After reading Professor Herzog's post, I want to now share it with you all. Professor Feser was right to call it glib. Perhaps we can attribute Professor Herzog's glibness to the context within which he writes (err the blogosphere), or the community to which he writes (err left-of-center academics).
_____________ is unnatural and therefore wrong.
I hasten to note that I am not any kind of skeptic about moral or political argument. My conviction that there is no sound way to fill in the blank here is a targeted skepticism. We have to get along without any appeals to what's natural or unnatural, I think, because those appeals are strictly speaking nonsensical.
Oh, I know we talk this way all the time. I know how we try to fill in the blank. With gay marriage. With anal sex. With abortion. And on and on. All these claims, I assert cheerfully, are just nonsense. The problem is not that nature is a critical standard that supports right-wing judgments. The problem is that it supports nothing at all.
To be sure, the we often frame ethical debates as Herzog says. Where he departs, however, is in using nature as a measure for morality. Nature, to Herzog, doesn't support anything at all?
And I don't mind talk of natural rights if that means we can argue sensibly about rights without thumbing through the local statute book. But if it means that Nature bestows us with rights, well, I'm afraid I can't wrap my mind arond [sic] that. And I suspect that neither can anyone else.
Citing Hume now,
If "natural" is the opposite of "rare" and means "common," it has no critical bite. Unless you think it's wrong to excel. If it's the opposite of "artifice" and means "what we haven't altered," it has no critical bite. Unless you think people shouldn't wear eyeglasses. If natural is the opposite of "supernatural" or "miraculous" and means "can be explained in the ordinary ways," it has no critical bite. Unless you think only divine intervention is wrong.
I see such claims to nature as an all too easy and often unconvincing way to argue about the moral value of a behavior if we do not properly contextualize what we mean by 'nature' or, say, 'goodness'. I am in no position, however, to advocate not making claims of that sort. I will be rereading Professor Feser's responses for sure.
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