That the knife didn't make itself is so irrelevant. Neither did the human.That we can only understand each on the basis of their purpose is the analogy man. come on!

In my view the notion of the human is a nature of the human. We can only have this discussion because some pre-interpretation of the word 'human' is in play. So for me the issue looks to be how fixed and/or articulated this notion/nature is. — ff0

That sounds interesting. How fixed do you think it is?

Yeah. End of discussion.

Thanks for leaving

That's a good question. The 'animal' foundation seems pretty fixed. A certain kind of food is reliably good for a human, while various poisons are reliably bad. The emotional or basic social foundation also seems pretty fixed, if already less so. It feels good to love and be loved, to trust and be trusted. It doesn't feel good to hurt the innocent. But that's perhaps already my adulthood speaking, an adaptation to the changeable world I've found. As a boy I shot snakes for no good reason. I am ashamed now to have been pointlessly cruel. Did it feel right then? Even then it felt evil, but experimenting with evil felt right in some way.

That serpentine digression aside, I suppose technology and language are where the human is especially unfixed. These bodies are terribly important to us. Bad digestion changes who I am. And then language is how I decide specifically to enlarge and sharpen the pre-interpretation that I inherited 'blindly' as the simple truth.


*On the OP. It occurs to me that some thinkers especially want to deny the existence of human nature in order to 'ground' radical freedom. (Sartre). But why not just assert radical freedom? Isn't it really a matter of power? How is some nature binding exactly? As nature it would already be automatic and hence not up for debate.

But human power is finite, so the radical freedom is 'just' an ideological or theological freedom. It just means that I can sleep with lots of women perhaps (or with men in a society that forbids it) and be unashamed on my death bed. Or I can spit on those who spit on me, trade contempt for contempt.

What do you expect? You present a supposed argument from analogy that fell apart on analysis. Teleology is purpose; you can't argue that purpose comes from teleology...

Knifes are intended, by people, to cut. What is it that intends people to some purpose, if not god? evolution? then you do not understand evolution.

Your argument makes no sense.

My argument makes perfect sense. I never argued that purpose comes from teleology. I thought you were leaving?

I never argued that purpose comes from teleology. — bloodninja

No, indeed. That purpose is teleology is what undoes your post. You need to argue that teleology is not purpose.

That purpose is teleology is what undoes your post. You need to argue that teleology is not purpose. — Banno

Why?

OK, correct me - what is teleology? My dictionary disagrees with you.

So Aristotle examines morality, the natural world, rational deliberation, and probably many other things, in terms of a teleology or an end at which they aim. The end that the virtues, for him, aim are Eudaimonia, which can be translated as flourishing or mistranslated as happiness. This is his teleological understanding of the virtues.
Heidegger doesn't explicitly use the word teleology as far as I'm aware but he also has a teleological understanding of the human being on many different levels. E.g Being-toward-death is teleological in that this way of being in the world is such that it is explicitly makes sense of itself in terms of the end that it anticipates. And what he calls "potentialities-for-being" are ultimately understood in terms of a for-the-sake-of-which e.g. being a Father. This for the sake of which is teleological in that it kind of points back and structures, or gives sense to various different features and practices in that person's world.
Similarly a knife when understood not as an object, but as equipment, is understood teleologically in terms of its end or what Heidegger calls its 'in-order-to'.

Then are you using teleology with some alternate meaning? Teleology without purpose...

It is up to you to show us what this alternate teleology does...

E.g Being-toward-death is teleological in that this way of being in the world is such that it is explicitly makes sense of itself in terms of the end that it anticipates. — bloodninja

Nice. In other words we know that our lives won't last. And we live in this knowing and shape our sense of what life is all about in the context of mortality. We can take this back to Ecclesiastes.

No one remembers the former generations,
and even those yet to come
will not be remembered
by those who follow them.

...

I said to myself, “Come now, I will test you with pleasure to find out what is good.” But that also proved to be meaningless. “Laughter,” I said, “is madness. And what does pleasure accomplish?” I tried cheering myself with wine, and embracing folly—my mind still guiding me with wisdom. I wanted to see what was good for people to do under the heavens during the few days of their lives. I undertook great projects: I built houses for myself and planted vineyards. I made gardens and parks and planted all kinds of fruit trees in them. I made reservoirs to water groves of flourishing trees. I bought male and female slaves and had other slaves who were born in my house. I also owned more herds and flocks than anyone in Jerusalem before me. I amassed silver and gold for myself, and the treasure of kings and provinces. I acquired male and female singers, and a harem[a] as well—the delights of a man’s heart. I became greater by far than anyone in Jerusalem before me. In all this my wisdom stayed with me.

I denied myself nothing my eyes desired;
I refused my heart no pleasure.
My heart took delight in all my labor,
and this was the reward for all my toil.
Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done
and what I had toiled to achieve,
everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind;
nothing was gained under the sun.
Wisdom and Folly Are Meaningless
Then I turned my thoughts to consider wisdom,
and also madness and folly.
What more can the king’s successor do
than what has already been done?
I saw that wisdom is better than folly,
just as light is better than darkness.
The wise have eyes in their heads,
while the fool walks in the darkness;
but I came to realize
that the same fate overtakes them both.
Then I said to myself,

“The fate of the fool will overtake me also.
What then do I gain by being wise?”
I said to myself,
“This too is meaningless.”
For the wise, like the fool, will not be long remembered;
the days have already come when both have been forgotten.
Like the fool, the wise too must die!
— Ecclesiastes

So perhaps every social human notion/nature is threatened by individually experienced mortality. In some sense individuality is this distance from what one thinks. We enter the world and find disagreement. We die before the world as a whole has figured it out.


This line from Shakespeare resonates more and more for me. We know how to do what we have to do for the most part, but how deeply do we know any entity apart from the squishy network of this doing? One word we define with still others. Apart from the doing that makes us feel better, it's all fog. Souls and quarks and the physical and the material and blah blah blah. A play of shadows.

"Since no man knows aught of all he leaves, what is it to leave betimes?"

Interesting, I'm not sure I agree with your anthropocentric stance, but I've always solved the Is/ought problem in exactly the same way as you espouse here. That we are already human beings with desires and objectives (no matter where they come from) and therefore certain virtues can be said to be 'good' if they promote those objectives and 'bad' if they frustrate them. I don't see that we have to even know where the purpose came from to reach this conclusion, it is self-evidently there.

What I'm not so clear on in your argument is how your assertion that 'morality changes' doesn't just undermine the very argument you're trying to make about intrinsic purpose. Are you just referring to normative ethics changing rather than the properties of 'good' and 'bad' or are you suggesting that what is 'good' and what is 'bad' are also culturally relative, in which case how do you reconcile that with a defined teleology for a human? To use your knife example, it only works to say a knife 'should' be sharp because we all agree that a knife is 'for' cutting things. If, however, someone were to assert that a knife was 'for' stroking kittens it would not be good that it were sharp.

I have quite strong ethical naturalist views so can use the teleological argument, but I'm intrigued to hear how a cultural relativist squares the two aspects.