Interpreting the Human Form of Life: A Response to Brüllmann

Abstract

There is a tension in Philippa Foot’s approach to ethical naturalism. On the one hand, she claims that our judgments of natural goodness share the same logical structure across all cases of living things, from plants to human beings. On the other hand, Foot emphatically denies that human goodness is a matter of biology and asserts that it is sui generis (Foot 2001, 51). These claims are of course not incompatible, but the latter claim is apt to make it seem as though Foot is abandoning naturalism. I believe it is this tension, inherited in my own work attempting to interpret and defend Foot’s ethical naturalism, that Brüllmann picks up on when he states: “Recent work… seems to call that similarity increasingly into question: for one thing, because it turns its focus to the case of human beings, for another, because it emphasises the special status of judgements that belong to our self-interpretation… [I]n this way, the basic idea of Aristotelian Naturalism seems to get lost from view, and we observe a peculiar reversal of the dialectical situation.” (Brüllmann 2019, xx). I take it that Brüllmann is charging me (and Micah Lott) with giving up on the similarity assumption, and thereby departing from traditional accounts of Aristotelian naturalism. Yet, on my reading, traditional Aristotelian naturalism, as found in Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas for instance, is also marked by a sharp distinction between rational and non-rational forms of life. I follow Matthew Boyle in thinking that the correct account of the Aristotelian tradition lies in noting that for rational animals, rationality is not a power simply added on to animal powers that we share with non-human animals, but rather a distinctive way of having powers (Boyle 2012, 399). On Boyle’s understanding of the tradition, rational powers transform our possession of nutritive and perceptual powers, such that they are actualized in a distinctive way that involves deliberation and choice. This means that there is a common structure to the logic of claims about natural goodness and defect to non-humans and humans, but also that human powers are distinctive and therefore their perfections and defects are likewise distinctive. Yet my concern here is not to contest the tradition, or even to discuss how Foot would herself resolve the question, but with formulating a defensible version of Aristotelian ethical naturalism; it just so happens that I think that a particular interpretation of the tradition encapsulates what should be said by contemporary Aristotelian naturalists. Brüllmann raises the important question concerning what role human nature is playing in Aristotelian ethical naturalism such that it is a distinctive approach to a set of questions posed by other metaethical theories.