely, the whole past duration of the human species. During all that time mankind have been learning by experience the tendencies of actions; on which experience all the prudence, as well as all the morality of life, is dependent. People talk as if the commencement of this course of experience had hitherto been put off, and as if, at the moment when some man feels tempted to meddle with the property or life of another, he had to begin considering for the first time whether murder and theft are injurious to human happiness", Mill, Utilitarianism (n. 78), at 42. 122 Example and discussion from the point of view of unconditional deontology in Immanuel Kant, Über ein vermeintes Recht aus Menschenliebe zu lügen: in: Werke in sechs Bänden (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1963). 123 The term eschatology is used here in non-Abrahamic sense, thus not in conformity with many elements associated with it within Judaism, Christianity and Islam. For eschatology in Abrahamic sense, see discussion below, 2.5. 44 would be norms too. Hence, in none of these circumstances the establishment of a purpose will be absent from normativity.124 In every ethical event, the selection of means, even of no means at all, is limited by value. Therefore, in the same way that the election of a norm requires a hierarchy of ends, the election of a purpose requires a coherent and hierarchical system of values according to which the means are to be selected and limited, even if in other particular cases another system of values is preferred by the same or by other persons. This means in practice that he who acts in pursuit of a purpose can neither be criticized for nor claim that he would be acting in a non-deontological way; he can, rather, at the most be blamed for following a mistaken hierarchy of values. In the same way, he who does not fulfil the promise of providing legal assistance to his client due to a sudden health issue in someone of his family does not act in a non-normative way, even if professional practice's deontology might be disrespected; rather, he follows another norm and another deontology such as that relatives in the case of illness should be helped first.125 In general, since the specification of a duty (or right) in a particular case consists in the participation of elements of the circumstance within the duty itself, a change in the circumstances might lead to a change in the duty, even if that disappoints someone's or even everyone else's expectations. As we see, both for the choice of purposes and for the choice of norms both an eschatology and a system of values are required. This is so because eschatology and system of values are ultimately the same; they are different ways of considering the hierarchy of goods that is established within every ethical event. It would be incoherent to claim that an eschatology does not exist and, at the same time, to establish any preference between values. In summary, the contingencies between norms, purposes and values exist only at the general level, because in every particular ethical event: (1) to adopt a certain action by following a certain norm implies the endorsement of a certain purpose; (2) to adopt a certain purpose implies the endorsement of a certain norm; and (3) both for the selection of purposes and of norms a certain hierarchy of values or goods is always established. 124 The single-case connection of good and right is expressed in Hegel's idea that "das Wohl ist nicht ein Gutes ohne das Recht. Ebenso ist das Recht nicht das Gute ohne das Wohl (fiat Justitia soll nicht pereat mundus zur Folge haben)", Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts (n. 24), §130. 125 This and further examples in Marcus Tullius Cicero's writing De oficiis: "Nec promisa igitur servanda sunt ea, quae sint is, quibus promiseris, inutilia nec si plus tibi ea noceant, qua milli prosint cui promiseris, contra officium est, maius anteponi minori, ut si constitueris, cuipiam te advocatum in rem preaesentem esse venturum atque interim graviter aegrotare filius coeperit, non sit contra officium non facere, quod dixeris, magisque ille, cui promissum sit, ab officio discedat, si se destitutum queratur", Cicero, De officiis (n. 118), at 30. 45 Since norm, purpose and value are indispensable elements of every ethical event, no choice between norm-based, value-based or purpose-based ethic can or should be made. Although each of these elements can be considered separately for educational purposes or stressed, sometimes exaggerated, in the social and historical context of each culture and epoch, deontology, teleology and axiology are essential parts of ethic. 1.10 Distinction and connection of etiology and teleology as patterns of justification 1.10.1 Legitimacy and legality as forms of etiological rightness Although ethical thinking is always (also) teleological, there remains indeed a temporal distinction between what is the right based on previous acts and events and what is the right based on a future purpose that is to be achieved. The most important instance of this problem in society can be found in the many types of procedure that exist. Procedural norms establish conditions under which certain actions can be considered right, for example judicial decisions, deadlines, and administrative acts. The most important and historically widely practiced type of procedure is the one which is used to judge whether a person has committed a relevant offence and should be punished, where authorities gather for deliberation and evidences and arguments are presented in favor of or against an acquittal or conviction. Criminal procedure has adopted diverse forms throughout history, depending on what constitutes an offence, what is really a proof and whether strict individual accountability based on causal nexuses with the action of an individual is relevant for punishment. Another socially relevant type of procedure is political procedure, e. g. the election of a governor. The underlying idea in all instances of procedure is that the outcome is right if and because it has been achieved in accordance with previously established rules. Thus, procedure is a kind of unconditional deontology, where what is right is determined by the way in which outcome is achieved after the observance of certain rules; this characterizes a special kind of legitimacy. A legitimate action, norm or status is one whose rightness is derived from its origin.126 To be legitimate is, first of all, to be 126 An example from cultural theory has been provided by Jean-François Lyotard, who has analyzed the cultural role of discourses of legitimation in science and politics and identified relevant similarities between them: "cette façon d'interroguer la légitimité socio-politique se combine avec la nouvelle attitude scientifique ... le peuple est en débat avec lui même sur ce qui est juste et injuste de la même manière que la communauté des savants sur ce qui est vrai et faux... C'est ainsi que la question de l'Etat se trouve étroitement imbriquée avec celle du savoir scientifique", Jean-François Lyotard, La condition postmoderne: Rapport sur le savoir (Paris: Minuit, 1979), at 52-53. From the point of view of culture and institutionalized discourse, both scientific and political discourse are subject to the same structure of social recognition by means of legitimation: "Soit une loi civile; elle s'énonce: telle catégorie de citoyens doit accomplir telle sorte d'action. La legitimation, c'est le processus par lequel un législateur se trouve autorisé à promulguer cette loi comme une norme. Soit un énoncé scientifique; il est soumis à la règle: un énoncé doit presenter tel ensemble de conditions pour être reçu comme scientifique. Ici, la legitimation est le processus par lequel un 'législateur' traitant du discours scientifique est autorisé à prescrire 46 an outcome. The reason why an outcome is legitimate does not lie in its susceptibility to achieve a certain future purpose, which is why there is, indeed, a temporal difference between legitimacy and teleology. In analytical terms: legitimacy is a tergo, teleology is a fronte; legitimacy is backward-looking, teleology is forward-looking; a conduct at t2 is legitimate if it observes a norm established at t1, and is teleological if it is a means to achieve results at t3. As a matter of fact, the word legitimacy is derived from the Latin term lex127 and contains the idea of conformity to the law, be it the immemorially old law as in the case of the custom that gave rise to the Roman Law of the Twelve Tables,128 be it the laws of nature (or loix de nature) as in the case of French and English attempts in early modernity to limit royal power by demanding observance of higher laws such as liberty and property,129 or be it institutionalized procedures130 or state law.131 Certainly, legitimacy can also be contraposed to legality. For example, conservative defenders of the European ancient régime have argued against the new constitutional monarchy and codifications of the 18th and 19th centuries that legitimate government and legitimate laws would actually be those that evolved historically out of the customs of a people rather than those defined in some written declaration.132 Normally, for defenders of a political regime, legality is prior to, or constitutes, legitimacy; for the opposition, legitimacy is prior to, or in the case of a collision, outweighs, legality. In any case, even when legitimacy is les conditions dites (en general, des conditions de consistence interne et de verification expérimentale) pour qu'un énoncé fasse partie de ce discours, et puisse être pris en considération par la communauté scientifique", ibid., at 19-20. 127 About the use of the terms legitimus and legalis in Roman jurisprudence, see Thomas Würtenberger, Legitimität, Legalität: in: Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, vol. 3 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1982), at 680-681. 128 Ibid., at 680. 129 As it was for example the case of Jean Bodin's political theory. See ibid., at 689-691. As is known, the founders of English political liberalism such as John Locke were also natural lawyers. 130 According to Jürgen Habermas' Discourse Theory, legitimacy is provided by the observance of procedural rules that make possible decisions based on rational justification. In contrast to Max Weber's idea of legitimacy via legality, he states that "der Formalismus des Rechts darf indessen nicht festgemacht werden. Legitimierende Kraft haben vielmehr Verfahren, die Begründungsforderungen und den Weg zu ihrer argumentativen Einlösung institutionalisieren", Jürgen Habermas, Faktizität und Geltung. Beiträge zur Diskurstheorie des Rechts und des demokratischen Rechtsstaats, 2nd ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001), at 563. Nevertheless, since for Habermas it is the deliberative procedure that confers legitimacy to decisions, legitimacy by means of legality is possible to the extent that the (state) law incorporates the rules of rational argumentation: "Legalität kann nur in dem Masse Legitimität erzeugen, wie die Rechtsordnung reflexive auf den mit dem Positivwerden des Rechts entstandenen Begründungsbedarf reagiert, und zwar in der Weise, dass juristische Entscheidungsverfahren institutionalisiert werden, die für moralische Diskurse durchlässig sind", ibid., at 565. 131 See the example of the use of the German terms Legalität and Legitimität throughout history: "In den deutschen Wörterbüchern finden sich seit dem 18. Jahrhundert die Ausdrücke ‚legal', ‚Legalität' und ‚legitim' nur zum Teil verzeichnet. Diese Ausdrücke werden fast synonym definiert. In einem spezifisch juristischen Sinn bringt man mit ihnen den Einklang mit der bestehenden Rechtsordnung zum Ausdruck. ‚Legal' und ‚legitim' bedeuten „gesetzlich", „gesetzmässig, „rechtmässig"", Würtenberger, Legitimität, Legalität (n. 127), at 711. 132 Ibid., at 715. 47 contraposed to state law,133 it is not a demand for anarchy or lawless government, but a criticism of government and its legal order on the basis of (temporally or hierarchically) prior laws that it is not observing, but is supposed to observe. Moreover, legitimacy is also derived from progeny, whereas it is the noble origin that determines the legitimacy of aristocracy, a child is legitimate depending on whether it has been conceived during marriage, and pedigree is a reference to purity of race. In addition, democracy as a procedure of political deliberation is based on legitimacy to the extent that a decision is considered to be right due to the way in which it has come about rather than on its good in itself; it is not the outcome that determines whether a procedure is democratic, but the procedure that determines whether the outcome is legitimate. While 'legitimacy by origin' is a pleonasm, 'legitimacy by outcome' is a selfcontradiction. Thus, whether legitimacy is defined by conformity to parental origin, by tradition, laws of nature, state law, legal or political procedure, the idea of conformity to previously established rules as a necessary condition of rightness (thus the idea of unconditional deontology) is always present. The idea that it is the observance of previously established rules that determines the rightness of a decision or action also underlies the rule of law. The rule of law has existed since the time in history when law existed, and should not be traced back to the social context of the modern bourgeois critique of feudal nobility only because this English phrase was coined or popularized at that time.134 Since legal orders are elaborated and operated by men, the phrase 'rule of law' is actually only an opposition to the 'rule of men' when it explicitly means natural law, divine law or, in another regard, female law (matriarchy, gynocentrism). The rule of law is an equivalent of the legal form that was, though not invented but at least initially developed to a great extent in the Roman Republic, Monarchy and Empire, and was later inherited by English common law and Continental European legal traditions. The legal 133 For example Carl Schmitt's conceptions of Legalität and Legitimität: "heute tritt die normativistische Fiktion eines geschlossenen Legalitätssystems in einen aufälligen und unabweisbaren Gegensatz zu der Legitimität eines wirklich vorhandenen, rechtmässigen Willens", Carl Schmitt, Legalität und Legitimität, 8th ed. (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2012), at 10, whereby one can stress that for him legitimacy is also based on conformity to a prior law based on will (rechtmässiger Wille). 134 About the erroneously restrictive use of the phrase rule of law (German: Rechtstaat) to define exclusively the legal order that oneself considers to be good or legitimate, Carl Schmitt has polemically stated that "das Wort „Rechtstaat" kann soviel Verschiedenes bedeuten wie das Wort „Recht" selbst und ausserdem noch soviel Verschiedenes wie die mit dem Worte „Staat" angedeuteten Organisationen. Es gibt einen feudalen, einen ständischen, einen bürgerlichen, einen nationalen, einen sozialen, ferner einen naturrechtlichen, vernunftrechtlichen, historisch-rechtlichen Rechtstaat. Es ist begreiflich, dass Propagandisten und Advokaten aller Art das Wort gern für sich in Anspruch nehmen, um den Gegner als Feind des Rechtstaates zu diffamieren", ibid., at 18. 48 form is what distinguishes the law from other normative orders such as morality, politics and religion; it is the principle of individuation of a legal order as such.135 Etiological rightness is also the conception that grounds the binding force of promise. After a promise is given, what should be done next, its fulfilment, is derived from a previous event, i. e., a previous act settles the rule that should be observed in a future moment,136 the rationale being that the fulfilment will take place independently of eventual adverse circumstances that might generate some disadvantage for the promiser. Promises generate, then, legitimate expectations for the counterparty.137 If the promiser does not fulfil his word, sanctions are legitimate precisely on the basis of his promise, and the counterparty has a legitimate interest in that demand. Promise is also a moral foundation of contract, whereby at least two parties give promises to each other and specify actions to be carried out at some point in the future, such as the delivery of a product and payment. Social contract rests also on the idea that it is the origin of norms, the way by which they have been issued, much more than their content, that makes them right, or even creates right and justice originally. According to this idea, right only exists and society and the state are only authorized to sanction individuals on the basis of rules that have been (or at least could have been) 135 About the distinctions and connections between law, morality and politics, see my article Ferreira Leite de Paula, ʻOn the Unities of Law, Practical Reason, and Right. Foundations of the Unity of Reason Beyond the Plurality of Knowledge and of Normative Ordersʼ (n. 103) and further contributions in the volume André Ferreira Leite de Paula and Andrés Santacoloma Santacoloma, eds., Law and Morals ARSP 158 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2019). 136 This is one of the features of norm-based morality that historically distinguished it from merely instinctive behaviours, as Friedrich Nietzsche has stated: "in den letzten zehn Jahrtausenden ist man hingegen auf einigen grossen Flächen der Erde Schritt für Schritt so weit gekommen, nicht mehr die Folgen, sondern die Herkunft der Handlung über ihren Werth entscheiden zu lassen: ein grosses Ereignis als Ganzes, eine erhebliche Verfeinerung des Blicks und Maassstabs, die unbewusste Nachwirkung von der Herrschaft aristokratischer Werthe und des Glaubens an ‚Herkunft', das Abzeichen einer Periode, welche man im engeren Sinne als die m o r a l i s c h e bezeichnen darf: der erste Versuch zur Selbst-Erkenntnis ist damit gemacht. Statt der Folgen die Herkunft: welche Umkehrung der Perspektive!", Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse (n. 80), §32, p. 50. 137 About the importance of past actions for legal thinking, see also John Finnis: "... we can say that legal thinking (i.e. the law) brings what precision and predictability it can into the order of human interactions by a special technique: the treating of (usually datable) past acts (whether of enactment, adjudication, or any of the multitude of exercises of public and private 'powers') as giving, now, sufficient and exclusionary reason for acting in a way then 'provided for'. In an important sense the 'existence' or 'validity' of a legal rule can be explained by saying that it simply is this relationship, this continuing relevance of the 'content' of that past juridical act as providing reason to decide and act in the present in the way then specified or provided for. The convenience of this attribution of authoritativeness to past acts is twofold. The past is beyond the reach of persons in the present; it thus provides (subject only to problems of evidence and interpretation) a stable point of reference unaffected by present and shifting interests and disputes. Again, the present will soon be the past; so the technique gives people a way of now determining the framework of their future", John Finnis, Natural law and natural rights, Repr., with corrections (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), at 269. For example, the notion of corrective justice in tort law is essentially backward-looking: "the function of the court is to preserve the initial equality by transferring from one party to the other the fixed quantity that marks the deviation from the transaction's implicit rationality. This sum represents either the plaintiff's loss or the defendant's gain, and in paradigmatic instances of restitution, gain and loss will be identical", Weinrib, ʻLegal Formalism: On the Immanent Rationality of Lawʼ (n. 104), at 980. 49 previously agreed upon;138 only the rules that have been or could have been settled in an "original agreement"139 are considered to be right. In this way, the right is a derivation from acts that factually took place or, hypothetically, could have taken place at some moment in the past, namely the individual's voluntary disposal of his liberty in an "original position"140, in a 'state of nature'141 or after a procedure of 'impartial justification of norms'142. The right is thereby grounded on legitimacy, and both are taken to have primacy over teleological "conceptions of the good"143, which are considered to be subjective to the opinions of individuals or the interests of groups. 1.10.2 The etiological character of constitutionalism The idea of rightness based on origin has been also adopted in jurisprudence and political philosophy within the doctrines of constitutionalism according to which the 'original constituent power' of the people and its representatives issue a constitution that, in its turn, gives guidance and defines the limits of future legislative activity, including constitutional changes, and determines the legitimacy of judicial and administrative decision-making in concrete cases. In this way, a 'chain of legitimation' (Legitimationskette) would be established between the people and all organs that exercise acts of state sovereignty upon citizens such as taxation, limitations of property, criminal prosecution and administrative sanctions. Although constitutions also contain some forward-looking (teleological) programs 138 According to Rousseau, for example, "dans l'état de nature, où tout est commun, je ne dois rien à ceux à qui je n'ai rien promis, je ne reconnais pour être à autrui que ce qui m'est inutile", Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du contrat social (Paris: Flammarion, 1966), at 74. According to him, the concept of law is attached to the general will (volonté general). See ibid., at 74-75. 139 "... the guiding idea is that the principles of justice for the basic structure of society are the object of the original agreement. They are the principles that free and rational persons concerned to further their own interests would accept in an initial position of equality as defining the fundamental terms of their association. These principles are to regulate all further agreements; they specify the kinds of social cooperation that can be entered into and the forms of government that can be established. This way of regarding the principles of justice I shall call justice as fairness", John Rawls, A Theory of Justice: Revised Edition (Cambridge Mass: Harvard UP, 1999), at 10. 140 Ibid., at 102-170. 141 According to Thomas Hobbes, for example, justice is grounded on convention: "For where no convenant hath preceded, there hath no right been transferred, and every man has right to every thing; and consequently, no action can be unjust. But when a convenant is made, then to break it is unjust: and the definition of injustice, is no other than the not performance of convenant. And whatsoever is not unjust, is just", Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008), chapter XV, 2, p. 95. It should be remarked that Hobbes' conception of conventional justice deserves criticism in regard to its compatibility with his doctrine of natural rights, for if there are natural rights (ch. 14, 1), it should be explained how it would not be unjust to violate such a right. If the answer is that it is not unjust because "every man has the right to everything" (ch. XIV, 4), then it remains unexplained what it means to have a right if it is not unjust to violate it. 142 Jürgen Habermas for example holds a procedural notion of justice and claims that it is impartial justification that constitutes the legitimacy of norms. See Jürgen Habermas, Wahrheit und Rechtfertigung: Philosophische Aufsätze (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004), at 333. 143 Rawls, A Theory of Justice (n. 139), at 22. About the priority of the right (Richtigkeit) in relation to the good, see also Habermas, Wahrheit und Rechtfertigung (n. 142), at 324, 331, 324, 344. 50 such as peace or maintenance of public health, they consist in a set of rules that compound basically rights, duties, empowerments and state structures, and only secondarily in a set of purposes. The idea that a constitution would be the grounding act of rights and obligations in a political community is a readoption and further development of social contract theories. Constitutionalism aspires a unification of legitimacy and legality; it is a conception of law and morality or, to wit, of moralized law and legalized morality, on the basis of which many citizens and scholars regularly condemn deviations from the constitution, especially purposeful ones, as being highly immoral, politically illegitimate and irremediably unlawful. Constitutionialism is a form of unconditional deontology that is widespread in society and profoundly ingrained within popular, scholarly and judicial mentalities in most countries of the Western world. 1.10.3 The contingency between legitimacy and teleology Promise, contract, social contract, rule of law and constitutionalism are examples of etiological rightness. They illustrate how legitimacy and teleology are conceptually distinct qualifications of actions and how they are contingent in relation to each other. Since legitimacy is norm-based and, therefore, deontological, this contingency is a special case of the above-mentioned contingency between norms and purposes: while the observance of a certain norm is not always causally related with certain purposes ('contingency of purposes in relation to norms'), the settlement of a certain purpose does not always imply that a specific norm or action by some individual or group is due. Rather, different actions and norms that may be incompatible with each other can be required ('contingency of norms in relation to purposes'). In the special case of legitimacy, that means that a certain way of legitimation of actions, say, criminal procedure, contract, or democracy, is not necessarily causally related with a purposed outcome, say, respectively, the effective identification of a criminal, profitable trade, or the choice of a good governor. Conversely, the settlement of these purposes and their factual realization is not always causally compatible with the observance of some specific rules of legitimacy, i. e., criminals can eventually be identified as such without any observance of due process of law, trade can be profitable for both parties also without a contract or even by state coercion, and a governor can be good for society even if, in many cases precisely because, his election has not been democratic. 51 1.10.4 Necessary connections between etiological right and teleological good Yet, although legitimacy and teleology, or: the etiological right and the teleological good, are contingent in relation to each other in general, within every particular event they are necessarily connected. Firstly, because, as already stated, to carry out an action in observance of a certain rule is to endorse the purpose that is causally connected with that action in that circumstance in a foreseeable way. For example: to comply with procedural rules of criminal law by producing evidences only within the realm of legally admitted ways of proof, and thereby to avoid for example many kinds of pressure on the accused to share his knowledge, or not to use confidential data that have been illegally collected by the state, by some company or a trial party, are efforts to produce a legitimate outcome by assuming the risk of a dysfunctional one; this implies the endorsement of an eventual acquittal by lack of proof in a case in which sufficient proofs of the crime are factually available. Under these circumstances, the libery of a criminal is a spatial-temporal situation explicitly or implicitly assumed by those who follow the norms. The system of values or eschatology that is being pursued in this circumstance is that the values that ground the mentioned procedural norms are higher than the value of protection of society against this criminal. Correspondingly, the eschatology that is being pursued is that not to create incentives for illegal production of evidences in future cases and, indirectly, the stability of a legal order on the basis of the rule of law, are greater goods than to prevent further misdeeds by this criminal. Whether these priorities are correct or not does not change the fact that the reasoning within that particular ethical event, taken as an example for all others, is axiological, normative and teleological at once. Anyhow, it can be expected with a quite high probability that, if the person in judgment is a major criminal with great social impact and public attention, some exception to procedural formalism would be made, if only in a discrete way. By the same token, since democratic procedure does not guarantee the election of good governors, those who defend democratic ideals take the risk of suboptimal outcomes for the sake of purposes such as social peace and periodic change of politicians in charge of government. Also here, since the value that grounds the (democratic) norm and the value that grounds the purpose (good governance) are balanced, it can be expected that when a particular winning candidate is considered to be of great evil for society, some open relativization or discrete fraud of democratic rules, some limitation of the governor's powers by the deep state or even a coup after election are to be expected, even from the side of 'democrats'. Thus, both in the case of compliance and non-compliance with democratic procedure, democratic thinking in particular cases is ultimately axiological, normative and teleological at once. The 52 same pattern is valid for the other above-mentioned conceptions of legitimacy based on promise, contract, social contract and constitutionalism. Secondly, etiological right and teleological good are necessarily connected in particular events because every set of rules that is intended to constitute the rightness of an outcome has itself a purpose, an immanent teleology. The rules of a political procedure for example have the purpose of electing a good governor. The rules of criminal procedure such as those for production of evidences, burden of proof and of argumentation, are intended as means to the end of finding out whether an accused really has committed a crime. Although the purposed outcome in both kinds of procedure is not always achieved (in the case of criminal procedure due to acquittals of criminals on merely procedural reasons such as court competence, deadlines, lack of proof or due to judicial mistakes), the higher frequency of some outcomes in comparison to others is due to the elaboration of norms already from the outset with these results as purposes.144 Procedural rules are always elaborated from their outset as means to certain purposes; they are changed and improved over history for more accurate results. In jurisprudence, this inherent connection between a norm and its purpose is traditionally called ratio legis, the 'law's reason'. If a norm states that 'dogs are prohibited in the room', cats are also prohibited, although not mentioned explicitly, if the room is a kitchen and the purpose is to maintain hygiene, but cats are not prohibited if the room is the cats room in a pets clinic and the purpose is to separate dogs and cats. The immanent teleology of a norm is not identical with the purpose aimed by its issuer.145 It depends rather on the circumstance of application, which is also an element that is not explicitly present in the norm's formulation, reason why norm issuers, particularly legislators, must always rely on the ability and willingness of the governed people and judicial organs for teleological interpretation, otherwise commands cannot be even understood in the first place, and actions would have to be infinitely specified. This means that a strictly 144 But not vice-versa: although the results of the application of norms frequently correspond to the norm's teleology, the teleology of a norm is not defined as what it normally causes in social reality in a statistical way. A norm can have for example the purpose of reducing inflation in an economy even if it never produces this result or is never applied by citizens or legal officials. 145 As Sartor explains, "the purpose of a normative proposition should not be mistaken for the aim (possibly a self-interested one, or also an illegal one) that is pursued by the individual members of the legislative body when voting for that proposition. To establish what purposes are served by a proposition of law, besides considering the (legitimate) objectives of the historical legislator, we often need to engage in an exercise in rationalisation, aimed at establishing which ones, among the effects of the adoption of that proposition (that is, among the consequences ensuing from its use as a standard for acting and adjudicating), may represent valuable reasons for its communal adoption and its persistent endorsement", Giovanni Sartor, ʻFundamental legal concepts. A formal and teleological characterisationʼ, Artificial Intelligence and Law, 14 (2006), 101–142, at 107. 53 grammatical, semantic, or, in reference to American Constitutional Law, "textualist"146 interpretation of norms is not enough for effective communication and intelligibility, and thus for their observance, justification or critique. This is also one of the senses of the Roman dictum summum ius summa iniuria.147 For the same reason, however, the necessity of teleological interpretation also commonly provides space for more freedom of interpretation, since the actions that correspond to the norm depend on elements that are not present in the norm's explicit formulation.148 This makes error more likely and also favors interpretive fraud, as those unwilling to comply (regardless if for justifiable or unjustifiable reasons) assert that, since the norm's purpose is not written in the norm text itself, its real purpose would be, actually, another one, and thereby they pursue other purposes while claiming compliance with the rule, a very old practice that is called eisegesis (as opposite to exegesis149) and that normally is carried out when the power that issues the rule or that guarantees its observance is not big enough to identify or punish the fraud, but is too big to be disobeyed explicitly, so that it is not strategically intelligent for those submitted to it to completely deny compliance. In any case, for both honesty and fraud in interpretation, to elaborate and to follow procedural rules is ultimately not a choice for normativity, legitimacy, or deontology over teleology,150 but the 146 For a defense of textualism, see Bryan A. Garner and Antonin Scalia, Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts (St. Paul: Thomson/West, 2012). 147 "Existunt etiam saepe iniuriae calumnia quadam et nimis callida, sed malitiosa iuris interpretation. Ex quo illud 'summum ius summa iniuria' factum est iam tritum sermone proverbium", Cicero, De officiis (n. 118), at 32. 148 Legal scholars who are committed to a normativist conception of law normally argue that teleological interpretation undermines the rule and authority of law. For instance: "Das Recht als Ganzes und seine Normen als Mittel für die Verwirklichung bestimmter Ziele zu erfassen, führe zu einem Instrumentalismus erster Ordnung, weil Entscheidungsträger in einer solchen Perspektive dazu tendierten, immer die bestmöglichen Entscheidungen im Sinne der höchstmöglichen Förderung wertvoller Zwecke in allen Fällen zu treffen und daher den autoritativen Rechtsstoff als nichtbindende Referenzen zu behandeln", Leal, Ziele und Autorität (n. 98), at 359. 149 Garner and Scalia, Reading Law (n. 146), at 10. "The most destructive (and most alluring) feature of purposivism is its manipulability. Any provision of law or of private ordering can be said to have a number of purposes, which can be placed on a ladder of abstraction. A law against pickpocketing, for example, has as its narrowest purpose the prevention of theft from the person; and then, in ascending order of generality, the protection of private property; the preservation of a system of private ownership; the encouragement of productive activity by enabling producers to enjoy the fruits of their labor; and, finally, the furtherance of the common good. The purposivist, who derives the meaning of text from purpose and not purpose from the meaning of text, is free to climb up this ladder of purposes and to "fill in" or change the text according to the level of generality he has chosen", ibid., at 18-19. 150 Deontological conceptions of political justice are only apparently an opposition to teleological ethical thinking. John Rawls for example claims that a contractualist theory of justice whose rules are based on what individuals would choose in an 'original position' would be deontological in opposition to teleological theories (Rawls, A Theory of Justice (n. 139), at 26-28). This goes along with what he calls the 'priority of right' and of justice in relation to conceptions of the good and teleology (ibid., at 28). However, the rules of the hypothetical procedure of the 'original position' are already elaborated by him as a theorist with selected purposed outcomes such as equal distribution of wealth, of rights and opportunities, which characterizes an elaboration of rules from the outset according to political aims in order to precisely achieve these aims by means of the application of the 54 endorsement of some purpose and the confirmation of the rule as an adequate means for that purpose. Thirdly, legitimacy is necessarily connected with teleology in every particular case because of the internal perspective of participants of a normative practice. The compliance with previously established rules is teleological because every observance is an act of confirmation that the norm is a means to attain some purpose, even if not a generalizable one. This is due to the teleological structure of agency of participants of a normative practice who follow rules in order to achieve some goal, even if this goal is not one that constitutes the immanent teleology of the norm or one that they might reveal to the public sphere as an argument for convincement of others. While a public prosecutor deals with the rules of criminal procedure as means to achieve condemnation and punishment, the accused uses legal remedies for the opposite sake, while the community and the state regard this way of conflict settlement as adequate means for peaceful conflict resolution. Participants of contentious procedures do not believe that the observance of procedural rules is sufficient for the rightness of the outcome, since the procedural dispute concerns precisely which one of two contradictory outcomes is the right, both of which are equally compatible with the rules, which are open enough for incompatible outcomes such as acquittal and conviction or, in the case of political procedures, the election of a conservative and a progressive governor. The teleology of norm-observance is also present when the norm is not followed because one would agree with its content, but solely due to the fear of negative consequences. In this case, the norm is followed as a means to some purpose that is considered to be a greater good than the consequence of its non-observance, for example a citizen who complies with the payment of exorbitant taxes in a welfare state not because he agrees with the amount, but in order not to be punished by state bureaucrats or not to be defamed by moralists in the public sphere. Even slaves, when their hands and feet are not tied, have the possibility of not complying with the holder's rules, and commit suicide or at least take the risk of severe punishment – a foreseeable consequence that normally is considered from their internal perspective to be lesser good and is, therefore, purposely avoided by compliant behaviour. These are examples of the general fact that the compliance with norms implies their acceptance as means to what the agent considers to be a greater good. rules. In this way, 'the right' is also implicitly defined teleologically in order to maximize the selected political aims. Indeed, as he states, "all ethical doctrines worth our attention take consequences into account in judging rightness", ibid., at 26. 55 The impression that one had to choose between following either a norm or a purpose arises due to the mentioned contingency between them at the abstract level. Sometimes, this impression arises due to the fact that an agent follows a norm that is not part of, or is even against, positive law or social morality, and thereby frustrates expectations of other agents who think that he is not acting 'normatively' or based on value because he is following other norms and values than expected. Indeed, philosophical conceptions of 'normative' (or 'nonconsequentialist') ethics and normativist conceptions of law commonly make the accusation that teleological action would not be 'normative' at all or would be a violation of the 'normativity of law'. Thereby, as already shown, they fail to recognize both (1) the normative character of behaviours that deviate from a certain selected system of values such as positive law or a certain moral philosophy,151 as well as (2) the teleological character of their own normativity and agency by elaborating, endorsing and attempting to enforce certain selected norms. Hence, the fundamental disagreement is not whether one should follow either norms or purposes, but which ones, and that is defined by diverging systems of values or eschatologies that establish something different as the highest value or good. 1.11 The primacy of the good over the right and over legitimacy Thus, since good and right are ultimately always simultaneous in particular events, the relationship of priority between them cannot be of choice for one over the other, but only of justificatory kind: the good has primacy over the right in the sense that it constitutes the right; the good is the reason why something is right. This means that in every circumstance, the ultimately good action will be necessarily also the ultimately right one. The same is not the case, however, of the relationship between teleology and legitimacy: since legitimacy is a matter of etiology, a good outcome must not be the legitimate one. It is not because of good governance that the election of a president was 151 Especially egalitarian and universalist policy has been commonly identified with the 'moral point of view' tout court, with the consequence that every position that is not committed to that principles would not even considered to be part of moral reasoning: "Most critics of MPVTs [Moral Point of View] have taken it as evident that such a characterization of the moral point of view (whatever the author's intentions) is not a characterization of "the moral point of view" (if there even is such a thing), but a characterization of, broadly speaking, the liberal moral point of view of modern morality (Mackie and Monro). It was not the moral point of view of Aristotle or Nietzsche or of the Greeks, the Medievals or Icelanders of the Icelandic sagas or, indeed, of many cultures past and present. And it is not the moral point of view of all conservative thinkers or postmoderns today. To claim, as Baier, Taylor and Frankena all do, that it is a necessary condition for someone's taking the moral point of view that they have "an attitude of equal respect for all persons or a belief in their having equal intrinsic worth (or having equal basic rights)" is clear enough evidence that in speaking of "the moral point of view" they are speaking of a restricted cluster of moralities and of liberal moralities preeminently and not of all those things and only those things that are moralities", Kai Nielsen, ʻMoral Point of View Theoriesʼ, Revista Hispanoamericana de Filosofia, 93, 31 (1999), 105–116, at 108. 56 democratic, it is not because of beauty that a dog has pedigree, and it is not because of positive consequences that an action is not a breach of contract or a violation of the constitution. Between the good and legitimacy there can be, therefore, definite oppositions and the necessity to choose beween them in concrete cases. Then, the primacy of the good over legitimacy means twofold: first, that the good is more fundamental than legitimacy: (a) the good as a purpose belongs to the structure of norms of legitimacy (immanent teleology), (b) the good is the reason why norms of legitimacy are elaborated throughout history, and (c) the reason why they are followed in the practice. It is because of the change of the circumstances in the course of time and due to the necessarily general character of norms that collisions between legitimacy and good arise soon or later. Ultimately, the primacy of the good over legitimacy means that a good and illegitimate outcome is preferable to a legitimate and bad one. There can be, however, no general criterion that specifies when the rule of legitimacy is not to be followed, for that would be itself a deontological specification, a rule of action whose validity would have to be independently of circumstances, and such rules are, as already stated (1.7), susceptible to exceptions due to the impossibility of unconditional deontology. 1.12 The ontology of the good Relativism about the hierarchy of values and skepticism about the possibility of knowing the good have commonly been reasons for the defense of some kind of unconditional deontology in law, politics and morals. The ideas that there is no truth in ethical questions,152 that the conceptions of the good are always relative to persons' and groups' opinions,153 and that within multiculturalism no tradition and no ethical conception of the good would be binding for all154 have led many to hold that society should achieve a post-traditional level of organization whose rules are independent of conceptions of the good and should make possible that individuals and groups live according to their own conceptions. This means that the right would consist precisely in these rules and that the right would either prevail over the good or define what is good.155 152 As held for example by Habermas, Wahrheit und Rechtfertigung (n. 142), at 324. For a substantial discussion and bibliographical overview on many conceptions of moral relativism, see Gonzalo Villa-Rosas, ʻMorality from the Outside. On Harman's and Wong's Theories of Moral Relativismʼ, in André Ferreira Leite de Paula, Andrés Santacoloma Santacoloma and Gonzalo Villa Rosas, eds., Truth and Objectivity in Law and Morals. Vol. 2 ARSP 151 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2016), 173–207. 153 Habermas, Wahrheit und Rechtfertigung (n. 142), at 331. See also Rawls' deals with 'conceptions of the good' in contrast to principles of justice in Rawls, A Theory of Justice (n. 139), at 109-112. 154 Habermas, Wahrheit und Rechtfertigung (n. 142), at 344. 155 For a claim to the priority of the right over the good, see Rawls, A Theory of Justice (n. 139), at 28. 57 At this stage of the inquiry, it is evident that such a normativity would, actually, fail in many ways to be non-teleological, especially, as already explained, due to (1) the teleological structure of norms, (2) the necessary connection of norms and purposes at the level of ethical events, (3) the immanent teleology of norms, (4) the need for teleological interpretation, and (5) the teleological character of rule-following agency. Again, every set of rules and procedures is already thought and elaborated from the outset with some purpose and is applied in particular circumstances in order to achieve some result. As to ethical relativism, its most common purpose in history has been the realization of egalitarian policy against some established moral or political order,156 whereby another order has been purposefully favored as a higher good, which characterizes teleological action. Analytically speaking, the very idea that 'one should do X', which characterizes normativity, implies that it is at least intended that it is good to do X, which characterizes teleology. Paradoxically, to claim that the right prevails over the good would mean that the good would consist in acting independently of the good, or, in other words, it would be independent of conceptions of the good to act in the good way X. This contradiction arises because of the teleological structure of agency: the choice of one action among others is a case of strive for the good.157 It is impossible for an agent not to do what he considers to be the better option. 156 Habermas for example elaborates a 'post-traditional' 'discourse theory' of law and morality with the aims of including persons, promoting egalitarian universalism and proscription of unequal treatment and of coercion. See Habermas, Wahrheit und Rechtfertigung (n. 142), at 324, 328, 334, 338-339, 344. 157 In this respect, Hegel has correctly stated that "das Handeln ist nichts anderes als die Verwirklichung des inneren moralischen Zwecks, nichts anderes als die Hervorbringung einer durch den Zweck bestimmten Wirklichkeit oder der Harmonie des moralischen Zwecks und der Wirklichkeit selbst", Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes (n. 23), at 454, and that "das Gute ist überhaupt das Wesen des Willens in seiner Substantialität und Allgemeinheit – der Wille in seiner Wahrheit ... Das Gute hat zu dem besonderen Subjekte das Verhältnis, das Wesentliche seines Willens zu sein, der hiermit darin schlechthin seine Verpflichtung hat", Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts (n. 24), §132, §133. About the necessarily intended good in human agency, see also Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae (n. 23), prima secondae, question 1, articles 6 and 7. In contemporary legal philosophy, see the necessary connection between purpose, norm and value at the level of the structure of human agency, as explained by Miguel Reale: "A ação, em seu sentido rigoroso, ou o ato, é energia dirigida para algo, que é sempre um valor. O valor, portanto, é aquilo a que a ação humana tende, porque se reconhece, em um determinado momento, ser motivo, positivo ou negativo da ação mesma. Não se indaga aqui da natureza ou das espécies de valores, mas apenas se verifica que, toda vez que o homem atua, objetiva ou contraria algo de valioso. ... Valor e dever ser implicam-se e exigem-se reciprocamente. Sem a idéia de valor, não temos a compreensão do dever ser. Quando o dever ser se origina do valor, e é recebido e reconhecido racionalmente como motivo da atuação ou do ato, temos aquilo que se chama um fim. Fim é o dever ser do valor reconhecido racionalmente como motivo de agir", Miguel Reale, Filosofia do Direito, 19th ed. (São Paulo: Saraiva, 2000), at 379. About the necessary role of evaluations in human agency, see also Josef Schmitz, Disput über das Teleologische Denken: Eine Gegenüberstellung von Nicolai Hartmann, Aristoteles und Thomas von Aquin (Mainz: Grünewald, 1960), at 178-183. From the point of view of bionormativity, the triviality of the good can 58 Since agents always act, whereby thinking, omissions and suicide are also activities, and since agents thereby consider some options better than others (including theories), ethical relativism and skepticism are ontologically impossible positions. They can be, indeed, thought, communicated and understood, but, since the thinking and communication of precisely these contents are also always acts that are preferred rather than others, they are manifestations of what is considered to be good, and thus not a contraposition to eschatology and teleology. Even the most obviously cruel actions or behaviours that are easily regretted by their author himself are carried out because a decisive good has been seen in them, be it pleasure, Schadenfreude or only the sublime taste of revenge – after all, evil is not the absence of good;158 evil means to do less than the greatest possible good, i. e., to do bad. Agents do not make the evil as such.159 Analytically speaking: whichever state of things X at the point of time t2 that the agent at t1 strives for in contrast to alternative states of things Y, Z etc. at t2 is a selection according to the idea of the good. Hence, the good as the ultimate guidance for agency is trivial because: (1) the striving is always present regardless of what is done by the agent, (2) it is a reformulation of the structure of agency and implied by it, (3) it is not only easy to grasp, but also literally undeniable, since denying is itself an activity and, as such, it has the same structure,160 and (4) it grounds on the fact that all purposes are self-affirmations of being: only what is, i. e., only being can settle purposes, and only what is either in act or in possibility can be made a purpose.161 It is also trivial that, by settling purposes, being puts itself against the nothing, against purposelessness, against the nihilism that would be the case if absolutely nothing be expressed in the following way: "But, insofar as teleological explanations are applicable to the behavior of organisms, there is a real sense in which organisms as such, no matter how simple, proximately and for the most part, do what they do because it is the right thing for them to do", Okrent, Nature and Normativity (n. 40), at 66. 158 Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae (n. 23), prima pars, question 5, article 5. 159 Ibid., prima pars, question 49, article 1; Oderberg, Moral theory (n. 117), at 39. 160 About the impossibility of denying the (trivial) good by means of purposeful acts such as thinking and speaking, see Jonas, Das Prinzip Verantwortung (n. 37), at 155-156. About the contradiction that arises with the negation of teleology, see also Jahae, Finality in Nature According to Kant and Blondel (n. 25), at 13. 161 As Aquinas states, "for that which, before aught else, falls under apprehension, is being, the notion of which is included in all things whatsoever a man apprehends. Wherefore the first indemonstrable principle is that the same thing cannot be affirmed and denied at the same time, which is based on the notion of being and not-being: and on this principle all others are based, as it is stated in Metaph. iv, text 9. Now as being is the first thing that falls under the apprehension of the practical reason, which is directed to action: since every agent acts for an end under the aspect of good. Consequently the first principle of practical reason is one founded on the notion of good, viz., that good is that which all things seek after. Hence this is the first precept of law, that good is to be done and pursued, and evil is to be avoided", Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae (n. 23), prima secundae, question 94, article 2. 59 would be striven for.162 The tautologies that are indeed present in the mentioned trivialities imply their truth, for tautological statements are necessarily true. There are relevant and irrelevant tautologies, and these are relevant ones. 1.13 Teleological and normative reasoning at different levels of consciousness The purpose of a behaviour is, therefore and nevertheless, not necessarily present at the level of the agent's consciousness about his own consciousness. An agent's purpose of action is always conscious, because purpose-settling is an agent's current reference to a hypothetical future state of affairs and some of the things involved in it. The purpose-settling of an agent is, additionally, always self-conscious, because it contains a distinction between environment and the agent itself, between what the agent is and what is not a part of himself, between what is being pursued and what is still not the case. Since these distinctive activities are present in all living beings as long as they live and regardless of their level of complexity, all living beings are both conscious and self-conscious. Since consciousness is the abstract reference to something, it is extremely simple, which is why to have a complex biotic nervous system such as a brain is not a precondition for the existence of consciousness. However, consciousness does not contain reference to everything that is implied by what is being referred to; although water is a quality (or type), a living being that seeks for water and which can therefore distinguish between what is water and what is not, does not necessarily have present in its consciousness the additional fact that water is a quality. To think of reality as qualitative, i. e., to have consciousness about the typological character of things and about the typological character of one's own consciousness is to have consciousness about one's own consciousness and to think in concepts163; these characteristics are not present in most living beings and in many activities of those living beings that are able to think conceptually, activities such as vegetative processes and instinct. Thus, consciousness should not be equated with or defined as conceptual consciousness; the latter is only a type of consciousness with an additional feature. In the same way, although water is H2O, 164 'to want water' entails only logically, not phenomenologically, 'to want 162 "In jedem Zweck erklärt sich das Sein für sich selbst und gegen das Nichts", Jonas, Das Prinzip Verantwortung (n. 37), at 155. 163 From Latin concepere (to apprehend). The German equivalent word Begriff is also enlightening because of its connotation of something that is used to 'grasp' (greifen) something else. 164 This does not imply that the macro-thing water is reducible to its microstructure. As Oderberg states, "when Cavendish, Lavoisier, Gay-Lussac, Humboldt, Nicholson and others discovered the composition of water in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they did not discover that water is identical to H2O. What they found were processes that synthesized water from, and separated water into, its chemical constituents of hydrogen and oxygen, and that these constituents were bonded together in a certain arrangement or structure. But it does not 60 H2O', for those who want water do not necessarily know chemistry and that water has atoms of hydrogen and oxygen. This is the difference between logical and phenomenological reference. Conscious reference is always phenomenological. To have consciousness about oneself (i. e., to be self-conscious, for example in the moment of a purpose-settling) entails only logically, but not phenomenologically, being conscious about one's own consciousness. Now, in order to follow a norm, one must be not only conscious about the norm and about oneself, but also about one self's consciousness; one must be conscious about one's own conscious activity of internal deliberation about whether one will follow the norm or not. That is, one must have an intention. Thus, intention is not the same and is not as widespread as purpose. The reason why many, perhaps most, living beings are not able to follow norms is not that they lack consciousness or even self-consciousness, but that they lack consciousness about their own consciousness. Now, one can follow a norm with or without consciousness about the fact that one's mind is settling a purpose while following the norm. For example, most individuals who have followed the unconditional norms of incest taboos and many who follow the current prohibitions against marriage between close relatives do not 'know' that their own biotic behaviour has purposes such as the continuity of healthy life. Most of the behaviour of children and to a great extent that of females due to their higher degree of neoteny165, is also instinctive and, thus, teleological in this way. Behaviour such as this is not 'conscious rule-following' combined with 'unconscious purpose-settling', since, as previously explained, purpose-settling is also a conscious activity. Rather, it is the presence of diverse conscious activities within the same individual and a lack of consciousness about some of these activities. Due to the fact that an agent's consciousness is about a manifold set of things, it is also possible that his consciousness about his own consciousness contains the idea that, for instance, 'I want to quit my job', whereas he remains in his job for decades while having this thought, which means that actually, he does not want to quit his job; the many actions that he undertakes in his professional life are purposed as means to the end of maintaining his job. A 30-year-old woman can have sincere thoughts such as 'I don't want to have children', and follow from the fact that water has the constituents hydrogen and oxygen in a certain arrangement – even if it has them necessarily – that these just are the essence of water rather than, at most, part of the essence", David S. Oderberg, Real Essentialism (New York: Routledge, 2007), at 14. 165 Neoteny denotes a complex of anatomic, physiological and psychological properties of adults that are typical of the young. Sexual dimorphism and natural selection in humans have led the female sex to evolve with a higher degree of neoteny than males. Neoteny is expressed for example by large eyes and lips, small nose and chin, higher pitched voice, emotional instability, lower tolerance for pain, more frequent crying and laughing, inclination to imitate the behaviour of others and weaker inclination to dominance. For empirical data about natural differences between the sexes, see Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate. The Modern Denial of Human Nature (London: Penguin, 2002), at 343-349. About psychological differences, see Georg Simmel, Zur Philosophie der Geschlechter: Das Relative und das Absolute im Geschlechter-Problem (1923), in: ibid., Philosophische Kultur. Über das Abenteuer; die Geschlechter und die Krise der Moderne (Berlin: Klaus Wagenbach, 1986). 61 at the same time, continually practice sexual intercourse and often 'forget' to use methods of contraception, and thus carry out purposeful actions that lead to pregnancy. A child may sincerely have the thought that 'I don't want to take this medicine because it tastes so bad', but always obey his parents when they give it to him. Yet, among contradictory purposes that may appear in the mind of an agent, only one at the most is a final purpose settled by himself overall. As in the case of the actions of children, very frequently of women, and also of many actions of men, the final purpose might not even be the 'explicit' purpose, i. e., the purpose that is part of their consciousness about their own consciousness, or in other words an agent's final purpose of action may coincide or not with his intention. Thus, to state that agency is teleological does not mean that one's consciousness about one's own consciousness would always contain the idea that one is following a purpose. In reference to different levels of consciousness, the distinction between normative and teleological reasoning is therefore accurate. Especially when one acts 'inconsequently', driven by strong emotions, or in a 'non-consequentialist' way by pure deference to duty, the teleological component of agency (which is always present at least at the level of biotic activity) may not be present at the level of consciousness about one self's consciousness. Yet, it is as impossible for a living being to behave in discordance with biotic principles of motion as it is impossible for a physical body to violate physical laws. An antibiologism that claims that living beings could violate biotic principles of motion would be as naïve as a biologism that claims that living beings would behave exclusively according to biotic principles of motion, as will be seen below (1.15). In any case, an ethic that considers only intention as decisive for the good or right of an action, or that reduces purpose into intentionality, would miss the real purpose of many behaviours, especially the purposes of many intentions. The same applies to conceptions of law, morality and politics that are only normative and which thus define the rightness of an action on the sole basis of its conformity to some norm at the level of consciousness about consciousness. This has the further consequence that both neutrality of value and ethical relativism are ontologically impossible positions; they consist in a contradiction between some of the ideas of an agent and the final purposes of the agent's own actions. It is by the final purposes of action that one knows the values of a value relativist. Neutrality in law, politics and morality is an ideal that cannot be even desired. 62 1.14 On the very possibility of relativism, skepticism, and knowledge about the good Although agents always strive for the good, the good does not consist in what someone, or many, or the most, or everyone considers to be good.166 That would be, indeed, a relativism. Such a definition of good would be mistaken for at least four reasons. Firstly, this would be, actually, neither a definition nor a criterion because the definiens contains the definiendum. In order to know what is good, one is referred to what the people consider good and in order to know what people consider good one is referred back to what good means. If what is being defined appears in the definition, nothing is being really said about what is being defined. Due to the deceiving character of such pseudo-definitions, they are properly called sophisms. Some psychic causes why this ancient sophism has become so widespread and is still sincerely believed and repeated by many will be treated below. Secondly, if good is defined as what the people consider to be good and if there are disagreements, which has always been the case in human history,167 so that at least two persons hold contradictory ideas, no definition is really given, for the good would be something and also its opposite, and good would not even be conceptually distinguishable from non-good, which is the purpose of the definition. Thirdly, if there are disagreements and some choice is made between two contradictory opinions, for example if it is claimed that the good corresponds to the oldest or newest opinions or if good is the minority's or the majority's opinion about the good or some conciliating middle between them, the criterion given is, actually, one's own criterion, and not what the respective group or individual referred to considers to be good if the group or individual does not believe that good is what itself considers to be good, but some other substantial idea such as happiness or pleasure. If the referred group or individual does refer to the own authority and consider that good is what itself considers to be good, the definition is self-referential and viciously tautological, for good is what one considers to be good and what one considers to be good is what one considers to be good. In this way, nothing is really said. 166 As erroneously stated for example by Thomas Hobbes: "Good, and evil, are names that signify our appetites, and aversions; which in different tempers, customs, and doctrines of men, are different: and divers men, differ not only in their judgment, on the senses of what is pleasant, and unpleasant to the taste, smell, hearing, touch, and sight; but also of what is conformable, or disagreeable to reason, in the actions of common life. ... private appetite is the measure of good, and evil...", Hobbes, Leviathan (n. 141), chapter XV, 40. John Stuart Mill also has claimed that the order of preference among two goods consists in what "all or almost all who have experience of both give a decided preference", Mill, Utilitarianism (n. 78), at 16. 167 In contrast for example to Hobbes' erroneous assumption that "all men agree on this, that peace is good", Hobbes, Leviathan (n. 141), chapter XV, 40. The attempt of grounding ethics on of common opinions or interests among all human beings is always deemed to failure for the simple reason that there are and have always been disagreements. An attempt to provide a fundament for ethics by means of this inductive method and on the basis of the identification of egalitarian interests such as non-discrimination can be seen for example in Norbert Hoerster, Wie lässt sich Moral begründen? (Munich: CH Beck, 2014), at 100-109. 63 The same applies if one says that good is what someone else considers to be good, that being, actually, one's own criterion, so that good is what I consider to be good and what I consider to be good is what I consider to be good. Fourthly, if 'something is good' means 'someone considers it to be good', the reason why person A considers a thing X to be good would not consist in some property of the thing such as its beauty or taste, but in the very fact that the same person considers it to be good.168 This error is commonly committed within biologist approaches of ethics when it is said that (1) good is what people consider to be good, (2) what people consider to be good is what leads to reproduction, and (3) people consider what leads to reproduction as good because it leads to reproduction. In this way, definition is confounded with cause, and no definition is actually given, but only the cause why someone makes a definition, only the spatial-temporal cause of a psychic act. An epistemologically faultless, though ultimately untrue, definition would have to renounce the first premise of the mentioned train of thought and simply claim that 'good is what leads to reproduction', which would have to be valid independently of people's opinions. These four refutations apply not only to the good, but also to the concept of law and to any attempt to define anything or only to refer to any property of something in terms of people's opinions. The self-referential and unexplanatory assertion that 'the good is whatever people consider to be good' could also be made by someone who, indeed, does not want to say anything definite about the good because he does not believe that such a definition could be ever given. That would be rather a skepticism than a relativism or a failed attempt of definition. Now, skepticism is not the mere lack of reflection about an issue. Rather, skepticism is a self-referential individual mental state in the sense that something is not and cannot be known by himself, and eventually by others. Skepticism requires consciousness about the own consciousness and sometimes about the consciousness of others. Skepticism never consists exclusively in negations, it is never pure ignorance, but also positive, i. e., affirmative knowledge about at least some things. In the same way that one can ask a wise 'where do you get your knowledge from?', for knowledge has always an origin, one can ask the skeptic 'where do you get your ignorance from?', for also ignorance has always an origin; 168 As held for example in Hendrik Gommer's biological theory of law by applying insights from evolutionary biology to the concept of law and moral facts: "Good is not a property of things as the colour yellow can be, but it is a value that we as humans give to the object. ... The intrinsic variant of morals is closely linked to emotions (he is bad because I feel jealous). ... Something is good when it feels good", Gommer, ʻFrom the 'Is' to the 'Ought'. A Biological Theory of Lawʼ (n. 80), at 450, 460, 461. "When I say drinking water is good, from a biological point of view I am actually saying that I feel drinking water is good because my body needs it", Gommer, ʻFrom genes to legal norms. Cooperation as a pivot pointʼ (n. 41), at 119. 64 it has causes and reasons. The answer will necessarily be some positive knowledge about something. Even dogs know who their owner is, and even penguins can find their offspring in the crowd. Equally as every living being, a skeptic too can distinguish between himself and the environment, and at least this consists in positive knowledge. Ethical skepticism consists, then, in the thought or claim that the skeptic's and other people's actual knowledge about many things and facts is not knowledge about the good, whereas the things and facts that he knows may or may not be good. But in order to claim that one's knowledge is not knowledge of the good, one must have at least an idea of the good. The thought that 'X is not Y' is a mental comparison between X and Y, which can only take place if the mind that makes the comparison processes both ideas. It is also based on the idea of Y that one can say that what persons A, B and C claim Y to be is, in reality, not real knowledge about Y. Since what is at stake in skepticism is knowledge about knowledge, which characterizes it as a position pertaining to the discipline of epistemology, skepticism is a position at the level of consciousness about consciousness and not simply of consciousness about other things and facts. For example: it is possible that one sincerely does not know what protozoans are. Then, one will not be able to say if a thing that one knows, say, a tree, is a protozoan or not. But this would not be a skeptical or even an epistemological claim. The skeptical claim would consist in saying that 'one cannot know what protozoans are', which presupposes that the knowledge that one already has, for example about trees, is not knowledge about protozoans. This presupposes that one has at least an idea about what protozoans are, in the same sense as when scientists claim that it is not yet really known what matter or energy really is, which are claims that presuppose deep reflection and study about these things and that sometimes categorically deny that some conceptions of matter and energy are true, for example the popular ones. To have an idea of what protozoans are is to know something about them, for example to know that they are living beings, or that they are something that biologists talk about, or that they are not what we normally talk about at lunch etc. Now, at the level of consciousness about the own consciousness, it is possible not to perform reflections about what a protozoan or the good is and, thus, to be, indeed, ignorant about the respective ideas and, consequently, about whether the things that one knows fall under these ideas. But once skeptical thoughts and claims are made, some reflection is present and, therefore, also an idea of the good. Thus, while ignorance is possible, skepticism is an ontologically impossible position; it is an impossible epistemology. Those who think to be skeptical do so, rather, because they are dissatisfied with the present state of knowledge or with someone's or the socially dominant conceptions, and wish to know in more detail, to 65 change someone's behaviour, or to appeal to some implicit value such as tolerance169, all of which consists in teleological purpose-settling trivially oriented towards the good. Although such critical attitudes always have had important functions for progress in society throughout history, in view of the ontology of consciousness the intellectually honest and mature attitude is the philosophical and psychological analysis of the reasons and causes of pretendedly skeptical claims or, metaphorically speaking, skepticism about skepticism. Thus, to be a skeptic about the possibility of knowing the good is a mental state that takes place at the level of consciousness about consciousness and, as such, contains the idea of the good. This means that even skeptics by necessity know what the good is, although they can have some mistaken opinions about it. Unlike the knowledge of material things that require sense perception, to grasp the idea of something immaterial at the level of consciousness about consciousness is to know the thing: while to grasp the idea of a horse does not imply the knowledge of any particular horse, to grasp the idea of a triangle is to know the triangle. The same is valid for numbers and mathematical relations, for literary figures such as the unicorn, pieces of music,170 logical principles and many other immaterial things. Someone who knows them, say, the triangle, can still have mistaken opinions about it, such as that the sum of its internal angles is 60o, but this does not invalidate the knowledge of the triangle, and only shows that the additional idea of one of its properties is not known. Thus, the idea of the good should not be confounded with its definition. In order to define something, one must first know it (how could someone define something that he does not know? Only per coincidence. Knowledge is prior to definition), and to know it does not imply that one is able to define, such as a child who knows the triangle and can distinguish it from a circle, but cannot find words to make definitions. This is so because a definition requires more knowledge than the knowledge about the thing to be defined; one must be able to know additional ideas such as the thing's kind, its difference to other things of the same kind, and 169 About tolerance and other allegedly neutral values as motivations for holding a kind of skepticism or relativism, see Oderberg: "What, then, does the relativist say about the principle of tolerance, or the freedom of each person to express whatever moral opinion he likes? Relativism is traditionally motivated by this very idea: if morality is simply a matter of personal opinion, then no one can be allowed to impose his sincerely held belief on someone who believes differently. But is the principle of tolerance itself simply a matter of opinion? Alan might disapprove of tolerance: is he then aUowed to impose his moral beliefs on others, even by physical coercion? Either the relativist says that he can, or that he cannot: but it is hard to see which view the relativist is logically bound to take, in which case relativism is compatible both with tolerance and with oppression, which is not a conclusion the vast majority of relativists would countenance. ... Suppose, on the other hand, that the relativist is able logically to resolve the problem of tolerance versus oppression, and opts one would hope in favour of the view that you may not coerce others to believe what you believe; and that this is an objective moral truth. Then the relativist will have countenanced at least one objective moral truth, contrary to his own theory that all morality is a matter of opinion", Oderberg, Moral theory (n. 117), at 19-20. 170 For advanced musicians, if scores are available, it is not necessary to ever hear a piece of music in order to know it. 66 what a definition is. A definition is a multiple comparison. To define is an act of knowledge about knowledge and, therefore, of consciousness about consciousness. At this level of consciousness, one may or may not have an idea of the good, but to have an idea of the good is to know the good properly, though not in regard to all of its properties, not least because, as already seen, the conscious reference to something does not include phenomenologically all of its properties. This is one more way to say that the knowledge of the good is trivial. Thus, at this level of consciousness, one might make wrong definitions, or judge particular things and actions as being the greatest possible good while they are not, but one can never be excluded from its idea if an idea is present, which is also tautologically true. 1.15 Physical teleology 1.15.1 Potency, tendency and strive Since biotic and physical entities exist and interact in the same single reality and since biotic entities are themselves partially physical entities, agency and biotic activity can only be teleological if physics is compatible with teleology. How could a cell or organism have fallible tendencies if they were exclusively made of physical particles and processes with determinist results sufficiently caused by physical laws? As already shown, this is not the case. On the contrary: physics is not only compatible with teleology, but is also teleological. Physical bodies have own principles of motion and change, an own potency. As already remarked, a body in movement tends to continue in its linear direction, and a body in rotation tends to develop a centrifugal movement. Bodies strive to certain positions in the directions of gravity. Big and small, heavy and light bodies have frequently different tendencies of movement regarding direction and speed.171 To cause movement against the natural tendency of a thing requires more energy, it requires more violent movement, whereas the movement according to the natural tendency requires less energy and softer force. All these tendencies are fallible, i. e., they can either succeed or fail. As already stated, and to take one example for all: the fact that a body continues in rotation does not eliminate the fact of its natural centrifugal tendency. All these tendencies are own tendencies of the respective bodies; they constitute what they are (how could a body exist one second without any tendency of movement?).172 Although physical bodies are not living beings and cannot start or stop their 171 About this point in Aristotelian philosophy, see Naeve, Naturteleologie bei Aristoteles, Leibniz, Kant und Hegel (n. 16), at 74-75. 172 This is approximately what Aquinas has meant with the statement "the principle of some acts or movements is within the agent, or that which is moved; whereas the principle of some movements or acts is outside. For when a stone is moved upwards, the principle of this movement is outside the stone: whereas when it is moved 67 own tendencies, what happens with a physical body necessarily depends on its own tendencies and properties173 and cannot be completely caused by exclusively external factors such as physical laws174 and other bodies.175 As already shown, physical laws are unconditional only at the level of their abstraction; at the level of particular events they are conditional and do not determine the occurrence of any particular event, neither biotic nor inanimate, although they are always present as some of their causes. This means that mechanism, properly understood, is not a real opposition to fallible tendency. Additionally to physical laws, for something to happen there must be an effective nexus that realizes spatiotemporally the transition between the things and events at t1 towards t2. Striving is precisely the effective nexus that completes the causation of a physical event. It is teleological in structure and consists in an immaterial and fallible transition of qualities towards one direction. Someone could argue that it is not the stone that strives downwards in the direction of the Earth's center, but the Earth that attracts the stone by the law of gravitation, which would mean that physical bodies would not have own tendencies of motion, but be moved exclusively by external causes, and that attraction would eliminate striving and be an alternative to teleological causation. However, that would be a shift of the same fact into another entity, for, then, it would be the Earth that has the own tendency of moving bodies towards its center, whereas it would still be the case that the attracted bodies, actually, do not always really move to the Earth's center, since some of them are prevented due to collisions with other bodies or due to other obstacles176 such as electric fields, all of which characterizes downwards, the principle of this movement is in the stone", Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae (n. 23), prima secundae, question 6, article 1, p. 72. 173 As Aquinas states, "fire does not come to be from just any non-fire, but from such non-fire as is apt to receive the form of fire", Thomas Aquinas, De principiis naturae: in: Joseph Bobik, Aquinas on matter and form and the elements (Notre Dame, Ind: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998), § 11. 174 As already explained above (1.1.2), physical laws are external to physical bodies in the sense that, while bodies emerge and perish within time, laws do not emerge and perish together with the bodies that they are valid for. External in this sense means, thus, beyond rather than exclusive externality, since physical laws also coconstitute internaly what the body is. 175 For important objections against the thesis that causes would have to be exclusively external to some entitiy in order to be causes at all, see Ponce, ʻTeleología y causalidadʼ (n. 13), at 160: "en vez de exigir que las causas operen "por compulsion externa", debemos contentarnos con una exigencia mas moderada, que bien puede ser la aristotelica de que nada sea su própia causa (Aristóteles Phys. 195a 5-10). Así quedaria a salvo cierta extern alidad e la causa respecto de su efecto y, a la vez, desapareceria la inconsistencia entre este requisito y el uso comun de "causa". El problema de que, según la estricta ortodoxia de la causalidad, los terminos que se refieren a cosas que no poseen virtudes productivas en si mismas no deben figurar en enunciados causales, es un problema complejo cuyas raíces se hallan, en parte, en la evolución histórica del concepto de causa y, en parte también, en que tales cosas, en apariencia no-productivas, están descritas inadecuadamente". 176 This kind of fallible tendency is ubiquitous in Isaac Newton's works, for example in the demonstration of his third law of motion: "Suppose that between any two bodies A and B that attract each other any obstacle is interposed so as to impede their coming together. If one body A is more attracted toward the other body B than that other body B is attracted toward the first body A, then the obstacle will be more strongly pressed by body A than by body B and accordingly will not remain in equilibrium. The stronger pressure will prevail and will make 68 success and failure. If one wanted, then, to eliminate the Earth's tendency of attraction by indicating another external physical body as its cause, which, by the way, would be hard to imagine, or by pointing at internal micro particles and processes, it is the other physical body (internal or external) that would have a fallible tendency in the same way, and so on ad infinitum. This is so because, actually, attraction is as fallible and teleological as striving.177 The same movement can be apprehended as attraction and as striving depending on the body that is considered by the observer. If a piece of metal is put close to a magnet, the metal tends to develop motion towards the magnet and the magnet towards the metal. Does the magnet attract the metal, or the metal strive for the magnet? At high tide, does the Moon attract the water or does the water strive for the Moon? Obviously, no choice can or should be made, precisely because both are the case. Reciprocal attraction is reciprocal striving. The same is valid for gravitational, magnetic and electric fields – for the latter both one can say additionally that 'avoiding' is the correspondent of 'repelling'. Now, the terms striving, attraction, avoiding and repelling can also denote the resultant tendency of movement, i. e., the resultant vector instead of all the vectors, thus the final target of a tendency. In the same way that a living being has in itself opposite tendencies of movement such as genes producing contrary tendencies or a tension between contrary purposes and intentions, and yet only one final purpose of action each time, physical bodies are embedded in many relationships of opposite attraction and striving with other bodies in many directions at once and, yet, they have a resultant final target178, such as a magnet's tendency upwards in the direction of a piece of metal even if it is also attracted downwards by the Earth, or a portion of water striving towards the Earth even if it is also attracted by the Moon. Both in trivial and resultant senses, attraction and striving are 'sides' of the same tendency; both are ways of consideration of the same physical event; none of them has ontological priority. The difference between them is only epistemological, i. e., it concerns the way in which human understanding observes nature, especially what is looked for preferentially in order to understand, foresee and manipulate movements. Indeed, it is often the system of the two bodies and the obstacle move straight forward in the direction from A toward B and, in empty space, go on indefinitely with a motion that is always accelerated, which is absurd and contrary to the first law of motion", Newton, Principia, 1687 (n. 6), at 83. 177 Clearly, with that it is not being said that a body fails to strive or to attract, but that striving and attraction can fail to cause the result that they tend to cause. 178 The term 'resultant' should not mislead to the assumption that the living being's final purpose of action or the physical body's final target of movement would be causal or emergent results of the many micro tendencies present in them, since macro and micro tendencies take place all at the same time and, therefore, cannot be divided into temporal antecedents and consequents, which would be required for a causal explanation. Moreover, the term 'final' in 'final target' does not mean the last in time, since the body still has tendencies of movement after it achieves a certain target. Final refers to the end of a certain series. 69 easier to explain, predict and manipulate movements by studying more or first the comparably bigger body than the many small bodies that may approach it, for the obvious reason that small things exist by necessity always in a greater number than big things179 and cannot be all known and studied with equal accuracy; small things are also often difficult to discover and, depending on the scale, often also difficult to manipulate once discovered. Thus, the focus on attraction rather than on striving is well justified by utility for research and technology, and this is an advantage of modern physics in comparison with pre-modern philosophy of nature, but an eventual priority of one of them does not have ontological correspondence and, as a matter of fact, has had the side-effect of driving natural teleology into oblivion or, worse, into ridiculousness.180 Of course, the fact that science does not approach natural phenomena in these terms anymore does not mean that the terms do not have ontological correspondence, but only that science has changed its agenda, even if for good pragmatic purposes. 1.15.2 Contingent and macro causation The teleological structure of physical striving exists at all size levels of physical bodies and does not consist in an emergent181 macro property from elementary micro particles and processes. It cannot be eliminated or explained by means of micro causation. The reason is itself 'elementary': what happens at the same time of an event or what composes a thing is not 179 Not least because every big think has small parts. 180 As is known, modern philosophy and science have shown extreme hostility towards teleology, a psychic attitude described and criticized by Hegel with fine wit: "man ist jetzt spröde (modernes Sträuben) gegen den Zweck", aprox. translation: "people are now aloof (modern ruffling) against the [idea of] purpose", Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie II (n. 21), at 178, and described by Spranger as 'teleophobia' in Eduard Spranger, ʻZum Problem der Teleologieʼ, Synthese, 3, 10 (1938), 397–410, at 397. As Ernest Nagel points out, "Modern science ... regards final causes to be vestal virgins which bear no fruit in the study of physical and chemical phenomena; and) because of the association of teleological explanations with the doctrine that goals or ends of activity are dynamic agents in their own realizations, it tends to view such explanations as a species of obscurantism. ... Purposes and deliberate goals admittedly play important roles in human activities, but there is no basis whatever for assuming them in the study of physicochemical and most biological phenomena", Nagel, The Structure of Science (n. 8), at 401-402. However, many authors have recognized and profoundly analyzed many mistakes that modern philosophy and science have committed in suppressing teleology from scientific investigation. See for example Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, De ipsa natura: sive de vi insita actionibusque Creaturarum, pro Dynamicis suis confirmandis illustrandisque, in: Die Philosophischen Schriften 4 (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1978). About the compatibility of mechanism and teleology, see Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik (1813, 1816) (Berlin: Hofenberg Sonderausgabe, 2016), 2nd part, chapter Teleologie. About teleology in organic beings, see Dessauer, Die Teleologie in der Natur (n. 1). About historical and other general philosophical aspects, see Robert Spaemann, ʻDie Unvollendbarkeit der Entfinalisierungʼ, in S. J. Follon and James McEvoy, eds., Finalité et Intentionnalité: doctrine thomiste et perspectives modernes. Actes du Colloque de Louvain-la-Neuve et Louvain 21-23 mai 1990 (Paris: Éditions de l'Institut Supérieur de Philosophie Louvain-la-Neuve, 1992), 305–324; Robert Spaemann and Reinhard Löw, Natürliche Ziele: Geschichte und Wiederentdeckung des teleologischen Denkens (Stuttgart: Klett-Cota, 2005); Marco Solinas, From Aristotle's teleology to Darwin's genealogy: The stamp of inutility (Houndsmill, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), and Naeve, Naturteleologie bei Aristoteles, Leibniz, Kant und Hegel (n. 16). An overview about the 'ressurection of teleology' in contemporary science has been provided by Analy Takemura, ʻLa teleología en la explicación científica contemporáneaʼ, Eikasia, 71 (2016), 277–296. 181 From Latin emergere (to rise up, to appear). 70 a cause of this thing or event: a thing such as a stone or an organism contains smaller parts, and the smaller parts contain other smaller parts etc.; since the whole and the parts exist together at all times of the thing's existence, what happens at the micro level, say, the movement of particles or some chemical process, can never be the cause and, epistemologically, the explanation of the total thing, since parts and whole cannot be divided in antecedent and consequent, so that no explanandum and explanans is available. At all times that something happens at the micro level, something happens at the macro level, so that one can never be the cause (antecedent) of the other one. All micro things are parts of macro things. Certainly, any macro thing is necessarily caused by something previous to it, but this antecedent is also itself both micro and macro, and does not only consist of particles and chemical reactions, but of particles and chemical reactions as simultaneous parts of the same or another stone, of the same or another organism, from the air, the Sun, the galaxy etc. The same thing is both a 'mountain' and 'basalt', both 'basalt' and '50% SiO2'; the same entity is both a living being and has a heart, and at the same time that the individual acts, his heart pumps blood, at the same time that the heart pumps blood, the mitochondria within the heart muscles respirate, at the same time there are centrifugal tendencies within some particles that compose the atoms of the mitochondria etc. Of course, a person can get sick due to an attack of protozoans, which would be a macro effect of microorganisms, but only because of other macro events such as that he has drunk water infected with the microorganism, which are equally part of the antecedents that led causally to the consequent, for if that person had not drunk exactly that lemonade at that trip, he would not have been attacked by that amoebea, which is true even if the disease is not regularly caused by drinking lemonade. Antecedents can be necessary causes even if they happen only once, i. e., even if they are not generalizable according to a law. In almost tautological terms: in order to be an antecedent of a consequent, an event must not be repeatable. X can be a necessary cause of Y even if X does not always cause Y and even if Y in other circumstances also happens by other causes than X. Also in this regard, the greater scientific achievements that are indeed made possible by research about microorganisms and particles, for example in order to distinguish more precisely between healthy and unhealthy food, are an unquestionable progress in relation to merely macro physics and many aspects of ancient medicine, but that progress consists in additional knowledge of reality rather than in ontological elimination of the macro reality and its tendencies,182 not least because science has also made progress in astronomy, which is even 182 In contrast to the assumption that macro events and properties, sometimes called 'emergent' ones in a strict sense, would be only a temporary lack of knowledge of how they would be completely caused by micro events and properties, as held for example by Hempel: "emergence of a characteristic is not an ontological trait inherent 71 'bigger than macro' and obviously does not eliminate microphysics and biochemistry. Micro and macro levels of physical and biotic reality exist by necessity at the same time and, therefore, neither determine nor eliminate each other causally. In other words, the quality of a macro thing is neither eliminated nor exclusively caused by micro things, and the quality of a micro thing is neither eliminated nor exclusively caused by macro things.183 Also in physics it is true that quality, i. e., what something is, is not a causal effect of quantity, i. e., how many components it has or has originated from. The effective nexuses that compose causation at all size levels of a thing or event take place at the same time. 1.15.3 Distinction between tendency and frequency, or: between teleology and probability Probability (or chance) can be epistemic or ontological.184 Epistemic probability is the degree of convincement of an agent in relation to some fact. It is the rate of certainty that someone attributes to a certain belief in comparison with competing beliefs. If someone is sure that the cause of the extinction of some reptile was the fall of an asteroid in the Cretaceous period, the probability of this hypothesis in relation to the person's knowledge is 100%. If the person thinks that two events could explain the extinction and is equally unsure about which one was the case, the probability of each is 50%. According to this pattern, indefinitely many hypotheses can be formulated and attributed a degree of certainty. in some phenomena; rather it is indicative of the scope of our knowledge at a given time; thus it has no absolute, but a relative character; and what is emergent with respect to the theories available today may lose its emergent status tomorrow", Hempel, Studies in the Logic of Explanation (n. 9), at 263. As Woszczek points out, "the commonsense approach in mechanics and dynamics, preferred in physics in the early 20th century and still avidly defended by Einstein and many others (before physics came to be completely dominated by the counterintuitive Quantum Field Theory ...), favored, in a singular manner, both the methodological and the ontological parceling of physical phenomena into independent objects of a different scale", Marek Woszczek, Platonic Wholes and Quantum Ontology (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2015), at 23, whereas 'externalistic compositionism' is the idea that "the parts (elements) of a whole are ontically primary and well-defined regardless of the irreducible whole (composite) they create, while the whole as such is secondary and dependent on the relations those elements enter into. ... Such an externalistic compositionism has turned to be – that is undoubted – an extremely productive research strategy (regarding explanation and prediction) and can be assumed to be responsible, as reductionism in general, for an unprecedented theoretical and technological effectiveness of physics ... The fascinating novelty of quantum mechanics ... , nevertheless has depended on the fact that it has challenged, in a nontrivial and somewhat surprising manner, the credibility of such a strategy of explanation...", ibid., at 23-24. However, it should be noted that the knowledge about the ontological character of macro reality is historically prior to quantum physics and does not depend on it to be achieved and cogently proven, although quantum physics does seem to provide additional examples of the impossibility of reductionism from wholes into parts. 183 Therefore, it would be mistaken to distinguish inorganic and organic by the criterion of determination of parts by the whole within the former and of the whole by the parts within the latter, as Etienne Gilson claims by following Auguste Comte ("the passage from an order in which the parts precondition the whole to an order in which the whole shapes the parts and, in a sense, precedes them"). Gilson, From Aristotle to Darwin and back again (n. 30), at 122. 184 About this distinction (with the terminology 'objective' instead of 'ontological'), see Franz von Kutschera, Wissenschaftstheorie I: Grundzüge der allgemeinen Methodologie der empirischen Wissenschaften (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1972), at 45-121. 72 The events themselves, however, whatever they may be, cannot be caused less than 100%. Everything that happens was caused 100%, otherwise it would not have happened. This does not mean, however, that the probability of an event to happen is always 100%. Also ontological probability varies between necessity (100%) and impossibility (0%) because it consists in the statistical relation between a certain kind of case and the total number of previous cases of the same kind. If a wolf abandons or gets lost from its pack, its probability of mating decreases and depends, among other factors, on the probability that it finds another pack or individual of opposite sex. This probability consists, then, in the number of favorable past cases in which other wolves and the same one (provided that it has gotten lost before) could find another one, divided by the number of total cases of lost wolves in the past. This could be, for example, 75%. If the probability of mating after finding another pack or individual is 20%, the probability of mating after getting lost is 15% (0,75 x 0,2).185 Since this singular wolf as well as the totality of previous cases and all their respective properties exist independently of being known by observers, the quantitative relations between them also exist independently of observers. Therefore, if an observer wants to predict an event, his counts and models will be an attempt to reproduce the quantitative ontological relations, i. e., epistemic probability is oriented towards ontological probability rather than vice-versa. The mere existence of past cases, however, does not condition a present case. In other words, the existence of past things and events, even those of the same kind, do not sufficiently cause a posterior one. The solitary wolf will necessarily either find others and mate or not, and either event will be caused not only 15% or 85%, but 100%. Now, how could the success and failure of other wolves in the past cause the success or failure of this one now (given that they do not exchange experiences and no learning process can take place)? There is no effective nexus between those events. The frequency that underlies them is a merely (ontological and eventually also epistemic) mathematical relation.186 It is based on common properties. The totality of properties of each individual and of the environmental circumstances in which they find themselves is, however, never equal. It is the individual properties of the singular wolf, its organic activity and the present state of its environment that will complete causation from a probability of 15% or 85% towards 100%. Since singularity and activity are always involved in the process of completion of causality, there exists no 185 Of course, the probability could be calculated with the addition of many other variables. However, since the other variables would also be relationships between previous cases of the same kind, this would not change the question any further. 186 As Schrödinger correctly states, the probabilistic correlation between events exists independently of the way of their causation, i. e., regardless whether they have been caused by chance or by necessity. In 'What is a law of nature?' (Was ist ein Naturgesetz?), he states that statistical correlations exist even if causation in nature occurred by playing dice. Schrödinger, Was ist ein Naturgesetz? (n. 13), at 11. 73 absolute probability (or absolute chance) for the next event to happen.187 This is most obviously true of the first time that something happens, since there are no previous cases of the same kind available for a statistical relationship, but it is valid for every event. Of course, the absence of absolute probability should not be confounded with an ontological probability or 0%, because the inexistence of absolute probability refers equally to contradictory possibilities (both X and non-X) and it is necessary that either the one or the other happens (in other words: the mere fact that it is the first time in history that an even happens or is about to happen does not mean that its probability is 0%). Ultimately, the lack of absolute probability is precisely what indeterminacy in nature means. It is in the sense of absolute probability, rather than of necessity or of ontological probability, that the statement 'there is no chance in nature' is true.188 The inexistence of absolute probability is the reason why the knowledge even of all previous events and of all laws would still not guarantee the certainty of any single prediction. The problem of the first time of an event is, however, not as simple as it seems to be. Consider the first time in history that a wolf abandons its pack. This event is only the first of its kind if wolves are considered as such, but not if a more general property of the same entity is considered. Wolves are, for example, also mammals, and the first time that a wolf leaves its pack is an instantiation of the much more frequent event that 'a mammal leaves its group'. In the same way, the first time in history that a mammal leaves its group is an instantiation of the even more frequent event that 'an animal leaves its group', which is a species of the kind 'a living being takes distance from others of the same species' and so on ad infinitum. All these relations are ontological and ground (ontological and epistemic) probability with more or less accuracy. In other these relations to exist, the existence of some equal property whatsoever between two entities suffice (whereas similarity is equality of some properties and difference in relation to other properties, thus not a third category between equality and difference). The underlying principle is that everything that exists is both general and singular. In relation to generality, there is never a first time; in relation to singularity, every event is a first time. The same is valid for every singularity such as the extinction of the dinosaurs or Sparta's victory 187 As von Kutschera explains, "Eine objektive Wahrscheinlichkeit wird nicht (oder doch nicht primär) einzelnen und einmaligen Ereignissen zugeordnet, so wie das bei der subjektiven Wahrscheinlichkeit geschieht, sondern nur Ereignistypen. Denn die objektive Wahrscheinlichkeit soll etwas mit der relativen Häufigkeit des Auftretens eines Ereignisses zu tun haben; bei singulären Ereignissen kann man aber nicht von einer relativen Häufigkeit sprechen", Kutschera, Wissenschaftstheorie I (n. 184), at 89. 188 In contrast to David Hume's assumption that the reason why there is no chance in nature would be the necessity of every single event. See Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (n. 13), at 56, and editor's note at 193. He confounds necessity in ontological sense (100% causality) with necessity in probabilistic sense (100% probability). 74 in the Peloponnesian War: even these singular events are of a kind and have, thus, common properties with other ones, such as to be the 'extinction of a species' in the first case, to be a 'war' in the second case, or, most generally, to be a 'singularity', as singularities happen all the time and are, therefore and as such, repeatable. Singularity and activity are precisely the places of teleology in nature. Both epistemic and ontological probability, on the contrary, consist in general relations based on common properties and contain only what happens and not what has been attempted without success. While striving exists with and without the striven results (because of fallibility), statistical correlations between events exist with and without striving, i. e., independently of an effective nexus between them. This is the difference between tendency in teleological sense (=striving) and tendency in probabilistic sense (=frequency). While teleological tendency consists in fallible attempts, probabilistic tencency consists in a relationship between successes189 exclusively. Fallibility is, however, as ubiquitous as success: wolves try to find other packs even if they fail, a particle has a centrifugal tendency even if it never leaves its orbital, an organ has a function even if it is never fulfilled,190 a person may carry out an action for some purpose and never achieve it, and a legal norm may have the telos of reducing inflation in the economy even if it never produces that result or even causes the opposite. Teleology, thus both function and strive, neither consists in, nor is caused by, its effects, although observers can often start by the effects for its cognition. Because of the difference between effects striven and not striven for, i. e., between effects with and without effective nexuses arising from a certain entity, empirical methods that rely on statistical correlations and repeatability of phenomena are inadequate to detect the teleological aspects of reality.191 189 Success corresponds to act in metaphysical sense, in opposition to potency. 190 "Función y normalidad biológica están relacionadas, pero no son iguales. Ni una ni otra es reductible al lenguaje de la física ... La concepción etiológica define y justifica un concepto normativo de normalidad desde una perspectiva histórica: Un corazón anormal (malformado, dañado), incapaz de bombear sangre, sí posee la función que corresponde a su tipo, porque su historia evolutiva ha seleccionado los corazones para -o mejor dicho por- eso. ... Por otra parte, lo estadísticamente normal en una clase de organismos no explica ni justifica su normatividad biológica. Varios contraejemplos se oponen a ese tipo de reducción. Una enfermedad puede llegar a ser estadísticamente normal en una población, pero no deja de ser una enfermedad ... Si alguien saca 180 en un test de cociente intelectual, ¿acaso lo ha hecho mal? La normatividad biológica es relativa tanto a la población en su conjunto como a cada individuo particular y a su relación con el entorno", Alberto Molina Pérez, ʻObjetividad versus inteligibilidad de las funciones biológicas. La paradoja normativa y el altismo epistemológico de las ciencias modernasʼ, Ludus Vitalis, XIV, 26 (2006), 39–67, at 42. About this point, Neander correctly states that "eine statistische Definition biologischer Normen bringt es paradoxerweise mit sich, dass die Funktion eines Merkmals für den Fall, dass das Merkmal üblicherweise seine Funktion nicht erfüllt, aufhört seine Funktion zu sein. Das Nichterfüllen einer Funktion ist dann keine Fehlfunktion mehr", Neander, ʻWarum Geschichte zählt. Vier Theorien über Funktionenʼ (n. 32), at 108. 191 As will be seen below, the inadequacy of empirical methods for teleological inquiry does not provide reasons for anti-realism about teleology, as mistakenly suggested for example in Carl G. Hempel's positivism with the claim that teleology would not be "inherent in the design of the universe" because it cannot be detected in a "test 75 1.16 Total teleology In the same way that any micro or macro physical body has many contrary tendencies in different directions but only one final tendency of movement in each period of time, a living being has many genes, organs, purposes and intentions pointing at different tendencies but resulting in only one final purpose of action each time.192 Since living beings are both biotic and physical, they accumulate physical and biotic tendencies. Although living beings are, unlike inanimate ones, self-conscious, the final purposes of their actions are never completely self-directed, i. e., they are never exhausted by self-referential purposes such as selfpreservation and own welfare, but always have also an external component: the bird that builds a nest does it for its offspring, the individual who avoids incest does it for eugenic purposes that concern the whole species etc. Now, the contrary tendencies of the physical and living being's movement cannot be attained all at once in the same reality. Although there are many purposes settled by different organs and genes of a living being, by different individuals and groups, only one is realized in each moment or period in time when they are contradictory, which means that there is a total tendency in the sense that the whole of reality ultimately tends to the same single events and the same total state in each moment.193 Failed tendencies are always successful tendencies of other entities. Since thinking, biotic activity and physical movement are simultaneous parts of the same reality, and since they are part of the same total tendencies and interact with each other by sometimes producing in combination the same results and sometimes producing opposite tendencies, there must be a common pattern of causation that involves them all. On the one hand, thinking could not be a real activity of subjects without being part of some series of causation within time (i. e. without causing and being caused), not least because subjects exist within time and process ideas in a temporal manner, one after the other. On the other hand, determinist causation at the level of living beings and macro things is incompatible with indeterminacy at the micro level, and vice-versa: determinist causation at the micro level is by experiment and observation", and that a scientific explanation would only be adequate if the explanans contains "general laws". Hempel, Studies in the Logic of Explanation (n. 9), at 248, 256. 192 In my view, it is in this sense that René Thom states that the acts of contrary intentions make up a single act. See Thom, Semio physics: a sketch (n. 32), at 153, after a 'catastrophic' reading of Aristotle. 193 Hegel and Lotze, in different ways, have given some account of the total tendency of reality, which they called Weltlauf, and its relationship with the tendencies of individual entities. See Lotze, Metaphysic in three books. Ontology, Cosmology and Psychology (n. 5), at 456 and Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes (n. 23), at 283-291. 76 not compatible with indeterminacy at the macro level.194 Since every event occurs due to an effective nexus that consists in an immaterial, qualitative, and fallible striving, the common pattern of causation between physics, life and thinking is precisely teleology. Every effective nexus is ultimately a final nexus.195 This, however, does not eliminate the difference between animate and inanimate entities. The most fundamental difference between them is that living beings and their parts196 can start and stop motion, they can start and stop settling certain purposes (even if the organism is simple and settles the same kind of purpose every time and even if it cannot stop settling purposes altogether), while inanimate entities and their parts permanently have some tendencies that can only be stopped by a change in their own nature or by a change of a property, for example loss of weight or loss of electric charge. The property of being selfconscious and able to start and stop the settlement of purposes due to an underlying continuous activity can be called entelechy (ἐντελέχεια197, similar to élan vital198). Entelechy is the specifically biotic effective nexus. The total tendency is the total entropy. Due to the existence of living beings and of thinking, the total entropy is not merely inanimate (i. e. it includes biotic activity and thinking), which is why it would be inaccurate to simply state that life is 'against entropy', as 194 The idea that biotic and physical events would be submitted to different patterns of causation seems to be implied by Hans Jonas' conception of teleology. In Das Prinzip Verantwortung, he considers the causa efficiens as a mere force according to laws of constancy ("blosse Kraftgrössen unter Konstanzgesetzen") in contrast to final nexuses, and claims that many particular events could be sufficiently explained without final causality, and that final causality would only be necessary for the comprehension of the whole of nature, but not of some of its parts. See Jonas, Das Prinzip Verantwortung (n. 37), at 139. Also Nico Naeve claims that only the causa efficiens has a real causal role in events. See Naeve, Naturteleologie bei Aristoteles, Leibniz, Kant und Hegel (n. 16), at 82. 195 This is the reason why many philosophers have asserted that the final cause is the 'cause of the causes' (fines est causa causarum, quia est causa causalitatis in omnibus causis). See for instance Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae (n. 23), prima pars, question 5, article 2 and Thomas Aquinas, De principiis naturae (n. 173), at § 29. Another way to understand the idea that effective nexuses are final nexuses is the idea that mechanism has a teleological structure rather than vice-versa, as is expressed with Hegel's claim that relationships of purposefulness are the 'truth of the mechanism' or the 'third' between mechanism and chemism ("hat sich die Zweckbeziehung überhaupt an und für sich als die Wahrheit des Mechanismus erwiesen... Der Zweck hat sich als das Dritte zum Mechanismus und Chemismus ergeben"), Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik (1813, 1816) (n. 180), at 705, 708 (2nd part, chapter Teleologie). 196 The animate character of the parts is one of the most fundamental differences between living beings and machines. 197 The Grand Bailly Dictionnaire Grec Français defines entelechy with simplicity and precision: "activité, énérgie agissante et efficace (p. opp. à ὕλη, la matière inerte, à δύναμις, la puissance pour agir, mais qui peut ne point agir, et à ἐνέργειᾰ, l'énergie agissante mais qui peut ne point aboutir)", Anatole Bailly, Dictionnaire Grec Français (Paris: Hachette, 1935), at 688, keyword ἐντελέχεια. See also Aristotle, Metaphysik, 6th ed. (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2010), 9th book, 1050a, 1050b; Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie II (n. 21), at 174-180; Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes (n. 23), at 195-197, and Driesch, Der Vitalismus als Geschichte und als Lehre (n. 67), at 242-243. 198 Or principe vital. See Bergson, L'évolution créatrice (n. 19), at 46-47, 56, 244, 271-273. 77 is commonly assumed. Rather, life counters only some factors of physical entropy,199 for example the equalization of temperature between a body and its environment. After all, physics is what makes life possible; "had the constitution of nature only slightly differed from what it is, life – and a fortiori human or intelligent life – would have never existed"200, which does not imply, however, that physical bodies and processes would have the ultimate purpose of making life possible. In any case, since thinking and life produce effects in reality and are part of the total entropy, the total tendency of reality cannot be reduced to physical entropy. The total tendency is the total striving. The total striving is the successive instantiation of possibilities in the course of time. Every possibility is a quality because every thing and every event is the instantiation of a quality. For example: to build a car is to instantiate the quality 'car'; to cause an atomic reaction is to instantiate the quality 'atomic reaction'; to build a triangular window is to instantiate the qualities 'to build', 'window', 'triangular' etc. Qualities are general and always exist prior to and independent of their instantiation. Physical laws and genes for example consist in connections of qualities that are valid independently of their instantiation: 'water boils at 100oC and 1 atm' is a combination of the qualities 'water', 'boils', 'at', and '100oC'. Since every event is a combination of qualities, striving consists in the anticipation of a quality at t1 in order to instantiate it at t2. 201 This implies that the striving entity contains a phenomenological reference to the respective quality. Such a reference is abstract because it concerns the quality itself independently of its instantiation, which is fallible. Thus, the very structure of striving is the reason why it is correct to assert that physical bodies also have consciousness, even though they do not have entelechy, selfconsciousness and consciousness of their own consciousness and of the consciousness of other entities. This is also the reason why the search for an explanation for the 'emergence of consciousness' in the history of the universe is a pseudo-problem generated in modern science due to its materialist commitments.202 As already stated, since consciousness is an abstract 199 As Bergson puts it, "Notre vision du monde matériel est celle d'un poids qui tombe ; aucune image tirée de la matière proprement dite ne nous donnera une idée du poids qui s'élève. ... Toutes nos analyses nous montrent en effet dans la vie un effort pour remonter la pente que la matière descend", ibid., at 266, 267. 200 Jahae, Finality in Nature According to Kant and Blondel (n. 25), at 12, which is also the view of Maurice Blondel's philosophy. See ibid., at 138-140. 201 As Aquinas states, "generation is a motion to form" (generatio est modus ad formam), Thomas Aquinas, De principiis naturae (n. 173), at §6. 202 Implicit materialist commitments are present for example when consciousness is conceived as an effect of unconscious matter in the history of the universe, for example in Thomas Nagel's Mind and Cosmos. In this way, even an attempt of understanding consciousness in a way that it would not be reducible to matter can be affected by implicit materialist commitments. According to him, "even if we conclude that the materialist account of ourselves is incomplete – including its development through evolutionary theory – it remains the case that we are products of the long history of the universe since the big bang, descended from bacteria over billions of years of natural selection", Nagel, Mind & Cosmos (n. 23), at 30. Another implicit materialist commitment would be that the existence of living beings would be the reason why materialism is an incomplete understanding of nature: 78 reference to something, it is extremely simple; having a biotic nervous system is not a precondition for the existence of consciousness. In any case, for the same reason that the total tendency does not consist in physical entropy, it also does not consist in biotic tendencies such as self-maintenance, reproduction, or the pursuit of happiness or pleasure. Nevertheless, the total tendency is the good, because it is the total striving and striving is trivially for the good.203 The good consists in the instantiation of possibilities in the course of time. 'Good' and 'the instantiation of possibilities in the course of time' build together an equation, which is ultimately a definition. One side of the equation explains the other in general terms in the same way that the proposition that 'it is raining in London' has a relation of synonymy with the proposition 'water is precipitating from the clouds in the region 51o30' N, 0o7' W 57'; when it is raining in London, one can say that the former is the case because the latter is the case and vice-versa, and the same is valid for every definition and relationship of synonymy. Definitions are ultimately equated reasons, and tautological by necessity. As a consequence, one can say that a given local tendency, for example reproduction, is not what the good consists in because it is not the total tendency. Equally importantly, one can say that some value, for example happiness, is not what the good consists in because it is not the total tendency, although both reproduction and happiness are local tendencies, and depending on the circumstances, are also good. Since the idea of the good is not the definition of the good, one can compare one with the other in order to check whether the definition is true, i. e., whether they correspond to each other. One can also apply the idea or the definition to some specific action or event. Then, one can even say that some value or local tendency, say, pursuit of pleasure, is not the total tendency because it is not the good (!). If an equation or definition is true, whatever thought considers firstly, secondly, thirdly etc. is irrelevant, for it must always arrive at the same point. As we see, in the structure of tendency, being and good are present and no dualism between fact and value, between is and ought, between teleology and deontology is possible. If the teleological character of reality is acknowledged, the dichotomy of descriptive and prescriptive thinking204 is overcome: the strive for the good is at least implicitly present in "materialism is incomplete even as a theory of the physical world, since the physical world includes conscious organisms among its most striking occupants", ibid., at 45. 203 It is in this sense that Hegel states that the good is the absolute final purpose of the world (der absolute Endzweck der Welt). See Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts (n. 24), § 129. 204 This ubiquitous dichotomy in modern thinking is well described by Mackie: "For them [those who are more familiar with Aristotle and Aquinas than with Kant], the fundamental notion is that of the good for man, or the general end or goal of human life, or perhaps of a set of basic goods or primary human purposes. Moral reasoning consists partly in achieving a more adequate understanding of this basic goal (or set of goals), partly in working out the best way of pursuing and realizing it. But this approach is open to two radically different interpretations. According to one, to say that something is the good for man or the general goal of human life is 79 every true description of reality, and every claim to ethical good is at least implicitly a description of reality. The strive for the good is an instantiation of the idea of the good. There is no source outside of total being to identify the good, which is why if one claims that the good would not be part of reality,205 one irremediably falls into nihilism, for the good would, actually, not exist, and, conversely, reality would not be good. Being is better than non-being because being is the seekable in general (it is impossible to seek for non-being). Even if one wants that something does not happen, one seeks for a situation to be that does not have some properties.206 All that is one more reason why the knowledge of the most diverse fields of reality is necessary for ethics, therefore equally for law, morality, politics and religion. These can never be separate specialized fields, neither prior nor posterior to science. The monism that is implied by the conjunction of being and good is, at the same time, a holism. Now, although the good is permanently instantiated as a property of striving, it cannot be definitely or fully instantiated, because it does not consist in a concrete action or event that could take place at tn. To realize the good would mean, ad absurdum, that nothing else could and should be done afterwards and, at physical level, nothing else could happen after a certain moment tn, as there would exist nothing pursuable and, therefore, no striving anymore. After the full attainment of the good, any action and change whatsoever (assuming for the sake of just to say that this is what men in fact pursue or will find ultimately satisfying, or perhaps that it is something which, if postulated as an implicit goal, enables us to make sense of actual human strivings and to detect a coherent pattern in what would otherwise seem to be a chaotic jumble of conflicting purposes. According to the other interpretation, to say that something is the good for man or the general goal of human life is to say that this is man's proper end, that this is what he ought to be striving after, whether he in fact is or not. On the first interpretation we have a descriptive statement, on the second a normative or evaluative or prescriptive one. But this approach tends to combine the two interpretations, or to slide from one to the other, and to borrow support for what are in effect claims of the second sort from the plausibility of statements of the first sort", J. L. Mackie, Ethics. Inventing Right and Wrong (London: Penguin Books, 1990), at 46-47. 205 In Kantian dualist philosophy for example, nature does not contain what should be the case, but only what is the case, and reasons do not belong to what is the case. The existence of fallibility in nature according to principles is, therefore, not acknowledged: "Das Sollen drückt eine Art von Notwendigkeit und Verknüpfung mit Gründen aus, die in der ganzen Natur sonst nicht vorkommt. Der Verstand kann von dieser nur erkennen, was da ist oder gewesen ist oder sein wird. Es ist unmöglich, dass etwas darin anders sein soll, als es in allen diesen Zeitverhältnissen in der Tat ist; da das Sollen, wenn man bloss den Lauf der Natur vor Augen hat, hat ganz und gar keine Bedeutung", Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft (n. 8), at 534 (AA 371). 206 As Aquinas explains, "non-being is desirable, not of itself, but only relatively – i. e., inasmuch as the removal of an evil, which can only be removed by non-being, is desirable. Now the removal of an evil cannot be desirable, except so far as this evil deprives a thing of some being. Therefore being is desirable of itself; and non-being only relatively, inasmuch as one seeks some mode of being of which one cannot bear to be deprived; thus even non-being can be spoken of as relatively good. ... Life, wisdom, and the like, are desirable only so far as they are actual. Hence, in each one of them some sort of being is desired. And thus nothing can be desired except being; and consequently nothing is good except being", Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae (n. 23), prima pars, question 5, article 3. 80 argument that movement would still be possible) would make reality only worse.207 The eschatological conception of an eventual end of the world that would be implied by this will be briefly addressed below, at 2.6. 1.17 Relationship between teleology and consequentialism Most consequentialist ethics were developed out of an observation of the most basic drives of human behaviour. Many tendencies have been claimed to be the most fundamental ones: most commonly selfishness, pleasure, happiness, wealth-maximization, life-maintenance and reproduction. What consequentialist ethics does, sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly and in extremely subtle way, is to generalize a tendency and to claim it to be the supreme good or, in normative terms, the right.208 To the extent that it is claimed that such factors provide an ultimate and unified criterion of rightness for the actions of individuals, consequentialism is actually a normative type of ethic that aims at establishing an unconditional deontology.209 This type of unconditional or deontological consequentialism is not an ethical relativism. On the contrary: while normativism attempts to find an unconditional action that would always be right independently of consequences, deontological consequentialism establishes an unconditional spatiotemporal purpose (or 'state of the world') that would always be good independently of the actions that are adequate means. The consequentialist description of human nature is false because the indicated tendencies are not really fundamental. As already seen, there are many behaviours that can be neither directly nor indirectly traced back to selfishness, hedonism or eudaimonia. Not even reproduction or gene spreading are fundamental for causation and for explanation of 207 As Hegel states, "lassen wir also dieses höchste Gut als das Wesen gelten, so ist es dem Bewusstsein mit der Moralität überhaupt nicht Ernst. Denn in diesem höchsten Gute hat die Natur nicht ein anderes Gesetz, als die Moralität hat. Somit fällt das moralische Handeln selbst hinweg, denn das Handeln ist nur unter der Voraussetzung eines Negativen, das durch die Handlung aufzuheben ist. Ist aber die Natur dem Sittengesetze gemäss, so würde ja dieses durch das Handeln, durch das Aufheben des Seienden verletzt", Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes (n. 23), at 456. 208 An influential example of elaboration of (natural) law from anthropological descriptions of human nature is provided by Hobbes. In ch. XIII of the Leviathan, he departs from an anthropology of selfishness and, in ch. 14, he claims that "preservation of his own nature; that is to say, of his own life" is the "natural right" of men. See Hobbes, Leviathan (n. 141). Deontological ethics normally goes the opposite way: it identifies a natural tendency and attempts to counter it by means of moral standards. A middle way has been gone by Schopenhauer. For him, ethics must be empirical and descriptive and discover the real drives (Triebfeder) in men for moral action. Schopenhauer, Preisschrift über die Grundlage der Moral (n. 75), §13, p. 320-321. 209 See the example of Mill's deontological utilitarianism: "The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, Utility, or the Greatest Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure. ... pleasure, and freedom from pain, are the only things desirable as ends; and that all desirable things (which are as numerous in the utilitarian as in any other scheme) are desirable either for the pleasure inherent in themselves, or as means to the promotion of pleasure and the prevention of pain", Mill, Utilitarianism (n. 78), at 14. 81 individual behaviour. Certainly, it is indeed the case that living beings cannot behave in discordance with biotic principles of motion altogether, for that would mean that they would not be living beings in the first place. It would be pointless to try to find some action that does not fall under a biotic principle, in the same way that it is impossible to find a physical event that does not fall under any physical law. For every biotic behaviour, exceptions of one biotic principle are instantiations of another one. However, reproduction and gene spreading are not the most fundamental behavioural laws because they are constantly violated by individuals. Even though it is true that the behaviour of many individuals who choose not to reproduce (such as a considerable number of geniuses210 and, in contemporary feminist Western societies, adherents of the MGTOW lifestyle211) often contributes indirectly to the reproductive success of their groups and of groups with genetic similarity to their own, behaviours that are strivings either in favor of the individual or of any group or form of life fall out of this pattern.212 Here, the distinctions between striving and frequency on the one hand and between purposed and non-purposed effects on the other hand are decisive: the mere effect that an action may have as a contribution to the survival of the group (or gene spreading) does not constitute an effective nexus towards the survival of the group,213 neither at the level of consciousness nor of consciousness about consciousness. Thus, even if one could observe with a frequency of 100% that certain or all biotic actions (as an antecedent) cause the reproduction or survival of whatever individuals or groups (as a proximate or distant consequent), that would not be a law 210 Geniuses are often indifferent to reproduction and have a lower number of children than the average. About geniality as an evolutionary strategy, see Edward Dutton and Bruce G. Charlton, The Genius Famine (Buckingham: The University of Buckingham Press, 2015), at 131-143. 211 MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way) is a lifestyle for males that consists in the cultivation of typically male features and virtues and in not involving in relationships with women despite contrary social pressure. Although this lifestyle in itself is as old as humanity, its reflected and theorized cultivation became widespread in the beginning of the twenty-first century, in reaction to several social and institutional changes that happened in favor of feminist ideology throughout the previous century. 212 This calls to a moderate position in regard to the determinative role of biotic principles, as elaborated by FitzPatrick: "The moderate position, as I understand it, just involves the claim that some human psychological and behavioural phenomena must be understood partly in terms of certain genetically influenced psychological predispositions. This plausibly holds true even where cultural influences are involved, as such predispositions have plausibly had a strong influence (in conjunction with the given environment, as always) on the course of cultural history itself through influencing the behaviour of the builders of culture, thus contributing to the shaping of specific conventions, such as conventional attitudes and practices surrounding aggression or sex, which in turn further condition individual and social behaviour", FitzPatrick, Teleology and the Norms of Nature (n. 43), at 301. 213 As FitzPatrick puts in in relation to the concept of function, "a crude welfare-based view that allows anything that regularly has good consequences for the organism (or its group, etc.) to count as functional will wind up counting as functional many things that are clearly just accidents or lucky side-effects. ... A classic example involves heart sounds: As a side-effect of its functioning, the heart makes certain noises; the making of different noises thus tends to tip off physicians to potential problems: There might even be characteristic sounds indicating particular problems. The production of such sounds may thus be good for the organisms in question, but it can hardly on that account be deemed biologically functional, as if it were on a par with the pumping of blood; it is merely an incidental effect", ibid., at 234. 82 that conditions behaviour. Mere frequency does not condition behaviour and, therefore, cannot explain it. As a matter of fact, the regularity of gene spreading would provide neither explanation nor prediction if any pair of contradictory behaviours such as selfishness and altruism, homicide of competitors and respect for life, war and peace, would always count as instantiations of the same principle. Furthermore, the specific behaviour of purposeful omission of one's own gene spreading cannot be explained by the principle of enhancing the gene spreading of the group when there is no incompatibility between both endeavors, i. e., when the individual could both have offspring and contribute to the gene spreading of others, especially when it is known by the individual himself that such possibilities exist. At the molecular level, genes are themselves finalistic and fallible entities. They contain information for the production of proteins etc. and cannot determine behaviour or the existence of phenotypical features because (1) genes are the environment of other genes, thus (2) they exist in a network of reciprocal and partially opposite influence, and (3) must be decoded and activated by other structures and activities in the organism in order to have effects,214 which must be performed, naturally, by entities and processes other than genes. The Sociobiological Enlightenment does not consist in the revelation of mechanisms of biotic determinism, but in the discovery of sociobiotic principles of motion whose effects are contingent. Every level of organization within an organism has some autonomy,215 so that the overall behaviour of an organism is not determined by any of its levels of organization alone.216 Finally, because gene spreading and reproduction are not a law under which all biotic behaviour could be subsumed, they cannot define what is good in the sense of the methodological premises of consequentialism. 214 See Toepfer, Historisches Wörterbuch der Biologie (n. 43), vol. 2, keyword Gen, p. 23 and 33. See also Griffiths and Stotz: "Since diverse sequences in gene products are derived from a single DNA sequence, mechanisms for the regulation of genome expression must provide additional sequence information. The main actors of these mechanisms, proteins and functional RNAs, relay environmental information to the genome with important consequences for sequence selection, processing, and, in extreme cases, sequence creation. Since these selection and creation mechanisms determine if a given DNA sequence is able to produce a gene product, arguably the very status of a DNA sequence as a gene is dependent on its cellular and broader context. ... Genes are 'things an organism can do with its genome': they are ways in which cells utilize available template resources to create biomolecules that are needed in a specific place at a specific time. The same DNA sequence potentially leads to a large number of different gene products and the need for a rare product calls for the assembly of novel mRNA sequences. Hence the information for a product is not simply encoded in the DNA sequence but has to be read into that sequence by mechanisms that go beyond the sequence itself", Paul E. Griffiths and Karola Stotz, ʻGenes in the postgenomic eraʼ, Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics, 27 (2006), 499– 521, at 509. This article also provides a comprehensive analysis of the history of the concept of gene. 215 "Les éléments organisés qui entrent dans la composition de l'individu ont eux-mêmes une certaine individualité et revendiqueront chacun leur principe vital, si l'individu doit avoir le sien", Bergson, L'évolution créatrice (n. 19), at 46. 216 About this point, see also Thom, Esquisse d'une Sémiophysique (n. 33), at 114. 83 Nevertheless, the consequentialist method of equalizing tendency with good is accurate, with the caveat that one must identify the real tendency and that the tendency must be total. Consequentialism also correctly identifies the aggregative character of the good. Within any given quality or purpose, say, pleasure, only quantitative variations are possible: if pleasure is established as the highest good, only actions that are adequate means to that end would be right, and the greatest good would be the greatest pleasure. If society could build a pleasure monster with unlimited capacity for pleasure, the only right action of individuals would consist in those that would provide adequate means of feeding the monster as efficiently as possible, and no deviation would be rationally justifiable.217 The same is valid for eudaimonia, life,218 reproduction,219 and other goods that could be hypothetically ranked at the top of eschatology. The point here is that this is also valid for the good in general, when it is truly understood: the greatest good is the greatest instantiation of possibilities; the quantity to be increased is the fulfilment of potencies,220 meaning quantity of being, i. e., perfection. 'Power' as in the phrase 'will to power'221 and 'potential' in the sense of human capabilities are types of potency in the sense of ethical good, and their increase is an example of an ethical and real striving that is ubiquitous in human affairs. Potency is an absolute value because it cannot be limited by any other value, but only by factual impossibility, i. e., by itself. It is not 217 For this argument ad absurdum against consequentialism, see Nida-Rümelin: "Die charakteristischen Schwierigkeiten des Utilitarismus mit Fragen der Gerechtigkeit oder der Integrität der Person haben ihren Ursprung darin, dass Personen in einem bestimmten Sinne als unwesentlich für die ethische Beurteilung angesehen werden. ... Gäbe es eine ungewöhnliche Person, deren Zufriedenheit sich unbegrenzt steigern liesse, z. B. durch den Genuss einer bestimmten Droge, dann ist es unter bestimmten empirischen Bedingungen denkbar, dass die gesamte Produktivität einer Gesellschaft unter utilitaristischer Beurteilung ausschliesslich dazu verwendet werden müsste, diesem Zufriedenheitsmonster zu dienen", Julian Nida-Rümelin, Kritik des Kosequenzialismus: Studienausgabe (Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag, 1995), at 57. 218 For a claim to the quantity of life as a factual and normative consequence of evolution and natural selection, see Herbert Spencer: "We have also concluded that these last stages in the evolution of conduct are those displayed by the highest type of being, when he is forced, by increase of numbers, to live more and more in presence of his fellows", Spencer, The Data of Ethics (n. 20), at 20. Analysis and criticism of Spencer's naturalism in the sense of "quantity of life, measured in breadth as well as in length" in G. E. Moore, Principa Ethica (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1922, reprint), at 42-52 (numbers 29-35). 219 An example of consequentialism in this sense is provided by Gommer's ethics of multiplication, which attempts to connect descriptive and normative claims in relation to gene spreading based on the idea that "values, just like feelings, are mental states that are ultimately physically induced by circumstances that improve or deter the spreading of our genes", Gommer, ʻFrom genes to legal norms. Cooperation as a pivot pointʼ (n. 41), at 117. 220 A similar conception in this regard can be found in Jonas, Das Prinzip Verantwortung (n. 37), at 155-156. 221 "Wille zur Macht", as conceived by Friedrich Nietzsche, though without acknowledgment of its ethical aspect. Will to power means the will to being as it is, the self-affirmation of being, the will to the eternal and cyclical emergence and perishment of all things. With the words of Nietzsche's philosophical poetry: "Alles geht, Alles kommt zurück; ewig rollt das Rad des Seins. Alles stirbt, Alles blüht wieder auf, ewig läuft das Jahr des Seins. Alles bricht, Alles wird neu gefügt; ewig baut sich das gleiche Haus des Seins. Alles scheidet, Alles grüsst sich wieder; ewig bleibt sich treu der Ring des Seins", Friedrich Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra (Munich: DTV, 1999), at 272-273, "Nicht der Fluss ist eure Gefahr und das Ende eures Guten und 5 Bösen, ihr Weisesten: sondern jener Wille selber, der Wille zur Macht, der unerschöpfte zeugende Lebens-Wille", ibid., at 147. 84 possible to decrease the total of possibilities here and now in order to increase the total possibilities overall. 1.18 Teleological ethics Although all entities strive for the good, the good does not consist in whatever an entity naturally strives for, i. e., the good is not self-referential to any entity. An analogy may help to clarify in which sense this is meant: even if all violins were made of wood and even if all existing wood were in violins, wood would not consist in 'what violins are made of' and violins would not consist in 'what is made of wood'. Rather, both the quality 'wood' and the piece of spatial-temporal reality that instantiates this quality are prior to violins. The underlying principle is that ubiquity is not essence. The good is a quality that is instantiated in every singular seeking process rather than a product or derivation of that process.222 A quality is always prior to its instantiation, and the good is the quality par excellence, the quality as such, which is why similar notions such as 'type', 'universal', 'natural kind', 'form' and 'concept' are not complete synonymous with quality despite the core meaning that is common to all of them, namely to be a principle of individuation. All these notions individuate things and events, i. e., they are the reason why things and events are distinct from other things and events, but they have different nuances. 'Concept' for example is a principle of individuation that exists at the level of consciousness about consciousness; it is the principle of individuation as grasped by a reasoning entity, while 'natural kind' is a principle of individuation as existing independently of the thinking activity of observers. 'Quality' is, in its turn, the formulation of the principle of individuation in which the good becomes evident. The structure, tendencies or kind membership of an entity cannot determine the good because diverse entities (of the same and of different kinds) often strive for contradictory states: political parties, chess players, predator and prey, protons and electrons partially strive for contradictory states that cannot be all attained at once in the same reality. If the good would consist in what any of them strives for, i. e., if the good were what is 'good for oneself', or the attainment of the own final tendencies223, or what is 'good for the kind', the 222 It is in this sense that Leibniz has stated that "il semble que toute volonté suppose quelque raison de vouloir et que cette raison est naturellement anterieure à la volonté", G. W. Leibniz, Discours de Métaphysique, 2nd ed. (Paris: Libraire Philosophique J. Vrin, 1952), at 27. 223 As it would be the case if the good were defined as "that which satisfies a thing's natural appetites, or that which fulfils a thing's nature", Oderberg, Moral theory (n. 117), at 37. According to Oderberg, "goodness is explicated in terms of what satisfies the nature of an individual human being", ibid., at 53. This kind of selfreferential conception of the good is regulary based on a purely immanentist conception of life according to which the most fundamental drives of organisms would be self-mantenance, for example in Oderberg, Real Essentialism (n. 164), at 196. This kind of self-referential conception of the good is also widespread in Aristotelian approaches. See for example the discussion on Aristotelian approches that attempt to make a 85 good would consist at the same time in X and non-X, which is impossible because of an insuperable contradiction, as some instances would be contradictory with what is being instantiated. If a lion catches a deer, this would be at the same time good because it is a satisfaction of the lion's needs and non-good because it is a dissatisfaction of the deer's needs. The same is valid for all oppositions between entities and kinds. Even though it is possible for two contrary properties or events to be instances of the same, none of two contradictory instances can be in contradiction with what is being instantiated. For example: suppose that a violin instantiates the quality 'tuned'; a tuned violin can be big or small, and both are equally compatible with 'tuned'. However, a tuned violin cannot instantiate the property 'untuned' at the same time, because the instantiation would be contradictory with what is being instantiated. In the same way, if the good is defined as the satisfaction of an entity's or kind's tendencies, many contradictory actions, purposes and states of the world would be indeed compatible with the definition, but 'dissatisfaction' could not logically be among them. If a singular satisfaction precisely consists in another entity's dissatisfaction, the very same would be good and non-good (or neither good nor non-good).224 Since all striving entities interact with others all the time in contradictory directions, no singular state of the world, no singular action or purpose would be in accordance or discordance with the good; no definition would be given in the first place, i. e., the good itself would not be individuated. The priority of quality over its instantiation and the univocal character of the good imply ultimately that the good is not self-referential to any entity or kind, but only for reality as a whole. In other words, the good is transcendent to every single entity and kind, but immanent within the whole of reality. Consequently, the good does not consist in what is good for men. Unlike consequentialism that is a theory of human action, teleology in the sense of a discipline is a non-antropocentric and non-biocentric theory of reality. Since humans are, nevertheless, part of reality, they also participate in the good. derivation of normativity from internal organization and from the structure of agency in Matthew Silverstein, ʻTeleology and Normativityʼ, in Russ Shafer-Landau, ed., Oxford studies in metaethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 214–240. According to Silverstein, "we can extract genuinely normative conclusions from an account of the teleological structure of agency-so long as that account is paired with a reductive metanormative theory linking reasons for action with the aim or function of practical reasoning. I have proposed such a theory: reasons for action are considerations that figure in successful practical reasoning", ibid., at 238. In his account, normativity is derived from the teleological structure of the specifically human reasoning, a derivation that falls, however, into the problems of self-reference addressed above. 224 This self-contradiction is present for example in Norbert Hoerster's attempt of grounding morality on the common interests among all human beings. According to him, all individuals have certain interests that are "equally directed" (gleichgerichtet), such as survival for example, which would be the fundament of the prohibition of homicide. The contradiction becomes evident when the survival of one individual requires the homicide of the other. Then, an attempt of homicide would be justified because it is an attempt of survival, but at the same time it would be unjustified because it is a violation of someone else's attempt of survival. At the end, it remains evident that individuals actually do not have "equally directed" interests. See Hoerster, Wie lässt sich Moral begründen? (n. 167), at 100. 86 If the good is neither self-referential to singular individuals or groups nor consists in an action or norm that would be unconditionally right under every circumstance (1.7), the good is inegalitarian, i. e., it is not something that everyone could do in equal amount or by equal means. It can also not consist in the mere compatibilization of individual or collective liberties or interests. Not even an egalitarian rule according to which the good would be the greatest possible development of individual potentials could be in conformity with the good as the greatest possible instantiation of possibilities: although diverse possibilities such as geniality, victory and arts can only be attained by means of the development of potentials of individuals, potentials often collide with each other and need sometimes coordination, sometimes incentive, sometimes repression. Latter is the case of diverse forms of crime and mass destruction of life because they are potentials that often diminish the totality of potentials. Even if music for example is good, the development of the greatest possible musical potential in every individual would collide with the development of their own potentials in other regards, with the potentials of their groups and of reality in general. If the good is, then, particularist in relation to groups and societies and inegalitarian in relation to individuals, it cannot consist in a standard; it does not consist in what all or most human beings practice or should practice nor in an eventual convention or common belief agreed or imposed in the public sphere.225 Because inclinations, capabilities and intelligence are naturally different among individuals and groups,226 the good as a standard would result in impossible duties if the standard is set higher than the lowest individual or group, and in mediocracy if it is set lower than the highest ones. Ethical guidance grounded on everyday life,227 on ordinary people228 and on precepts that are accessible and addressed to everyone229 225 Normative ethics is, on the contrary, commonly committed to the principle that only publicly justifiable statements and reasons could be ethically correct. See for example Kutschera, Grundlagen der Ethik (n. 108), at 80 and John Rawls: "a conception of right is a set of principles, general in form and universal in application, that is to be publicly recognized as a final court of appeal for ordering the conflicting claims of moral persons", Rawls, A Theory of Justice (n. 139), at 117. 226 About natural differences of capabilities and intelligence between individuals and groups, see Richard Lynn, Race Differences in Intelligence. An Evolutionary Analysis (Augusta, GA: Washington Summit Publishers, 2006); Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen, Intelligence: A Unifying Construct for the Social Sciences (London: Ulster Institute for Social Research, 2012); Helmuth Nyborg, ed., Race and Sex Differences in Intelligence and Personality (London: Ulster Institute for Social Research, 2013); Richard Lynn and David Becker, The Intelligence of Nations (London: Ulster Institute for Social Research, 2019); 227 Ethical theories committed to the Anglo-Saxon worldview almost always focus on ordinary life, ordinary people, ordinary language and ordinary moral reasoning as the fundament of ethics. According to Oderberg for example, natural law theory would have to focus on everyday moral problems that confront most people most of the time. See David Oderberg, ʻThe Structure and Content of the Goodʼ, in Timothy Chappell and David Oderberg, eds., Human Values: New Essays on Ethics and Natural Law (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 127–165, at 161. 228 This is a common focus of contemporary normative ethics. According to Kutschera for example, the criteria of right moral action should be simple and easy to learn. See Kutschera, Grundlagen der Ethik (n. 108), at 80-81. Also according to Schopenhauer's deontological ethics, complicated philosophical reflections are not able to provide any fundament for ethics for the simple reason that the fundament of ethics should be equally accessible 87 would necessarily result in decrease of possibilities. Although standards are adequate means for coordination and incentive of creative potentials, for repression of destructive potentials and elevation of those who are below the average, the strict proscription of deviation from some standard would reduce the potentials of those who are above it. For example: it is good that a society develops orthographical norms, but not good that the standardization of language is advanced to the extent that literary creativity is damaged, for literary excellence consists precisely in what is above the rule. In the same way, it is good that an unhealthy person seeks normal health and that a society develops health standards, but it is not good that a person in extremely good medical condition seeks standard health. To become normal is a progress for fat, ugly, dumb, sick and rough people, but a degeneration for those who are wonderful, healthy, genius, or rich. When different levels of perfection are at stake, the virtue is not in the middle. The underlying principle in all these instances is the primacy of quality over equality and of ethics over morality and the law. Normativity as the establishment of moral, legal and political standards is and has always been a means for ethical ends. Because the good is aggregative and transcendent to singular entities and kinds, reality and ethics are hierarchical. High and low are determined by the amount of potency (or power, potential). The amount of potency is the amount of qualities that an entity or a state of the world instantiates and causes. For example: an intelligent and educated person normally instantiates more qualities because he has more consciousness and consciousness is the abstract reference to qualities; certain effects that are dependent on technology and on processing complex information can only be caused by the activity of intelligence. The lesser for all: "Künstliche Begriffs-Kombinationen jener Art können also, wenn wir die Sache ernstlich nehmen, nimmermehr den wahren Antrieb zur Gerechtigkeit und Menschenliebe enthalten. Dieser muss vielmehr etwas sein, das wenig Nachdenken, noch weniger Abstraktion und Kombination erfordert, das, von der Verstandesbildung unabhängig, Jeden, auch den rohesten Menschen, anspreche, bloss auf anschaulicher Auffassung beruhe und unmittelbar aus der Realität der Dinge sich aufdringe", Schopenhauer, Preisschrift über die Grundlage der Moral (n. 75), §12, p. 313. 229 Such as Kant's categorical imperative, which establishes universality (i. e., conformity to a general law that is valid for everyone) as a criterion for moral correctness: "handle nur nach derjenigen Maxime, durch die du zugleich wollen kannst, dass sie ein allgemeines Gesetz werde", Kant, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (n. 77), at 51 (BA 52). Another example is John Rawls (Kantian) theory of justice, which considers universality as a "formal constraint of the concept of right". According to him, "principles are to be universal in application. They must hold for everyone in virtue of their being moral persons", Rawls, A Theory of Justice (n. 139), at 114. Modern conceptions of natural law are also commonly committed to egalitarianism. Political thinker Leo Strauss for example assumes egalitarian premises in his 'natural right' theory. According to him, the possibility of agreement among normal men is a condition of existence of natural right: "All natural right doctrines claim that the fundamentals of justice are, in principle, accessible to man as man. They presuppose, therefore, that a most important truth can, in principle, be accessible to man as man. ... Not all men, but only all normal men, agree as regards sounds, colors, and the like. Accordingly, the existence of natural right requires merely that all normal men should agree as regards the principles of justice. The lack of universal agreement can be explained by a corruption of human nature in those who ignore the true principles, a corruption which, for obvious reasons, is more frequent and more effective than the corresponding corruption in regard to the perception of sensible qualities", Strauss, Natural Right and History (n. 97), at 28, 98, although many points of his criticism on historicism and conventionalism are sound. 88 developed the spiritual qualities of an entity are, the more it instantiates and causes only what is common with its peers and with other entities of biotic or material kind, and the fewer possibilities are instantiated overall. In relation to man, this means that the orientation toward materialist 'ideals'230 such as self-satisfaction in relation to food, sex and feelings leads to the instantiation of exclusively or preferentially those possibilities that are common to other animals and that are anyway already instantiated by them. The ethical good defined as those potencialities that a pig is capable of, to put it the polemic terms of the Swine Philosophy, would result in imbestiamento231. Then, low leveled equality would prevail over quality. Imbestiamento is the way of degeneration of spirits by becoming bestial or vegetative. It is parallel to the way of degeneration of animals and vegetals by becoming inanimate (through death). Although the aspiration to a bestial Dasein is itself a possibility that is embedded in an eschatological chain of utility for forstering further possibilities, its philosophical elaboration as an ethical system rests on a materialist misconception of nature. It is because of real and ubiquitous qualitative hierarchy that ethical thinking cannot dispensate antithetical categories such as elevation and degeneration, perfection and corruption, evolution and involution, progress and regress, superior and inferior, aristocracy and people. Teleology is an ethics of power and expansion rather than self-satisfaction and self-limitation. 230 Note the self-contradiction of the phrase 'materialist ideal'. The tendency of the spirit of negating itself will be addressed below, at 2.7. 231 As elaborated and criticized at length by Julius Evola, Gli uomini e le rovine, 3rd ed. (Rome: Giovanni Volpe, 1972), at 29-43. 89 Part Two: The Epistemology of Teleology 2.1 Anti-realism about teleology The immaterial, qualitative and fallible character of teleology has always caused skepticism about its existence outside of the human mind, outside of the mind of observers who think with teleological concepts and believe that their thinking would correspond with real processes. Indeed, how could a fallible 'principle' of motion exist outside of human (or other superior animals') thinking? If 'being', 'nature', 'reality' and 'the world' are the totality of things and facts, of what is the case, in which possible sense could fallibility 'exist'? The astonishment (stupor) with the organization of nature232 with such features led thinkers in all epochs, most frequently in modernity, to make claims such as (1) that causation, though not necessarily frequency or correlation, would only be a way of human judgment about nature;233 (2) that it is the subject that creates the being as being, so as it creates the tree as tree,234 and (3) that it would be scientific practice that ascribes to the living being a typological unity,235 so that all characterizations (Bestimmungen) of a thing as such would be only creations of subjects; they would not exist in the things themselves.236 In this way, teleology has been 232 Spinoza, Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata (n. 32), at 152. 233 For this claim after an extensive analysis of Kant's conception of teleology, see Simon, ʻTeleologisches Reflektieren und kausales Bestimmenʼ (n. 32), at 384. For a conception of laws of nature as a human postulate of necessity after inductive reasoning about regularity of individual instances, see Schrödinger, Was ist ein Naturgesetz? (n. 13), at 9-10. Schrödinger's book 'What is a law of nature?' is an example of analysis that is normally ascribed to the field of natural sciences but that, after a closer regard, actually provides analysis of psychic, cultural and historical factors of our worldview in regard to nature. He does not focus on laws, causality or mechanics, but on our reasoning and our concepts about laws, causes and mechanisms, and on how our reasoning has evolved throughout the history of science. In short, his contribution belongs more to epistemology and sociology of science than to ontology. In the same path, positivist thinker Franz von Kutschera conceives of laws of nature as 'propositions about nature' (Sätze über die Natur) and analyzes thereby human judgments about nature instead of nature itself. For him, laws of nature are universal propositions that are accepted as true by the scientific community. See Kutschera, Wissenschaftstheorie II (n. 8), at 329-345. For a claim to causation, necessity and laws of nature as projections of human understanding onto nature, see also Spaemann and Löw: "in der mechanischen Welt gibt es weder Ursachen noch Ziele unabhängig vom Beobachter. Jede Isolierung eines Ereignisses, das mit irgendwelchen anderen in einem gesetzmässigen Zusammenhang steht, setzt bereits ein dieses Ereignis beobachtendes Subjekt voraus. ... wir setzen nicht nur das Ende, sondern auch den Anfang des Kausalnexus", Spaemann and Löw, Natürliche Ziele (n. 180), at 202. See also 209-210. 234 Jean-Paul Sartre, Wahrheit und Existenz (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rohwolt, 1998), at 46-47. 235 Matthias Gutmann, Leben und Form: Zur technischen Form des Wissens vom Lebendigen (Wiesbaden: Springer, 2017), at 258. 236 As held for example by Toepfer from a biological perspective, which is in contrast with some realist ideas about function defended in the same book: "Denn von einem erkenntniskritischen Standpunkt aus geurteilt, kann es ein »Dingsein der Dinge«, sofern diese besondere, und nicht nur als Komplemente zu ihrer begrifflichen Bestimmung angenommene »Dinge an sich« sein sollen, selbstverständlich nicht unabhängig von einem Erkenntnissubjekt geben. Erkenntniskritisch gesehen, gehen alle Bestimmungs-funktionen von dem Subjekt aus, und können nicht in dem Objekt selbst liegen", Toepfer, Zweckbegriff und Organismus (n. 22), at 30. This idea is similar to the division of properties in primary and secondary ones, whereas the primary properties would be part of the thing in itself and the secondary properties would be projections of subjects: "The modern mind-body problem arose out of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, as a direct result of the concept of objective physical reality that drove that revolution. Galileo and Descartes made the crucial conceptual division 90 claimed to be only heuristics,237 an anthropomorphism,238 a way of consideration (Betrachtung239), a projection of features of human agency onto nature,240 a projection (imaginandi modos241) of human conceptions of utility, a means of filling gaps in knowledge by proposing that physical science should provide a mathematically precise quantitative description of an external reality extended in space and time, a description limited to spatiotemporal primary qualities such as shape, size, and motion, and to laws governing the relations among them. Subjective appearances, on the other hand-how this physical world appears to human perception-were assigned to the mind, and the secondary qualities like color, sound, and smell were to be analyzed relationally, in terms of the power of physical things, acting on the senses, to produce those appearances in the minds of observers", Thomas Nagel, Mind & Cosmos (n. 23), at 35-36. See also Weizsäcker: "Das 17. Jahrhundert hat uns noch einen ganz anderen Ansatz zur Erklärung des Erfolgs der Physik hinterlassen, das mechanische Weltbild. Nach ihm sind die Gegenstände der Natur an sich nichts anderes als Körper. Diese Körper haben gewisse objektive Eigenschaften, die man auch ihre primären Qualitäten nennt: Ausdehnung, Undurchdringlichkeit, Festigkeit, vielleicht Masse. Sie zeigen zweitens gewisse sekundäre Qualitäten, die eigentlich nur subjektiv sind, wie Farbe und Geruch", Weizsäcker, Die Einheit der Natur (n. 2), at 116. 237 For example Hempel: "One of the reasons for the perseverance of teleological considerations in biology probably lies in the fruitfulness of the teleological approach as a heuristic device: Biological research which was psychologically motivated by a teleological orientation, by an interest in purposes in nature, has frequently led to important results which can be stated in nonteleological terminology and which increase our knowledge of the causal connections between biological phenomena", Hempel, Studies in the Logic of Explanation (n. 9), at 256. Also Mark Bedau recognizes the utility of including value and goodness in the teleological analisis of nature, but he asserts that these methods would not correspond with real vital forces in nature. Mark Bedau, ʻWhere's the Good in Teleology?ʼ, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 52, 4 (1992), 781–806. See also Schaffner, ʻFunktionsanalyse und teleologische Erklärungʼ (n. 43), at 70-71. For the claim to merely heuristic teleology from the sociological point of view, see Niklas Luhmann, Zweckbegriff und Systemrationalität. Über die Funktion von Zwecken in sozialen Systemen, 2. Aufl. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977), at 166. Also René Descartes has considered teleology to be a "denominatio a cogitatione meâ" in René Descartes, Meditationes de prima philosophia: Méditations métaphysiques, 4th ed. (Paris: J. Vrin, 1953), at 82, marginal notes 67-68/84-85. For teleology as heuristics, see also Kant's position about teleology as a principle of judgment in Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft (n. 33), at 1187, 1202, 1218 (AA 05: 387-388, 398, 411). Teleology as heuristics has also been held by Konrad Lorenz: "Die finale Bedeutung der menschlichen Kausalforschung liegt somit darin, dass sie uns als wichtigster Regulationsfaktor die Mittel in die Hand gibt, Naturvorgänge zu beherrschen", Konrad Lorenz, Induktive und teleologische Psychologie (1942): in: Über tierisches und menschliches Verhalten (Munich: Piper, 1966), at 387. 238 Hempel, Studies in the Logic of Explanation (n. 9), at 256; Spranger, ʻZum Problem der Teleologieʼ (n. 180), at 403. 239 Kelsen, Hauptprobleme der Staatsrechtslehre (n. 32), at 63. This is also Immanuel Kant's position, who claims that teleology is a judgment (Beurteilung) and analogical with causality rather than a form of causality: "Gleichwohl wird die teleologische Beurteilung, wenigstens problematisch, mit Recht zur Naturforschung gezogen; aber nur um sie nach der Analogie mit der Kausalität nach Zwecken unter Prinzipien der Beobachtung und Naturforschung zu bringen, ohne sich anzumassen sie danach zu erklären. Sie gehört also zur reflektierenden, nicht zur bestimmenden Urteilskraft. ... Der Begriff von Verbindungen und Formen der Natur nach Zwecken ist doch wenigstens ein Prinzip mehr, die Erscheinungen derselben unter Regeln zu bringen, wo die Gesetze der Kausalität nach dem blossen Mechanismus derselben nicht zulangen", Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft (n. 33), at 1156 (AA 05: 360). About Kant's position on this issue, see Otfried Höffe, Immanuel Kant, 2nd ed. (Munich: Beck, 1988), at 278-279 and Rudolf Eisler, Wörterbuch der philosophischen Begriffe, 4th ed. (Berlin: Mittler & Sohn, 1927), at 679-680. Kant's conception of teleology corresponds to an idea of 'teleology without telos' ("Zweckmässigkeit ohne Zweck") according to an interpretation by György Lukács, Zur Ontologie des gesellschaftlichen Seins (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1984), at 19. 240 Spinoza, Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata (n. 32), at 152. Although Kantian legal theorist Hans Kelsen holds that organic activity can be considered in a teleological way, he considers the purpose (Zweck) that produces real causal effects in reality as the product of human mind: "Die psychologische Entwicklung des Zweckbegriffes zeigt als Ursprung desselben das Bewusstsein, welches der Mensch von seinem eigenen w i l l e n s mässigen Handeln hat. ... Dieses Ziel unseres Wollens, diese Vorstellung eines künftigen, von uns zu bewirkenden Erfolges ist der Zweck ...", Kelsen, Hauptprobleme der Staatsrechtslehre (n. 32), at 57. In this sense and also from the point of view of Kantian jurisprudence, see Leal, Ziele und Autorität (n. 98), at 48. 241 Spinoza, Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata (n. 32), at 154. 91 (ignorantiae asylum242) and an inevitable construction of humans in their experience of nature,243 so that organic activity and subject (observer) would be 'coextensive'.244 Due to its fallible character, teleology has been claimed to be an ascription of meaning,245 a specifically linguistic judgment,246 our normative way of dealing with organisms rather than a description247, and even that the organic structures would be determined by scientific models rather than be a real data of nature.248 While effective nexuses would be real, final nexuses would be subjective constructions.249 In these ways, teleology would be a kind of normativity rather than vice-versa. The consequence for ethics would be that, if all teleological elements so far identified within physics, biology and society are, actually, only mental states of 242 Ibid., at 152. 243 Kant for example assumes the premise that nature would not have intelligence ("Natur, welche wir nicht als intelligentes Wesen annehmen") and that the attribution of purposes to natural objects would be bad reasoning ("Vernünftelei"). Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft (n. 33), at 1155 (AA 05: 359-360). 244 As claimed by Naeve, Naturteleologie bei Aristoteles, Leibniz, Kant und Hegel (n. 16), at 418-434, in reference to Hans Jonas' hermeneutic theory. 245 For example: "Para mostrarnos lo que debe ser, la naturaleza tendría que manifestar paradójicamente lo que no es. A la idea de una naturaleza susceptible de error, de equivocación, de disfunción, le acompaña la idea de corregir esa naturaleza, restaurando a nivel teórico lo que, en su inmediatez, manifiesta erróneamente. Pero esa duplicación de la naturaleza nos llevaría de regreso a la caverna de Platón, es decir, a la ilusión metafísica por excelencia", Molina Pérez, ʻObjetividad versus inteligibilidad de las funciones biológicas. La paradoja normativa y el altismo epistemológico de las ciencias modernasʼ (n. 190), at 42. "Die Funktionsbezüglichkeit der Abgrenzung von Strukturen und die unabsehbare Iterierbarkeit der Modellierung hat ihren Grund aber nicht zunächst in einer So-Verfasstheit von Lebewesen als vielmehr in dem präskriptiven Charakter der funktionalen Strukturierung selber: Der methodische Anfang bestand nämlich in der Aufforderung, Lebewesen als funktionale Einheiten zu verstehen und entsprechend zu strukturieren. Es handelte sich also nicht um eine empirische Feststellung, der zufolge etwa gelte, dass alle Lebewesen funktionale Einheiten seien. So aufgefasst ergäben sich u. a. die bekannten Probleme der Dysfunktionalität, die ja für den Biologen ebenso gegenwärtig sind wie die Entsprechungen für den Mediziner beim Menschen. Da aber die Aufforderung zur funktionalen Strukturierung in den methodischen Anfang eingeht, können auch dysfunktionale Verhältnisse nach denselben physikalischen, chemischen oder technischen Gesetzen beschrieben werden; anders gesagt folgen Funktion wie Dysfunktion denselben Gesetzen. Mit der Unterlassung der Aufforderung kommt also entweder gar keine biologische Forschung zustande, oder es treten die angezeigten methodologischen Probleme bei der Explikation von „Funktion" auf. ... Funktionale Beschreibungen und Strukturierungen, die für die Erklärung von Leistungen und Merkmalen von Lebewesen notwendig sind, ergeben sich erst im Zusammenhang einer entsprechenden wissenschaftlichen Praxis", Gutmann, ʻÜber 'Funktion'ʼ (n. 32), at 350, 354. 246 Toepfer, Zweckbegriff und Organismus (n. 22), at 425-426. For this claim in a Kantian sense, see Simon, ʻTeleologisches Reflektieren und kausales Bestimmenʼ (n. 32), at 386. 247 Gutmann, Leben und Form (n. 235), at 257. 248 From a hermeneutical point of view "liegen also Funktionen nicht einfach vor oder könnten durch schlichtes Beschreiben „gefunden" oder „herausgegriffen" werden – sie sind vielmehr Resultat der (prozedierenden) Beschreibung und Strukturierung von Lebewesen als funktionalen Einheiten unter der Leitung technischer, physikalischer oder chemischer Gesetzmässigkeiten. ... Treffen diese Überlegungen zu und orientiert sich die Funktionszuschreibung an der in den methodischen Anfang eingehenden Beschreibung des jeweiligen Lebewesens in Hinblick auf die jeweilige Fragestellung, dann ist auch die Identifikation von Strukturen wesentlich von der Art und Durchführung der funktionalen Zuschreibung abhängig. Was also als Struktur anzusprechen ist, kann nicht einfach dem Lebewesen selber abgesehen werden, sondern ist im Zusammenhang der Fragestellung, der in die Modellierung eingehenden Parameter und der genutzten Mittel jeweils spezifisch zu ermitteln", Gutmann, ʻÜber 'Funktion'ʼ (n. 32), at 348, 349. 249 According to Kant's philosophy for example, the nexus finalis is intentional and would be, therefore, not ontological, which is why only the nexus effectivus would provide a proper scientific explanation. See Hein van den Berg, Kant on Proper Science: Biology in the Critical Philosophy and the Opus postumum cover (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2014), at 98-100. Also Schelling has held that in nature there is only mechanical causality and that purposefulness would be only appearance. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, System des transzendentalen Idealismus (Leipzig: Philipp Reclam, 1800, ed. 1979), at 255. 92 observers, the good would be in last instance defined by the norm that humans mentally give to themselves in order to think about nature and culture.250 Normativity would, thus, determine, eliminate or prevail over teleology. If any objectivity in ethics is accepted at all, here again it is the right that would prevail over the good. However, there is a fundamental ambivalence in this kind of thinking. On the one hand, both in natural sciences and in humanities there is a constant talk about facts that are prior to and independent of cognition of anyone in order to be the case, such as physical laws, the biotic activity of cells and inflation in an economy (which can be the case before anyone notices it), but, on the other hand, after being asked about the ontological status of what is being said, escape into subjectivism is a very common answer, with no concern about the compatibility of both views.251 By subjectivism I mean any form of relativization of the ontological and observer-independent status of entities and facts, so that at least one part of the described things or events is meant to be a subjective construction and, therefore, only existing in the mind of the observer or in the culture of some collective, even if in all minds and all collectives. The modalities of this constructivism vary according to (1) the kind of separation, i. e., what is meant to belong to the side of the object and what to the side of the 250 As is known, such norm is called in Kant's dualistic system of thought 'heautonomy' (Heautonomie). See Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft (n. 33), at 95 (AA 05:186). 251 Immanuel Kant, Wolfgang Smith and Richard von Wright provide especially clear examples of this ubiquitous tendency in modern thought. For Richard von Wright, laws of nature are valid "semper et ubique", they "depend upon facts of nature" and are not "creations of the mind". However, in the very same article he states that physical laws exist only in "our understanding" and that they are kinds of "propositional instruments which we use for predicting and explaining contingent necessities", Wright, Truth, Knowledge, and Modality (n. 7), at 144, 147. According to Wolfgang Smith, "so far as objectivity and observer-independence are concerned, therefore, the case for mass and for color stand equally well; both attributes are in fact objective and observerindependent in the strongest conceivable sense". However, in the very same book he states that "nothing in the world 'simply exists', but to exist is precisely to interact with other things – including ultimately observers" and that "a 'purely objective universe' – a universe, let us say, in which there are no observers at all – can indeed be conceived, but only on condition that it contain no 'secondary attributes' (such as redness)", Wolfgang Smith, The Quantum Enigma: Finding the Hidden Key (San Rafael: Angelico Press / Sophia Perenis, 2011), at 13-15, 13, 13-14 respectively. Kant states, on the one hand, that organisms have an internal teleology and cannot be understood in exclusively mechanical terms, but, on the other hand, he states that every internal teleology is a product of an external teleology given to it by some external mind, which is, according to him, not an acceptable presupposition in relation to natural organisms. About the dualities of Kant's position about teleology, see A. Gambarotto: "... he ended up confusing the conceptual distinction between internal and external purposiveness, interpreting the former as the latter, i.e. understanding teleology as solely the result of subjective intention. ... we find passages in which Kant insists on the need to distinguish organized beings from machines, chiefly in § 65, but these passages ultimately fail to take teleology, understood as internal purposiveness, seriously enough to admit self-organization as a legitimate object of scientific inquiry. Consequently, Kant argues that, since mechanical laws cannot explain organic processes, the only possible alternative is the design argument, which he nonetheless finds untenable within the framework of proper natural science. In this respect, Kant's main concern is to distance himself from Intelligent Design, insisting that purposiveness is not a constitutive feature of organized beings but only a regulative principle inherent to our power of judgment. As a result, he categorically denies the possibility of scientifically explaining the purposive characteristics displayed by organized beings. In this sense, Kant lays the foundations for overcoming both mechanical and technical teleological understandings of vital organization but is ultimately incapable of moving beyond this conceptual space", Andrea Gambarotto, ʻAn Unstable Middle Position. The Kantian Account of Teleology and its Controversial Legacyʼ, Estudos Kantianos, 5, 2 (2017), 91–104, at 101. 93 subject, and according to (2) the way and cause of the construction, i. e., whether the construction is a projection, a deliberated heuristic reasoning for reasons of utility, or a necessary way of thinking due to the nature of the human mind, and whether it is caused by instincts, emotions, brain processes, religion, preconceptions of economic class,252 and/or other natural and social factors. Multiple combinations are possible and were indeed held throughout the history of philosophy. The most common factors that are claimed to exist only on the side of the subject are: qualities (types, kinds, universals, forms, ideas), causation (physical laws and causal nexuses253), teleology (final causes), normativity, and the spirit (Geist, νοῦς). The most common ones believed to be on the side of ontology are matter and energy. These forms of dualism of subject and object have always provoked questions such as whether and how the mind could emerge from matter,254 whether and how there could be causation between matter and spirit, whether everything that exists can be reduced to physical entities or processes, and how qualities could be reduced into quantity (of non-qualitative matter), and (qualitative) movement into a continuum. 2.2 The ontology and teleology of motion and construction There are at least three reasons why constructivism and dualism about teleology are wrong. First, the same things and processes that are claimed to be constructions are present in the act of constructing. If the identity of the subject (his quality) and purposes such as those present in the functioning of his own organs are claimed to be only existing as his mental state, and since identity, the functioning of organs and mental states exist simultaneously, the subject would have to have them in his consciousness all at once and at all times of his existence, which is evidently not the case. Of course, the argument could go on and state that these 252 For Engels and Marx, for example, the reality of individuals consists in the reality of their material production, and their thinking and identity is sufficiently caused by material processes that take place in them: "Es sind die wirklichen Individuen, ihre Aktion und ihre materiellen Lebensbedingungen, sowohl die vorgefundenen wie die durch ihre eigne Aktion erzeugten. Diese Voraussetzungen sind also auf rein empirischem Wege konstatierbar. ... Was sie sind, fällt also zusammen mit ihrer Produktion, sowohl damit, was sie produzieren, als auch damit, wie sie produzieren. Was die Individuen also sind, das hängt ab von den materiellen Bedingungen ihrer Produktion. ... Das Vorstellen, Denken, der geistige Verkehr der Menschen erscheinen hier noch als direkter Ausfluss ihres materiellen Verhaltens. Von der geistigen Produktion, wie sie in der Sprache der Politik, der Gesetze, der Moral, der Religion, Metaphysik usw. eines Volkes sich darstellt, gilt dasselbe", Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, Die deutsche Ideologie (1932): in: Werke, Band 3 (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1969), at 20, 21. 253 As Naeve points out, "schon bei Malebranche und Hume, aber auch noch bei Russel und Stegmüller gerät der Gedanke der Kausalverusachung überhaupt (für welche die Wirkursache als paradigmatisch gilt) unter den Verdacht des Anthropomorphismus. Hume hatte die kausale Verknüpfung als psychologisches Phänomen, als einen mentalen Akt der Gewöhnung, aufgefasst, dem kein objektiver, bewusstseinsunabhängiger Ereigniszusammenhang nach kausalen Gesetzen entspricht (zumindest kann man einen solchen nach Hume nicht gerechtfertigt behaupten)", Naeve, Naturteleologie bei Aristoteles, Leibniz, Kant und Hegel (n. 16), at 111-112. 254 An in-depth account of these questions under the premises of metaphysical dualism has been provided by Schelling, System des transzendentalen Idealismus (n. 249), at 10-12, 256-257. 94 qualities and purposes are, indeed, not the case as long as the subject does not construct them. This would be, however, self-contradictory, because 'construction' requires for exist someone or something, thus a qualitative identity, that makes the construction, something that exists prior and during the construction, which is precisely the subject. Construction is itself an act that departs from a quality to another one, from the non-existence of something into its existence; it is also a purposeful act with the end of causing a result which is precisely what is being constructed. In short, the activity of construction is not constructed at the same time and in the same way that what is being constructed. Construction is itself a quality and takes place within time; it is also ontology, and those who make constructions are also part of ontology. This is one way to show that subject is an ontological category, and that 'I am' is an ontological statement. Existence does not precede quality. Therefore, an account of construction without qualitative, immaterial and teleological factors would be required for the coherence of the claim that these factors would be only mental states of constructors and only results of their activity. The same is valid for the causes of the construction, since a cause must take place before its effect. If the construction has a cause such as brain processes, genes, emotions, interpretation or culture, neither the cause of the construction nor causation in general can be a construction that is part of the explanandum. Now, both causation in general and things and events prior to the construction have and are themselves qualities; before the construction, living beings had already functioning organs, the particles in their bodies had already centrifugal tendencies, attraction was already fallible etc. Therefore, to assert that these factors would exist exclusively as mental states of constructors would incur in a chronological contradiction if it is also stated that the constructions also apply to what existed before the construction. Then, something at time t1 would start at t2 to exist or to have some property at t1. For example, if it is claimed that (1) dinosaurs had cells and organs with functions and that (2) functions are, actually, mental states of humans, one makes a reference to the past ("enoncé ancestral"255) that requires for its coherence either realism about qualitative, immaterial and teleological factors (which would be incompatible with thesis 2) or, again, an anti-realist account of everything involved in it that excludes such factors (which would be incompatible with thesis 1).256 The same is valid for all kinds of past facts, including psychic, social, economic, and normative ones. By the way, this is why it is important to distinguish between thing and object when dealing with the boundaries of ontology and 255 Quentin Meillassoux, Après la finitude. Essai sur la nécessité de la contingence (Paris: Seuil, 2006), at 30. 256 As a matter of fact, "there would be something strange to the point of incoherence about taking scientific naturalism as the ground for antirealism about natural science", Thomas Nagel, Mind & Cosmos (n. 23), at 75. 95 epistemology: while all objects are things, not all things are objects; since subject and object are relational ideas, a thing is only an object if it is considered by some subject that has a spatial-temporal position. Since all present and past things do not exist only if, when or because they are being considered by some subject, it would be mistaken to believe that they would always be objects. Furthermore, construction, as well as every other event in nature, is involved with motion, and motion is always certain (bestimmt) in the sense that it instantiates certain qualities rather than others. At every moment, everything that is in motion, say, a stone, a bacterium, or a galaxy, has a certain position in time and space (and that is why the distinction between things and between events is possible at all). Every position corresponds to a certain quality, not least because 'position' is itself a quality. Now, there is no possibility for a thing to get from a position to another one either (1) in an exclusively quantitative (i. e., nonqualitative) manner or (2) by skipping positions and, therefore, qualities, otherwise the entity that is moving would be nowhere during its movement (and to be somewhere is already to have a position); it would disappear while leaving the point of departure and appear again in the targeted position. Therefore, movement is not 'continuous' in the sense of being outside of qualities, i. e., in the sense of non-qualified nature, but it is, indeed, continuous in the sense of a series of successive and qualitatively distinct events spatial-temporally connected by effective nexuses. In this way, the idea of movement as a change of states excludes the nominalist idea of 'continuous' in the sense of 'out-of-type'. The movement of a certain entity from A to D presupposes that A and D are different places, thus different qualities, and that the entity first occupies A, then B, then C, then D. If the entity occupies A, B, C and D at once or no position at all, no motion takes place. The same is the case if the entity occupies simultaneously A and B, then simultaneously B and C, then simultaneously C and D, for, then, there would be no change of position or state, since the entity would be, actually, at the same time at origin A and target D, and no motion would really take place. Therefore, the existence of motion entails the existence of qualities, which is why qualities are prior to the thinking activity of constructors and also belong to nature.257 This is also the sense in which the expression natural kinds is appropriate for their denomination. Constructivism of qualities would require, therefore, absence of motion, which is incompatible with construction. 257 This extended notion of nature corresponds to the prevailing conception before the emergence of the modern materialist worldview. For an overview of the historical transition from a complete to a reduced concept of nature and how it relates to natural law over history, see Michel Villey, La formation de la pensée juridique moderne, 2nd ed. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2013), at 190-201. 96 2.3 The impossibility of reduction or elimination of teleology Second, a reductionist or eliminativist account of teleology always fails when teleological notions are replaced by non-teleological vocabulary with implicit teleological meaning. Although teleology is traditionally associated with terms such as 'purpose', 'goal' or 'end', it also embraces many other categories that contain implicitly the idea of purpose, for example 'error'. An error is an action that does not fulfil a certain purpose. Thus, error is itself a teleological category and cannot be used without teleological presuppositions, although such a 'deflationary' use is often attempted, for example when it is claimed that mutations contain 'errors' of replication. Other examples of such categories are, besides 'function'258, 'degree of directive organization'259, 'control', 'advantage', 'propensity', and (genetic) 'information'. If one claims on the one hand that "there is no need to think of design or purpose or directedness"260, but on the other hand one uses implicit teleological terminology all the way down in descriptions of biotic processes, for example that genetic copying processes are not "perfect", that "mistakes" and "errors" happen thereby,261 or that organisms have "desired" states262, the anti-realist caveat that these would be only metaphors263 does not eliminate the question of why that alleged metaphors are adequate, necessary or only convenient at all for the understanding of biotic activity, and why it is indispensable to talk about organisms at least "as if" they were motivated by a purpose.264 Equally, if one states on the one hand that nature "is not goal-directed"265, but on the other hand one uses terms such as "biological purpose"266, "need for"267, "function" of norms268, or that organisms "have to" do 258 See for example the teleological notions of "function" and "essential to" that appear in attempts of reduction to non-teleological terminology by Hempel: "In certain cases, however, assertions about the purposes of biological characteristics may be translatable into statements in non-teleological terminology which assert that those characteristics function in a specific manner which is essential to keeping the organism alive or to preserving the species", Hempel, Studies in the Logic of Explanation (n. 9), at 256. 259 Or "degree of persistence", phrases used by Ernest Nagel in attempt to reduce teleology into non-teleological variables in Nagel, The Structure of Science (n. 8), at 417: "The prima facie distinctive character of so-called 'goal-directed' or teleological systems is thus formulated by the stated conditions for a directively organized system." 260 Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (n. 29), at 17. 261 Ibid., at 20, 39, 56. About Dawkins' pretendedly metaphorical use of teleological vocabulary, see FitzPatrick, Teleology and the Norms of Nature (n. 43), at 229-233. 262 Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (n. 29), at 65. 263 Ibid., at 28. 264 Ibid., at 64. See also Charles Darwin's constant use of the expressions "advantage" (p. 148), "struggle for existence" (51), "profitable to the community" (149), "desired end" (150), "useful direction" (153), "struggle for life" (50), and the idea that "instincts are not always absolutely perfect and are liable to mistakes" (153). Quotations from Charles Robert Darwin, On the Origins of Species. By means of natural selection or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life, Dover Thrift ed. (Mineola: Dover Publications, Inc, 2006). 265 Gommer, ʻFrom genes to legal norms. Cooperation as a pivot pointʼ (n. 41), at 118. 266 Ibid., at 119. 267 Ibid., at 118, 126. 268 Ibid., at 136. 97 something269 such as to drink in order to stay healthy in order to spread the genes,270 such a chain of immediate and ultimate causes of organic behaviour271 would implicitly and structurally correspond to the hierarchy of near and far ends that is traditionally called eschatology. In this vein, even if one finds historical or social causes that have led to the use of teleological vocabulary in science and that are not a justification of its use, its persistence in science after the identification of that factors would remain unexplained.272 The same is the case in physics, where attempts of reduction of teleology always fail when implicitly teleological notions such as 'vector', 'attraction', 'tendency' and "endeavor"273 are used, whereby not even an eventually successful reduction of biological teleology into physics would remain free of teleology. The reason is that the attempt to eliminate the spirit from reality by means of reducing it to non-qualitative matter necessarily goes along with equipping matter with spiritual qualities such as memory (if the matter that constitutes a squirrel's body remembers the way back to the matter that constitutes the nest, matter has the spiritual property of memory), which is traditionally called hylozoism274 and is, actually, a failed reduction, not least because physical laws are themselves immaterial, qualitative and general principles that are saved in the memory of reality (νοῦς) for repeated 269 Ibid., at 138. On the bases of an anti-teleological conception of nature, Gommer makes even the political and Abrahamic statement that "we need to expand the in-group to a global community... so we may grow and multiply", ibid., at 138. About Abrahamism in science and philosophy, see below, 2.5. 270 Ibid., at 131, italic marks by myself. 271 As stated by ibid., at 131, with the claim that nature is "ethically neutral" (118). 272 "... the pervasiveness of teleological concepts and language in even our most scientifically informed discourse about living things strongly suggests that natural teleology is not merely a holdover from an outmoded metaphysics or a creationist picture, but something deeply bound up with the nature of living things", FitzPatrick, Teleology and the Norms of Nature (n. 43), at 22. See the discussion about this point also in Naeve, Naturteleologie bei Aristoteles, Leibniz, Kant und Hegel (n. 16), at 408-410. About the impossibility of elimination of final causes by accidental causes according to Aristotle, see ibid., at 57-60. 273 Isaac Newton for example has comprehended attraction as an "endeavor" (conatus) of bodies to approach each other: "I use the word 'attraction' here in a general sense for any endeavor whatever of bodies to approach one another, whether that endeavor occurs as a result of the action of the bodies either drawn toward one another or acting on one another by means of spirits emitted or whether it arises from the action of aether or of air or of any medium whatsoever – whether corporeal or incorporeal – in any way impelling toward one another the bodies floating therein", Newton, Principia, 1687 (n. 6), at 86. The original Latin term conatus means the own tendency of some entity to perform some movement. Original passage: "Vocem attractionis hic generaliter usurpo pro corporum conatu quocunque accedendi ad invicem: sive conatus iste fiat ab actione corporum, vel se mutuo petentium, vel per spiritus emissos se invicem agitantium; sive is ab actione aetheris, aut aeris, mediive cujuscunque seu corporei seu incorporei oriatur corpora innatantia in se invicem utcunque impellentis", Isaac Newton, Principia (New York: MacMillan, 1871), at 188. 274 For terminology, see Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft (n. 33), at 1179, 1194 (AA 374-375, 392). See also Weizsäcker's explanation: "Sagt der Monist (Materialist) nur, wie es Hobbes gegen Descartes tat, es sei nicht einzusehen, warum die Materie nicht solle denken können, so hat er mit dieser Formel, soweit sie geht, wohl recht. Fasst man nämlich den Materiebegriff zunächst unbestimmt genug, so wird man nicht verbieten können, ihm auch das Denkvermögen als Merkmal zuzuschreiben. Aber damit hat man im Grunde das mechanische Weltbild gesprengt; man hat der Materie neben Ausdehnung und Bewegung eine weitere, völlig andersartige Eigenschaft zugeschrieben. Gerade das Grossartige und Fruchtbare des mechanischen Weltbilds ist damit geopfert, nämlich sein Anspruch, das Prinzip der Einheit der Natur explizit angeben zu können", Weizsäcker, Die Einheit der Natur (n. 2), at 142. 98 instantiation, as seen above in part 1.1. In short, the price for materialization of all reality is the vitalization of matter. Of course, still, one could make descriptions of nature without any explicit mention of spiritual factors, which is always possible, since what to describe in an event is a matter of choice according to culture and usefulness, and, after all, everything can be correctly, though not completely, described without some of its parts. Thus, in relation to some selected practical purposes, one indeed does not 'need' teleology. But usefulness and observers' choices are not ontological objections. "To him who looks on the world reductively, the world looks reductively back"275. The claim that a reduction is possible, but that present-day science has not yet been able to show how, would be a dogmatic assumption that assumes something as true and postpones the proof to indefinite future.276 Furthermore, attempts to reduce teleology into non-teleological notions always fail when purpose is confounded with consequence and teleology is defined as a necessary or frequent connection between antecedent and consequent, so that fallibility and single-case functions and strivings are eliminated. One could for example attempt to reduce the idea that "the function of the leukocytes in human blood is to defend the body against foreign microorganisms" into the non-teleological statement that "unless human blood contains a sufficient number of leukocytes, certain normal activities of the body are impaired".277 However, such a translation would fail because teleology is contingent causation. The function of an entity at t1 in relation to a state at t2 does not consist in the frequency of 275 Robert Brandom, ʻReason, Genealogy, and the Hermeneutics of Magnanimityʼ, available at http://www.pitt.edu/~brandom/downloads/RGHM%20%2012-11-21%20a.docx (last visited 11 July 2018), at 4. In the same vein, Hegel has stated that "Es gibt keinen Helden für den Kammerdiener; nicht aber weil jener nicht ein Held, sondern weil dieser – der Kammerdiener ist, mit welchem jener nicht als Held, sondern als Essender, Trinkender, sich Kleidender, überhaupt in der Einzelheit des Bedürfnisses und der Vorstellung zu tun hat", Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes (n. 23), at 489, as Brandom analyzes in his above-mentioned article from the point of view of philosophy of language. 276 As in Hempel's positivism with the assumption that 'emergent' (in this case, macro and functional) properties would be a reflex of a present lack of knowledge that could be filled by future empirical research. Hempel, Studies in the Logic of Explanation (n. 9), at 261-264. Another example of dogmatism is provided by the scientists Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, who seem to know already that macro properties emerge from micro, but how exactly it occurs would be a matter of detail to be shown in the future: "That might sound strange, but there are many instances in science in which a large assemblage appears to behave in a manner that is different from the behaviour of its individual components. The responses of a single neuron hardly portend those of the human brain, nor does knowing about a water molecule tell you much about the behaviour of a lake. In the case of quantum physics, physicists are still working to figure out the details of how Newton's laws emerge from the quantum domain. What we do know is that the components of all objects obey the laws of quantum physics, and the Newtonian laws are a good approximation for describing the way macroscopic objects made of those quantum components behave", Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design: New Answers to the Ultimate Questions of Life (London: Bantam Press, 2010), at 67-68. 277 As attempted by Ernest Nagel, The Structure of Science (n. 8), at 405. Another example would be the translation of the statement "The function of chlorophyll in plants is to enable plants to perform photosynthesis (i.e., to form starch from carbon dioxide and water in the presence of sunlight)" into "when supplied with water, carbon dioxide, and sunlight, plants produce starch; if plants have no chlorophyll, even though they have water, carbon dioxide, and sunlight, they do not manufacture starch; hence, plants contain chlorophyll", ibid., at 403. About Nagel's and E. Hempel's efforts, see Toepfer, Historisches Wörterbuch der Biologie (n. 43), keyword 'Funktion', at 650-652. 99 successes that the same entity or other entities of the same kind achieve in other cases,278 or even in the eventual success that the entity may achieve in the case under consideration. For single-case functions, this would mean that a property of something at t1 would depend on some event at t2, which would incur in a kind of retroactive constructivism of conditions, for the consequent would have to happen first in order the function to be real, i. e., an entity's property at t1 would start to be functional only after the success at t2. The origin of the confusion between purpose and consequence and of the attempt to reduce the former to the latter is the elimination of immaterial quality and fallibility from reality, so that reality would ultimately consist only in successes (i. e., positivism279), and the only real nexuses would be those between successes. On the contrary, and concretely to the example: each single leukocyte has the function of protecting the body against microorganisms even if this function does not succeed in a single case, in most or in all cases. Function consists in the final nexus between an entity at t1 and a quality at t1 that is purposed 278 This confusion based on a reduction of teleology to frequency correlations between antecedent and consequent is committed for example by Ernest Nagel. He states that "despite the prima facie distinctive character of teleological (or functional) explanations, we shall first argue that they can be reformulated, without loss of asserted content, to take the form of nonteleological ones, so that in an important sense teleological and nonteleological explanations are equivalent. ... More generally, a teleological statement of the form 'The function of A in a system S with organization C is to enable S in environment E to engage in process P' can be formulated more explicitly by: Every system S with organization C and in environment E engages in process P; if S with organization C and in environment E does not have A, then S does not engage in P; hence, S with organization C must have A. ... In the light of this analysis, therefore, a teleological explanation in biology indicates the consequences for a given biological system of a constituent part or process; the equivalent nonteleological formulation of this explanation, on the other hand, states some of the conditions (sometimes, but not invariably, in physicochemical terms) under which the system persists in its characteristic organization and activities", Nagel, The Structure of Science (n. 8), at 403, 405. Similar misconceptions of teleology can be found where one denies existence to single-case biotic effective nexuses (often called pejoratively 'vital forces'), for, then, only probabilistic relationships between antecedent and consequent can logically remain as the core of teleology. Mark Bedau for example classifies single-case biotic effective nexuses as unscientific and states that "teleology in biology has sometimes been underwritten by things like vital forces, and biological science has no place for unscientific, ad hoc entities or forces. There would be good grounds for worrying about any form of biological teleology that involved any of these factors. However, teleological explanation in biology need have none of these defects. For example, teleological explanations underwritten by (hypothetical) good-producing selection processes would not involve deism, the argument from design, a Garden of Eden, a global purpose, preordained purposes, or vital forces", Bedau, ʻWhere's the Good in Teleology?ʼ (n. 237), at 803. Thereby, his analysis is committed to the dualist tradition of thought that separates reality and good. For example: the goodness-states caused by functional entities are conceived in a non-ethical sense (ibid., 791). It is, however, unintelligible and self-contradictory to conceive of goodness in non-ethical sense. 279 This is the most general definition of positivism and the underlying idea in all its instances. Compare for example logical positivism (Circle of Vienna), sociological positivism and legal positivism. 'Success' is sometimes called in the German Theory of Science "das unmittelbar wirklich Beobachtete" (and similar expressions). See for example the positivist conception of Schrödinger, Was ist ein Naturgesetz? (n. 13), at 21. Positivism can let open the ontological question of causality (i. e., whether there is necessity or chance in nature itself) precisely because it focuses exclusively on statistical relations between observable successes. See the example of Schrödinger's positivism in ibid., at 11 and of John Stuart Mill: "I premise, then, that when in the course of this inquiry I speak of the cause of any phenomenon, I do not mean a cause which is not itself a phenomenon; I make no research into the ultimate or ontological cause of anything. ... The Law of Causation, the recognition of which is the main pillar of inductive science, is but the familiar truth that invariability of succession is found by observation to obtain between every fact in nature and some other fact which has preceded it, independently of all considerations respecting the ultimate mode of production of phenomena, and of every other question regarding the nature of 'Things in themselves'", Mill, A System of Logic (n. 8), at 213. 100 to be instantiated at t2. The nexus is, thus, between single entity and quality rather than between single entity and other entities or between different states of the same entity. 2.4 The etiological bias Third, although it is always possible to indicate non-teleological causes of teleological entities and processes, such an indication does not provide an objection to the teleological character of those entities and processes because teleology does not consist in etiology, i. e., in the manner how the respective entity or process has come about, although, of course, every entity and process does have an etiology. This distinction is frequently obscured by the ambiguous use the terms 'why', 'because', 'cause' and 'reason', all of which can refer to etiological, typological and teleological kinds of questions. To ask what at t1 brought about something at t2 (etiology) is not the same as to ask which quality the thing (or a thing's property such as its function) at t2 is an instantiation of (type). In order to know the latter, it is not necessary to know the former. In epistemology, the relationship of priority of type over explanation can be called gnoseological primacy, i. e., what one has to know first in order to know something else. In order to explain the spatial-temporal coming about of a thing or property, one has to know first which thing or property is being explained. For example, in order to know that it is raining in London, it is not necessary to know the causes of this particular rain or of rains in general, but in order to explain why it is raining in London, one has to know what a rain is and that it is really raining or has rained. In the same way, in order to know what a heart is and which function it has, one does not have to know natural history or the theory of evolution and natural selection,280 but in order to know what caused existing hearts and why the heart has been naturally selected over history, one has to know what it is. However elementary the distinction between origin, type and goal is and however compatible they always are and logically must be, the idea that origin would determine, eliminate or prevail over type and goal is widespread in scientific thinking, most frequently in modernity. It can be called etiological bias. The etiological bias is present wherever it is claimed that the far or near historical origin of an entity or property would be the most important aspect that should be known in order to understand its existence and meaning. In physics, the etiological bias underlies the idea that qualities, especially macro things and immaterial ones such as consciousness, would emerge or supervene from quantity of 280 About the necessity of a theory of function for a theory of evolution rather than a theory of evolution for a theory of function, see Toepfer, Zweckbegriff und Organismus (n. 22), at 308-311. 101 micro matter or micro processes,281 whereas micro would, depending on the theory, either determine or eliminate macro,282 which characterizes 'reduction' in literal sense. The etiological bias in physics also underlies the widespread idea that previous things and events, with or without the addition of general physical laws, would be sufficient for the causation of some posterior thing or event, so that the whole history would be a necessary consequence of the the Primeval Causes.283 The consequence is the need for a grounding moment in the history of the universe that could sufficiently explain all other events. This epistemically unjustified need is commonly stanched by the big bang theory. In biology, the etiological bias is present in the idea that the existence of a previous and external function causing the existence of some structure would be the reason why the structure has a function, i. e., teleology would be a matter of etiology (!). In this way, if some non-functional cause of structures is found, for example mutations as allegedly non-functional causes of a new property of cells or organisms, that would be incompatible with the ontological functionality of the cell, or, conversely: in order to claim that the cell is 281 Many thinkers from many points of view have recognized the problems of reduction of quality into quantity. René Guénon has provided the most in-depth analysis of the relationships between quantity and quality in René Guénon, Le règne de la quantité et les signes des temps (Paris: Gallimard, 2015, ed. 1945). As he puts it, "la quantité, réduite à elle-même, n'est qu'une 'présupposition' necessaire, mais qui n'explique rien; c'est bien une base, mais ce n'est rien d'autre, et l'on ne doit pas oublier que la base, par definition même, est ce qui est situé au niveau le plus inférieur; aussi la reduction de la qualité à la quantité n'est-elle pas autre chose au fond que cette 'réduction du superieur à l'inférieur' par laquelle certains one voulu très justement caractériser le matérialisme: pretender faire sortir le 'plus' du 'moin', c'est bien là, en effet, une des plus typique de toutes ales aberrations modernes!", ibid., at 30. Analysis and criticism of this view also in Naeve, Naturteleologie bei Aristoteles, Leibniz, Kant und Hegel (n. 16), at 390-467. 282 As Hempel critically puts it, "The kinetic theory of heat, the atomic theory of matter, the electromagnetic as well as the quantum theory of light, and the gene theory of heredity are examples of this method. It is often felt that only the discovery of a micro-theory affords real scientific understanding of any type of phenomenon, because only it gives us insight into the inner mechanism of the phenomenon, so to speak", Hempel, Studies in the Logic of Explanation (n. 9), at 259. 283 According to Abrahamist thinker Stuart Mill, who was also an adherent of egalitarian and deontological consequentialism, "the state of the whole universe at any instant we believe to be the consequence of its state at the previous instant; insomuch that one who knew all the agents which exist at the present moment, their collocation in space, and all their properties, in other words, the laws of their agency, could predict the whole subsequent history of the universe, at least unless some new volition of a power capable of controlling the universe should supervene", Mill, A System of Logic (n. 8), at 226-227. Such a purely etiological comprehension of causality is widespread in science and popular culture. See critical discussion in Lotze, System der Philosophie (n. 3), at 431. In this context, the analytical distinction between a tergo and a fronte kinds of cause is relevant: "Folgt man den Vorschlägen von A. Grünbaum und N. Rescher, so reduziert sich der Gegensatz [zwischen Mechanismus und Teleologie] auf den Unterschied zwischen a-tergo-Erklärungen und a-fronteErklärungen. Die ersteren entsprechen der mechanistischen Betrachtungsweise: Sind alle Ereignisse ausschliesslich durch das "determiniert", was ihnen vorangeht, so muss auch alles in der Weise erklärbar sein, dass man auf Früheres bezug nimmt. Die zweite Klasse von Erklärungen entspricht der teleologischen Betrachtungsweise der "Determiniertheit" und damit der Erklärbarkeit des Gegenwärtigen auf Grund des Künftigen", Wolfgang Stegmüller, Probleme und Resultate der Wissenschaftstheorie und Analytischen Philosophie: Vol. 1 (Erklärung Begründung Kausalität), Part E, 2nd ed. (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer, 1983), at 647-648. 102 functional, one would have to find functionality in the mutation that gave rise to it.284 Clearly, the wings of flying dinosaurs and of bats arose historically out of a prolongation of their fingers; in general, the structure of vertebrates arose out of rhythmic repetitions (which does not mean that acquired properties in the course of an individual's life would have been transmitted genetically to its offspring). However, although the organisms are adapted because of the structure, the structure is adaptive and has been more frequently replicated because of the behaviour, so that constancy and change in (teleological) behaviour are prior to the constancy and change in the structure. Thus, an exclusive focus on the functions of organic structures rather than on the function of activity and behaviour dismisses the actual level at which teleology is most evidently real and relevant.285 Furthermore, the etiological bias in biology also accounts for the widespread idea that, if the case that the genes of a living being are completely deciphered, the 'mechanism' that contains the general rules that govern the activity of organisms would be discovered. In Christian theology, even claims to teleology of biotic structures are frequently accompanied by the claim that its existence depends on the structure having been the 'creation' of an 'intelligent design', i. e., teleology would be inscribed into the structure from outside rather than being its own property, which bears the consequence that the focus of the attention is shifted toward the origin of the universe, so that present teleology would depend on previous events in order to exist and on a theory of the origin of the universe in order to be known and proven. In its secularized version, the etiological bias leads to nihilism if reason, purpose and good are understood as being necessarily external to nature, while the existence of the transcendental entity that could account for their existence outside of nature, namely god, is denied, which bears the consequence that reality would be in itself purposeless and groundless. In epistemology, the etiological bias is what one traditionally calls genetic fallacy: the idea that the causal origin of a claim could be a confirmation or refutation. This pattern of argumentation is frequently used in politics and ethics in order to undermine people's beliefs about ethical truth without addressing them directly, without presenting an own and positive 284 Thomas Nagel for example recognizes that some teleological account of the evolution of life is needed due to the failure of reductions of the mind into matter, but the focus of his reflection remains on the etiology of life, i. e., on mutations and origin, rather than on the very structure of motion, behaviour and normativity. The "essential character" of a complete understanding of nature that includes the mind would be, according to him, to "explain the appearance of life, consciousness, reason, and knowledge". See Nagel, Mind & Cosmos (n. 23), at 7-10, 32, 44, 50-51, i. e., it would be a "historical account of how such systems arose in the universe from its beginnings", ibid., at 54. For an analysis about several problems of etiological explanations of functions, see Bedau, ʻWhere's the Good in Teleology?ʼ (n. 237), at 783-787. 285 An example of the exclusive focus on the function of structures while discussing function in Biology and Philosophy can be seen in Gutmann, ʻÜber 'Funktion'ʼ (n. 32), where the author, notwithstanding, rightly acknowledges the independence of functional explanations from evolutionary explanations. 103 conception of ethics that could defeat them. Depending on the field and methods, these approaches exist in the variants of expressivism, emotivism, psychologism, biologism, sociologism and others. The pejorative note that sounds with these terms fits to their fallacious character. The common idea is that the way in which a proposition comes about or the properties of those who make a claim would be either positively or negatively relevant for truth-value. In this way, truth would be a matter of etiology rather than of correspondence with reality, and origin would either determine or eliminate reference. In jurisprudence, etiological thinking permeates the ideas of social contract, constitutionalism and legal positivism: what the law is and, by consequence, which acts are lawful, would be determined by their origin (its "pedigree"286), be it the foundational act of a community,287 be it an assembly, the legislator and courts or social recognition (social positivism288). In relativist moral philosophy, the etiological non sequitur is present in the idea of evolution as a 'Midas principle': if some entity or property has any accidental cause throughout evolution, it would be itself accidental and only have accidental effects. Concretely, this would mean that necessary moral truth would not exist or not be accessible by those whose cognitive apparatus has arisen out of a history of natural selection.289 As we see, the focus on etiological questions rather than questions of essence and teleology have been pervasive for the understanding of the deep structure of reality, although it has had, as already mentioned, also some advantages, especially for empirical discoveries. In any case, it remains doubtful whether even an eventual discovery of the origin of life in exclusively materialistic terms could have any relevance whatsoever for the actual meaning of human existence, most particularly for the motivation of forward-oriented behaviour in ethics, law and politics. Due to the immaterial and qualitative character of physical laws, of genes, 286 In the context of criticism of legal positivism, this term has been frequently used by Ronald Dworkin, for example in Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1978), at 7. 287 The symbolic authority from foundational acts such as mythological narratives and constitutions are sometimes seen to be 'unavoidable' for the justification institutions and obligations. See for example Thomas Vesting's position in reference to Jewish law in Thomas Vesting, Legal Theory and the Media of Law (Cheltenham UK: Elgar, 2018), at 252-253. 288 Social positivism is the view that the law consists in what is socially recognized as law. This view has been elaborated for example by H. L. A. Hart, The Concept of Law, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994) Explanation and critique of social positivism in my article Ferreira Leite de Paula, ʻOn the Unities of Law, Practical Reason, and Right. Foundations of the Unity of Reason Beyond the Plurality of Knowledge and of Normative Ordersʼ (n. 103), at 72-79. 289 For example: "Street points out that if the responses and faculties that generate our value judgments are in significant part the result of natural selection, there is no reason to expect that they would lead us to be able to detect any mind-independent moral or evaluative truth, if there is such a thing", Nagel, Mind & Cosmos (n. 23), at 107. On the contrary, as Nagel states, "A Darwinian account of the origin of our basic desires and aversions, by contrast, has no implications as to whether they are generally reliable perceptions of judgment-independent value, or whether indeed there is such a thing", ibid., at 109. 104 functions and consciousness, such a discovery would not even be a confirmation of the materialistic world view or a refutation of theism. 2.5 Some historical origins of anti-teleologism One can speculate about the etiology of the etiological bias. There is a possibility that it is profoundly embedded in Abrahamic thinking, which is present to different degrees and in differing versions in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and consequently also in the modern moral and political ideologies that have historically emerged from these religions. The rationale is that it is fundamental to Abrahamic thinking to base rightness on origin, namely in the correspondence of the action with Yahweh's will and laws such as the Ten Commandments,290 and that even nature follows laws, the laws of the creator.291 Abrahamic thinking also takes a dualist position regarding the world and heaven, and thus regarding matter and spirit, creation and creator, so that goodness, ideality and purpose are regarded as not being own properties of nature, but are ultimately ascribed to it from outside by the divine subject at the beginning of time292 or, in its secularized version, inscribed by a mundane subject (constructivism).293 Indeed, the idea that nature follows laws rather than purposes, and is 'governed by laws of necessity' rather than being organized according to essence, act and 290 "Jewish law is linked to the medium of writing in a wholly singular way, inasmuch as scribality is constitutive of its authority and validity. Not unlike the early Greek city codes, it is put into effect via a foundational act: Yahweh delivers the Ten Commandments to Moses on Mount Sinai and establishes a covenant with the Hebrew people. The Torah – following a long process of Jewish law being transcribed and canonized – builds on this founding event as a binding and conclusive foundational text. ... The law, i. e. the prescriptions spelled out in the Torah's 613 commandments and prohibitions, casts off all authority that existed before writing in order to enclose such authority entirely within itself. ... Because the law as a 'pre-scription' infiltrates and occupies the soul of the individual in an utterly singular way, the psychological architecture of the Hebrew people is thereby given a much stronger normative (rule-driven) foundation than is the case in other early writing cultures", Vesting, Legal Theory and the Media of Law (n. 287), at 250-251. 291 See for example Isaac Newton's Abrahamic thinking that accompanied the elaboration of the laws that are nowadays known as 'Newton's laws': "This most elegant system of the sun, planets, and comets could not have arisen without the design and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being. ... He rules all things, not as the world soul but as the lord of all. And because of his dominion he is called Lord God Pantokrator [i.e. universal ruler]", Newton, Principia, 1687 (n. 6), at 90. See also the Abrahamism in Hobbes' political thinking and definition of law: "law is properly called someone's imperative for others. Laws of nature are properly called as such if god is the legislator", Hobbes, Leviathan (n. 141), at 106 (chapter XV). 292 Jewish-Christian theology have often conceived of nature without immanent good and purpose due to the idea that nature could only have a meaning and purpose in relation to men, since it would be gods creation for men. About Christian faith as a motive for underestimating teleology in nature, see Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik (1813, 1816) (n. 180), at 704 (2nd part, chapter Teleologie): "Je mehr das teleologische Prinzip mit dem Begriffe eines ausserweltlichen Verstandes zusammengehängt und insofern von der Frömmigkeit begünstigt wurde, desto mehr schien es sich von der wahren Naturforschung zu entfernen, welche die Eigenschaften der Natur nicht als fremdartige, sondern als immanente Bestimmtheiten erkennen will und nur solches Erkennen als ein Begreifen gelten lässt". 293 Kantian philosophy has considerably contributed to the adaptation of the Christian conception of divine law into secularized thinking: "Es ist vor allem die Kantische Philosophie, die scheinbar erneut zu einer Annäherung von theoretischem und praktischem Gesetz führt. Nach ihr ist der Verstand der 'Gesetzgeber' der Natur, der ihr ihre Gesetze 'vorschreibt'; die Gesetze 'verschaffen den Erscheinungen ihre Gesetzmässigkeit'", Spiegelberg, Gesetz und Sittengesetz (n. 7), at 127. 105 potency, has been to a large extent imported from theology into science and ethics.294 It is therefore a sign of ignorance of history, and rather ironic, to conceive of nature as 'obeying' and being 'governed' by laws and to see this as the epitome of atheist science,295 or to conceive of unconditional deontology, in contrast to teleology, as a secular ethics.296 Law, in its physical and ethical variants, is no less metaphysical than purpose. Now, although Abrahamism also have a teleological component (namely the upcoming reign of the Last Judgment), its teleology or, more precisely, its eschatology, expresses necessity rather than fallibility; it is the announcement of a transcendent and inevitable approach rather than an immanent and ubiquitous order. It is dualist about good and salvation in the 'world to come' and the suffering here on Earth, rather than being a pantheist monism that unifies substance and form in all entities of a single reality, and it points toward a destiny, a definite end arising from a foundational act of revelation, rather than an eternal cycle of means to ends that are themselves means to other ends and so on ad infinitum. In this way, Abrahamic teleology consists in the infallible fulfilment of Yahweh's Word297 and is the precise opposite of the contingency of events and of duties. This can be observed in Western culture wherever it is claimed that some past or present state of the world 'requires' or 'leads by necessity' to another one in a completely new and irreversible, thus not cyclic manner, such as Marxist thinking about a classless society to come, or the idea that ancient knowledge would be progressively overcome by scientific revolutions298, as well as in the liberal eschatology that 294 As John Stuart Mill states, "but the expression law of nature has generally been employed with a sort of tacit reference to the original sense of the word law, namely, the expression of the will of a superior", Mill, A System of Logic (n. 8), at 207. There is much bibliography about this import. See for example Schopenhauer, Preisschrift über die Grundlage der Moral (n. 75), at 264; Wolfgang Kullmann, Naturgesetz in der Vorstellung der Antike, besonders der Stoa: Eine Begriffsuntersuchung (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2010), at 11-12. An indepth analysis about the secularization of the concept of law of nature has been provided by Spiegelberg, Gesetz und Sittengesetz (n. 7), especially at 91-95 and 202-372. See also and Thomas Vesting, Rechtstheorie. Ein Studienbuch (Munich: Beck, 2007), at marginal note 88. 295 As Spiegelberg states, "Es ist offenbar eine von der des praktischen Gesetzes abgeleitete Bedeutung, in der man vom theoretischen Gesetz, vor allem vom Naturgesetz spricht. Die Brücke für diesen Bedeutungsübergang bildeten dabei religiös-theologische Anschauungsweisen. Sie sind inzwischen gänzlich in Vergessenheit geraten. Sonst wäre es nicht möglich gewesen, dass man im vergangenen Jahrhundert, besonders von atheistischer Seite, die Naturgesetze sogar als Argument gegen die Existenz Gottes und einer göttlichen Weltschöpfung und Weltlenkung ausgespielt hat", Spiegelberg, Gesetz und Sittengesetz (n. 7), at 91. 296 For example: one of the origins of the Protestant focus on unconditional duties is the fact that the Reformators, in contrast to Catholic ethics and institutional practices, often have denied the capability of humans to establish moral duties and to judge the value of consequences of the actions, which is why the duties stated in the Gospel should be followed more closely and with a lesser degree of freedom from the text. See Anselm Reiner, ʻDie Debatte um Deontologie und Teleologie in der evangelischen Ethik. Ein Sachstandsberichtʼ, in Adrian Holderegger and Werner Wolbert, eds., Deontologie – Teleologie: Normtheoretische Grundlagen in der Diskussion (Freiburg/Vienna: Herder, 2012), at 96-97. 297 As the Christian Bible states in John 1:1, in the beginning was the word and the word was god. 298 For an example of interpretation of the history of science from the point of view of revolutionary mentality, see Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd ed. (Chicago, 1996). The revolutionary mentality is ubiquitous in modern science. See for example Thomas Nagel's claim that the solution of the mind-body problem would not be possible with traditional concepts and that a "major conceptual revolution" would be 106 claims that liberal democracy is either factually or deontologically the 'end of history', and in diverse modern conceptions of political progressivism such as the revolutionary and nationalist ideologies of the 19th century which replaced feudal and monarchic rule in Europe. That progressive, law-based eschatology in diverse epochs has probably contributed to the "bias in favour of 'law'"299 or legalism300 in science and ethics, and is metaphysically and historically related to the etiological bias. In any case, as long as etiology determines the world view, natural teleology must remain unacknowledged. 2.6 Belief in materialism as an evolutionary strategy The attempts of reduction of quality and teleology into quantitative material relations are parts of an all-encompassing, therefore metaphysical, worldview that can be called materialism. To a certain extent, such attempts are understandable. After all, scientific thinking requires a certain degree of disanthropomorphization301 in order not to run the risk of projections and wishful thinking. While laws and purposes, as every immaterial cause, are highly susceptible of being projected where they are actually not real, matter is the unprojectable entity par excellence: in order to (rightly or mistakenly) ascribe a purpose to an entity, thinking suffices, while matter cannot be put there by the pure thought of observers. Matter is also infallible in its property of occupying the space that it occupies and in resisting occupation of the same space by other body (for if it would not resist, it would be the same portion of matter). Hence, reality as composed exclusively by matter would be only what 'really' is the case, since required for that. Nagel, Mind & Cosmos (n. 23), at 42. The idea that revolution would be the 'driving force of history' (die treibende Kraft der Geschichte) is a Marxist conception that has been used in many fields of knowledge to make interpretations of their own history. For Engel's and Marx' elaborations of this idea, see Engels and Marx, Die deutsche Ideologie (1932) (n. 252), at 38. 299 Wolfgang Smith criticizes this bias from the perspective of quantum physics in Smith, The Quantum Enigma (n. 251), at 101. 300 "Legismus" as defined by Herbert Spiegelberg: "Unter Legismus ist dabei zu verstehen jede Überbetonung der Rolle des Gesetzes, gleichgültig auf welchem Gebiete sie vorkommt und in welcher der zahlreichen, noch so wenig geschiedenen Bedeutungen das Wort Gesetz genommen wird. Hauptfall dieses Legismus ist der, dass das Gesetz als die primäre, grundlegende Gegebenheit auch von Disziplinen wie Ethik oder Naturwissenschaft hingestellt wird. Das Gesetz soll dann nicht nur erkenntnismässig (quoad nos) sondern auch ontisch (quoad rem) das ens primum, die πρώτη οὐσία bilden, von der alle anderen Gebilde herstammen", Spiegelberg, Gesetz und Sittengesetz (n. 7), at 11. 301 As described by György Lukács and valid independently of Marxist and constructivist premises: "Bei dieser Frage gilt es, sich darauf zu besinnen, dass die Desanthropomorphisierung eine der allerwichtigsten, der unentbehrlichsten Mittel für die Erkenntnis des Seins, wie es wirklich, wie es an sich ist, war, ist und bleiben wird. Alles, was mit der unmittelbaren Beziehung des jeweiligen Gegenstands der Erkenntnis zum wahrnehmenden wirklichen Menschen untrennbar verbunden scheint, was aber nicht nur dessen echte, objektive Eigenschaften, sondern zugleich bloss die Eigenart der menschlichen Aufnahmeorgane (das unmittelbare Denken miteinbegriffen) bestimmt, muss in diesem Prozess der Desanthropomorphisierung als Erscheinung (oder eventuell sogar als blosser Schein) in den Hintergrund treten, um seine Stelle den wirklich an sich seienden Momenten zu überlassen, um den Menschen dazu zu befähigen, die Welt so aufzunehmen, wie sie an sich, unabhängig von ihm ist. Eine solche von der Arbeit ausgehende Bewältigung der Wirklichkeit durch die menschliche Praxis wäre nie real zustande gekommen ohne dieses Abstrahieren des Menschen von seiner eigenen Unmittelbarkeit", Lukács, Zur Ontologie des gesellschaftlichen Seins (n. 239), at 28. 107 puerpose-settling and fallibility contain negation, and negation is a spiritual capability whose existence in nature bears the consequence that reality contains thinking about what is not but should be the case, whereby reality as a whole would contain thinking about itself and be, therefore, self-conscious and normative (from νόμος), i. e., self-ordering according to goodness states and, therefore, also ethical. Hence, for the sake of elimination of possible mistakes, the progressive elimination of anything spiritual from the understanding of nature is useful heuristics. The history of the modern sciences of nature is an example of a collective thought project in this sense throughout centuries.302 The advantages include the development of technology for the purposes of multiplying life, of enhancing the satisfaction of material needs and for general increase of power. It is that usefulness that explains the widespread adoption and cultural power of materialism as a worldview. As a matter of fact, cultures that have gotten contact with Western materialism over the last centuries have rapidly abandoned or adapted considerable parts of their traditional worldviews in order to participate in the benefits. Of course, none of these benefits is a reason against the reality of teleology. After all, there has always been cognitive mistakes that are adaptive to a certain extent.303 Since power is potency, since increase of power is the increase of possibilities in the course of time and since usefulness and satisfaction of needs are teleological, it is the reality of teleology that accounts for materialism as an evolutionary strategy rather than vice-versa. It is the spirit that for heuristic reasons sometimes wishes to eliminate itself from reality, which reveals its nihilist tendency and confirms the existence of negation within reality. Concluding Remarks There are many conceptions of teleology that are partially not backed up, partially explicitly contraposed by what has been said until now. It is worth mentioning them because misconceptions of teleology are very often the reason why people reject it or even express hostility. Since "there is no such thing as a clarification of the ways in which men may arrive at an error",304 for that would be an endless endeavor, I will only briefly mention the most basic premises of these conceptions and take what has been said until now as the reason why there is some fundamental mistake in them. 302 About the historical transition from psychism to materialism in science, see Felix Gross, Einleitung, in: Biologie als Weltanschauung. Bausteine zu einer biologischen Weltanschauung: Jakob Baron von Uexküll (Munich: Bruckmann, 1913). 303 The reflection about the utility of truth and error is an important contribution of Friedrich Nietzsche to the Sociobiological Enlightenment. See Nietzsche, Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (n. 80), book 5, §344. 304 Morgan, Formal logic (n. 12), at 237. 108 False teleology can be comprehended in four groups. The first is merely heuristic teleology, i. e., to only acknowledge its heuristic and not its ontological character, for example when teleology is claimed to be an explanation for facts that mechanistic science has not yet explained in non-teleological terms, i. e., when teleology is used as a temporary method of filling gaps in knowledge only until science makes progress and discovers the mechanisms that underlie the explanandum. As explained above, this version of teleology would consist in a mere mental state of observers, therefore be limited by the scope of epistemology and telling nothing about the reality that is independent of those entities which are able to have consciousness about it.305 The second group involves anthropocentric teleology. It consists in the assumption that all teleological features of physical and biotic beings would be ultimately human attributions of sense.306 In its ethical version, anthropocentric teleology assumes that physical and biotic nature would have the ultimate purpose of making human life possible and good, so that everything that happens would ultimately have the telos of utility for humans.307 In contrast to these approaches, the teleological structure of reality does not bear the claim that 305 In this way, Kant's treatment of teleology as a subjective (though necessary) pattern of thought remains merely epistemological, as Hegel shows: "Dem Wesen nach kehrt dieselbe Antinomie in der Kritik der teleologischen Urteilskraft als der Gegensatz wieder, dass alle Erzeugung materieller Dinge nach bloss mechanischen Gesetzen geschieht, und dass einige Erzeugung derselben nach solchen Gesetzen nicht möglich ist. – Die Kantische Auflösung dieser Antinomie ist dieselbige wie die allgemeine Auflösung der übrigen: dass nämlich die Vernunft weder den einen noch den anderen Satz beweisen könne ... weil wir von [der] Möglichkeit der Dinge nach bloss empirischen Gesetzen der Natur kein bestimmendes Prinzip a priori haben können, – dass daher ferner beide nicht als objektive Sätze, sondern als subjektive Maximen angesehen werden müssen, dass ich einerseits jederzeit über alle Naturereignisse nach dem Prinzip des blossen Naturmechanismus reflektieren solle, dass aber dies nicht hindere, bei gelegentlicher Veranlassung einigen Naturformen nach einer anderen Maxime, nämlich nach dem Prinzip der Endursachen nachzuspüren, – als ob nun diese zwei Maximen, die übrigens bloss für die menschliche Vernunft nötig sein sollen, nicht in demselben Gegensatze wären, in dem sich jene Sätze befinden. – Es ist, wie vorhin bemerkt, auf diesem ganzen Standpunkte dasjenige nicht untersucht, was allein das philosophische Interesse fordert, nämlich welches von beiden Prinzipien an und für sich Wahrheit habe; für diesen Gesichtspunkt aber macht es keinen Unterschied, ob die Prinzipien als objektive, das heisst hier äusserlich existierende Bestimmungen der Natur, oder als blosse Maximen eines subjektiven Erkennens betrachtet werden sollen; – es ist vielmehr dies ein subjektives, d.h. zufälliges Erkennen, welches auf gelegentliche Veranlassung die eine oder andere Maxime anwendet, je nachdem es sie für gegebene Objekte für passend hält, übrigens [aber] nach der Wahrheit dieser Bestimmungen selbst, sie seien beide Bestimmungen der Objekte oder des Erkennens, nicht fragt", Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik (1813, 1816) (n. 180), 2nd part, chapter Teleologie, p. 707-708. 306 See for example Spaemann and Löw's criticism of modern science with the anthropocentric argument that not only teleology, but also causal nexuses and necessity would be human attributions of sense and would not exist in nature independently of observers. Spaemann and Löw, Natürliche Ziele (n. 180), at 197-228. 307 This conception is the basis for Spinoza's criticism on teleology in Spinoza, Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata (n. 32), at 146-148. Another example would be Maurice Blondel's philosophy according to Jahae's reading: "matter can only be conceived as actualized by some kind of life (thought and activity). Likewise, life is there for the person. In itself, life vanishes into nothing unless it is actualized by the person", Jahae, Finality in Nature According to Kant and Blondel (n. 25), at 202. 109 human life would be the highest good that reality is capable of and ultimately strives for. Man's place in ontology is not as special as humanist thinking claims it to be.308 Thirdly, teleology can be misconceived if it grounds on mereological and dualist thinking about nature. This type of thinking places teleology only in some things and events, most commonly of a biotic and cultural kind, but not in others, so that mechanism (in the temporal sense of 'if A, then necessarily B') would be the way in which causation occurs in physical events, while teleology would be how it occurs in biotic and cultural events;309 life would 'use mechanisms' for its purposes.310 Another variant of this conception is the division of reality into micro and macro levels, and the ascription of teleology to only one of them, sometimes only the latter, and sometimes only the former, as often claimed in quantum physics.311 Rather, as shown above, the fallible character of teleology makes it at any level of size or complexity logically incompatible with determinism (understood as sufficient causation by physical laws and previous things and events). The very structure of causation is teleological and that is why teleology involves the totality of the real. 308 The standpoint of humankind in ontology is well characterized by René Guénon: "... considerations de cet ordre n'implique nullement que l'état humain occupe un rang privilégié dans l'ensemble de l'Existence universelle, ou qu'il soit métaphysiquement distingué, par rapport aux autres états, par la possession d'une prerogative quelconque. En réalité, cet état humain n'est qu'un état de manifestation comme tous les autres, et parmi une indefinite d'autres; il se situe, dans la hiérarchie des degrés de l'Existence, à la place qui lui est assingné par sa nature même, c'est-à-dire par le caractère limitative des conditions qui le définissent, et cette place ne lui confère ni supériorité ni infériorité absolue", René Guénon, Les états multiples de l'être, 5th ed. (Paris: Véga, 2009), at 6. 309 Hans Jonas for example claims that determinist mechanism would be a sufficient explanation for many natural events, but not for some of them such as human feelings. Jonas, Das Prinzip Verantwortung (n. 37), at 138-143. German jurist Rudolf von Jhering makes a mixed claim in this regard in his milestone Der Zweck im Recht. On the one hand, physics and biotic 'appearances' would obey different 'laws', but such laws would be tokens of a higher type called 'purpose': "Mit der monistischen Auffassung, zu der ich mich hiermit bekenne, steht die Annahme eines doppelten Gesetzes für die Welt der Erscheinung: des Causalitätsgesetzes für die unbelebte und des Zweckgesetzes für die belebte Schöpfung im Mindesten nicht in Widerspruch. Beide finden in dem Zweckgesetz als höchstem weltbildendem Princip ihre Einheit. Mag die Materie dem einen gehorchen, der Wille dem andern, beide vollführen jedes in seiner Weise und Sphäre nur die Werke, die ihnen von Anfang durch den Zweck aufgetragen sind", Rudolf von Jhering, Der Zweck im Recht, 4th ed. (Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1970), at XII. 310 As stated by Jonas, Das Prinzip Verantwortung (n. 37), at 140. 311 According to Wolfgang Smith for example, there is a "discontinuity" between quantum ("physical") and macro ("corporeal") "ontological planes", so that the former would be indeterminate and the latter determinate. The rationale is that microphysical systems would not exist completely independently of observers. Rather, they would be "actualized by presentation" and not be empirical facts in themselves, but a potency to be actualized by means of measurement. Ultimately, quantum objects would not have any position or momentum before the act of measurement; they would only exist "for us, as objects of intentionality", Smith, The Quantum Enigma (n. 251), at 59-69. Smith's position is a very representative example of several confusions between ontology and epistemology that are widespread in Quantum Mechanics. The impossibility or difficulty in measurement is interpreted as the non-existence of entities or properties, the influence of measurement on the measured objects is interpreted as ontological indeterminacy, and the lack of precise knowledge about quantum phenomena in present-day science is overrepresented as an argument against the existence of determinist laws governing their behaviour (although it is indeed the case that ontology is indeterminate, lack of knowledge is not an argument for that), and the interactions between determinate and indeterminate 'plans' are conceived without reflection about logical contradictions: if there is some causal interaction between entities at different levels, what is determinate would make the indeterminate determinate and vice-versa; one would eliminate the other. 110 If nature is teleological, history and ethics are also necessarily teleological. But teleological ethics cannot be a "bond" or "union" between man and nature as if they were separate entities, or a bond between reason and nature312, because mankind is itself natural and nature is itself a part of reason (λόγος). Reason cannot emerge or perish in history for the elementary reason that every temporal causal nexus follows logic (identity, non-contradiction etc.), quality and potency. This is why reason should not be confounded with consciousness or reduced to a property of spatiotemporal entities such as human beings, as modern science and philosophy commonly do. The authentic rationalist is not vain or narcissist; he acknowledges reason wherever it really is. The teleology of history does not consist in any conception of an "absolute moment in history"313 or "endism"314 – the fourth type of misconceived teleology. This conception is frequently associated with the idea of teleological mechanism, i. e., the reverse determinism that would be the case if everything that happens was sufficiently caused by its purpose.315 Rather, real teleology is neither etiological nor apocalyptical. Reality does not have a cause or purpose outside of itself. A cause or purpose outside of reality would not be real, and therefore would not have any influence on reality. Hence, every purpose is inside reality, and therefore already part of what is the case, i. e., of real striving. Purposes are immanent to reality and transcendent to the entities that strive for them. In this vein, teleology is a nonanthropocentric progressum ad infinitum. Although the thinking style of great meta-narratives (les grands métarécits316) that has constituted Abrahamic religions and profoundly influenced progressive, liberal, socialist (including national-socialist) and fascist political thinking has been below the complexity of reality, the failure of this does not mean that meta-narratives would not be possible, but only that totality must be truly understood.317 The very focus on 312 As argued for example by Jahae, Finality in Nature According to Kant and Blondel (n. 25), at 9, 13, 202. 313 See Leo Strauss' criticism on this historicist claim in Strauss, Natural Right and History (n. 97), at 29. 314 Term coined and conception criticized by Peter Sloterdijk, Im Weltinnenraum des Kapitals (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2006), at 27. 315 This idea has been well described and criticized by Bergson under the title of finalisme radical: "Le mécanisme radical implique une métaphysique où la totalité du reel est posée en bloc, dans l'éternité, et où la durée apparente des choses exprime simplement l'infirmité d'un esprit qui ne peut pas connaître tout à la fois... Mais le finalisme radical nou paraît tout aussi inacceptable, et pour la même raison. La doctrine de la finalité, sous sa forme extreme, telle que nous la trouvons chez Leibniz par exemple, implique que les choses et les êtres ne font que réaliser un programme une fois tracé. Mais, s'il n'y a rien d'imprévu, point d'invention ni de creation dans l'univers, le temps deviant encore inutile. Comme dans l'hypothèse mécanistique, on suppose encore ici que tout est donné. Le finalisme ainsi entendu n'est qu'un mécanisme à rebours. Il s'inspire du même postulat... Il substitute l'attraction de l'avenir à l'impulsion du passé", Bergson, L'évolution créatrice (n. 19), at 42. 316 An influential cultural study about the use of meta-narratives for the legitimation of political power and of scientific statements has been provided by Lyotard, La condition postmoderne (n. 126). 317 As Sloterdijk puts it, "das Elend der grossen Erzählungen herkömmlicher Machart liegt keineswegs darin, dass sie zu gross, sondern darin, dass sie nicht gross genug waren", Sloterdijk, Im Weltinnenraum des Kapitals (n. 314), at 14. 111 'narratives' in humanities as the primary form of justification of rightness is, however, already part of the etiological bias. This shows how the forms of justification of scientific truth, how cultural institutions and political ideals are intrinsically related with the metaphysical worldview of a society,318 and that false metaphysics can only be replaced by true metaphysics. No abandonment of metaphysics is either possible or desirable. 318 As shown in detail by Carl Schmitt, Politische Theologie: Vier Kapitel zur Lehre von der Souveränität (1922), 10th ed. (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2015), at 50-51.