You'd think that any concept of the inviolability of
nature would long have been abandoned by philosophers,
ethicists and cultural commentators. But sadly it isn't so.
Nature's inviolability is still a club to bash any
controversial practice or technology that conservative
thinkers dislike.

John Stuart Mill's essay

On Nature
seemingly exploded the whole idea more than 100 years ago,
but it persists in 21st century policy debates. It's like a
vampire with a stake through its heart that refuses to die.
Choose any of a vast range of controversial topics, from gay
marriage to genetic enhancement and beyond, and you'll find
a few thinkers willing to argue that it must be stopped
because it defies nature.

And so we're left with two questions: Why does this
argument persist? And is there anything that we can do about
it?

The simple argument

The idea seems hopeless from the beginning. As Mill and
many others have demonstrated, there are various ways that
we can think of nature, and none of them make defying nature
a sin. Once we clarify what is meant by "nature," there
seems to be no easy way to make a morally salient
distinction between "the natural" and "the unnatural."

The most obvious definitions are as follows. Nature is
either:

1. The totality of all the phenomena and their causal
   relationships, as investigated by science; or


2. Those things which are not artificial, i.e. not
   produced by human agency or technology.

If these are the only ways we can understand what is
meant by "nature," the first difficulty is this: nothing we
ever do is unnatural in the first sense. After all, we are
part of nature (so defined). Using this first sense, there
is no distinction between natural actions and unnatural
actions, such that the former are morally acceptable and the
latter are not. No such distinction can be made because
every action is natural.

The second difficulty relates to the second sense of
"nature." Using this definition, every action that we
ever carry out is unnatural, since it is a product of human
agency (unless perhaps someone is so drunk that she is
essentially running on automatic pilot; I'll leave that
small class of actions out of the discussion). It follows
that everything we do must be morally wrong, if
unnaturalness is our criterion. Once again, no distinction
can be made between natural and unnatural human actions, so
we cannot use such a distinction to separate what is morally
acceptable from what is morally unacceptable.

But here's an idea. We could replace the word "or" in the
second definition with "and." What's more, we could think of
technology rather narrowly. If we made those two moves, we
could (for example) include in the realm of "the artificial"
only those activities that use some form of advanced 20th or
21st century technology. Note, however, that if we take this
approach some supposedly "unnatural" activities (e.g.
homosexual acts) end up being defined as "natural," and
hence morally okay, since they do not require any advanced
technology. That causes a problem for some extreme
conservatives.

But what about the sort of moderate bioconservative who
considers homosexuality to be morally acceptable, yet wishes
to condemn various technologically based actions that
supposedly defy nature? Well, some acts or technologies can
clearly be condemned by our modified criterion, such as
genetic engineering and the contraceptive pill.
Unfortunately, however, this modified idea of "the
unnatural" also covers many modern medical therapies that
are not controversial. It also covers computer
technology, aviation, advanced building techniques and
materials, and a host of other innovations that no one
seriously has moral qualms about. Clearly this won't do. It
still proves far too much.

In the end, it seems impossible to make a simple
distinction between morally acceptable "natural" practices
and morally unacceptable "unnatural" ones. Something much
more sophisticated is required if the idea is to work at
all.

A dose of sophistication

Nothing I've said so far completely rules out the
possibility that there is a sin of defying nature. It is
always conceivable that someone will come up with a new
sense of "nature" or "the natural" that is, indeed, morally
salient. It's not easy to see how this could be done, but
the understandings of what constitutes nature that I've
offered so far (guided by Mill) are not the only ones that
have ever been given, and still others might be offered in
the future. They are not logically exhaustive of all the
possibilities.

But there is a more general difficulty lying in wait.
Anyone who wants to rehabilitate the idea of defying nature
must first define "nature" in a way that really is morally
salient, and must show us why it is. Then, to put
this concept to use in moral argument, he or she will also
need to show how some controversial practices fall under the
new concept-not merely some other concept of nature, such as
those already discussed. From where I sit, achieving both of
those requirements at once looks to be an insurmountable
problem. We'll have to see how much it frustrates, and
continues to frustrate, actual arguments that are brought by
conservatives, but I'm not holding my breath waiting for a
cogent argument to be delivered.

I don't have space to deal with a whole range of novel
understandings of "nature," much less the time to test each
one to see whether it can overcome this general difficulty.
I'll simply underline my skepticism and leave the exercise
for readers.

Meanwhile, I'll concentrate on a line of argument
developed by

Stephen Holland
in a recent bioethics text, Bioethics: A Philosophical
Introduction. Holland, in turn, draws upon a 1996
article by British philosopher

Richard Norman,
published in the


Journal of Applied
Philosophy. Norman himself is not inclined to
attack any particular practice on the basis that it defies
nature; indeed, he actually defends IVF against that kind of
attack. But he develops an understanding of "the natural"
that can be exploited by bioconservative thinkers, and
Holland puts it to good use in suggesting that there really
is something morally problematic about contemporary and
prospective reproductive technologies.

Norman begins his article, "Interfering with Nature," by
pointing out some of the well-known difficulties in this
area, following a similar line to that of John Stuart Mill.
However, he then sets out on a more adventurous path. Early
in his discussion, he makes three main points:

First: As a matter of logic, our choices of actions,
projects, life plans, and so on must be made against a
background in which some things are not open to
choice. Otherwise, we would have no basis on which to
choose. The background conditions for us will vary but
they typically include general facts about sex,
procreation, nurturing, maturing and aging, death, the
necessity of work and the existence of illness and pain
in our world-eternal verities, it might be thought, of
human experience.



Second: It turns out that this causes various
paradoxical threshold effects. For example, the fact
that the world contains illness and pain is a background
condition which informs our choices to attempt to avoid
them, or ameliorate them, in any particular case. But if
illness and pain disappeared from the world entirely, or
almost entirely, and we no longer had to fight against
them, much of what is valuable in our lives would
disappear with them. For example, we would no longer
need doctors and medical science. We would no longer
guard our children's health, or our own. So many
important practices would be lost that our lives would
become "shallow and empty."



Third: Where threshold effects are concerned, the risk
is not that some specific harm will be done. Rather, the
threatened elimination of basic conditions from the
background of our lives creates the specter of a loss of
experienced meaning.

Norman is sophisticated enough to realize that different
cultures will understand these basic background conditions
of life in different ways. Also, because these background
conditions are very broad and general, not just any
innovation will threaten people's sense of experienced
meaning in their lives. Furthermore, some of the basic
conditions understood in particular societies or cultures
may actually not be eternal verities, even if they seem to
be so within the culture. For example, many cultures have
beliefs about the inferiority of women among their most
basic background "knowledge." At the same time, Norman
believes that what is seen in a particular culture as the
basic background conditions is not entirely arbitrary:
background conditions are shaped not just by culture but by
our evolved biology and the physical world that we all live
in. Thus we can expect a great deal of intercultural
agreement about them. Furthermore, he says, it seems to be a
psychological fact about human beings that we need a quite
extensive conception of what must be accepted as part of the
basic background to our choices-conditions without which our
sense of leading meaningful lives may be threatened.

For Norman then, the discomfort that some people feel
about IVF and such things as the prospect of biological
immortality comes from their sense that important background
conditions relating to procreation and death are under
attack. If technologies are used for fertility enhancement
and life extension, then very basic conditions of human life
in the culture concerned no longer obtain, or are at least
eroded. A sense that this is happening can be expressed as a
claim that "nature" is being interfered with; here, "nature"
is equated with the basic background conditions recognized
by the culture. However, Norman defends IVF on the basis
that incremental changes to our culture's background
conditions can be absorbed into our thinking, and do not
constitute "taking an axe to the natural order," as alleged
by one conservative commentator.

Is it rational?

Norman's theory seems to have a great deal of explanatory
power. It explains why some technological innovations, but
not others, seem to make people feel threatened. It also
explains what they have in common with such practices as
homosexuality, which are not products of high technology.
Anything that might challenge our main background
assumptions about how ordinary human life works-especially
our understanding of sex, its relationship to conception and
birth, the development and rearing of children, the roles of
men and women, the processes of aging and death-is likely to
seem threatening. Rightly or not, if the facts of these
matters change it can seem to pull out the rug out from
under various constant understandings of life that we assume
in all our decisions. That is unsettling.

So, if Norman is right, we have an explanation as to why
the supposed sin of "defying nature" lingers in policy
debates.

I am prepared to accept this theory, at least for the
sake of argument. It appears to be a good theory to explain
some human motivations. That does not, however, entail that
people who react in the way that the theory predicts are
thereby behaving rationally. Perhaps they are in some
sense, and I'll discuss that in part two of this column.
Note, however, that the theory predicts that there will be
opposition to sufficiently powerful technological
innovations even if they are beneficial. If a new technology
is powerful enough to alter fundamental conditions that are
relied on by people making choices within a particular
culture, it should be expected to cause unease and attract
opposition.

In part two, I will analyze the view of Holland, who
believes that the responses predicted by Norman's theory are
not only relevant and rational but often justifiable. I'll
try to answer this claim, and I'll comment on the
implications of the theory for advocates of radical
technological change.

Part two of this column will be published next week.