Nature, Freedom, and Responsibility: Ernst Mayr and Isaiah Berlin - eminent scientists from early 20 century - Abstract

The moral culmination of such episodes of culturally interpreted experience, the land ethic, no matter how much reflected on, seems "natural," seems to fit

with Leopold's value-laden experiences of the human and natural world, which moves him to promote its goodness. Has he fallen victim to the dreaded "naturalistic fallacy," confounding the "is" and the "ought"? Yes and no. The felt or experienced goodness of reality that emerges from the interaction of the human (organic) experiencer and the world encountered accounts for the experiential roots or ground of substantive moral injunctions. But the emergence is an interpretation of reality's character, significance, meaning, and goodness (or evil). It is not natural reality in its (unexperienced) starkers. Furthermore, the interpretation can be reflected on and checked against further encounters with the world, with their accompanying (and expanding) "interpretative emergences." This may be as close as we can come to bringing together nature with genuine human freedom and responsibility, but it is getting very close indeed and we are the better for it. For this we have to thank not only our cultural and social inheritance and nurturing, but also and emphatically our natural status as animate, biological, mammalian, human organisms in the evolving ecosystemic world.

With these final philosophical reflections we have come a long way from Descartes, Newton, and even Vico. We have Darwin and his modern proponents and interpreters to thank, Ernst Mayr in particular, and his (perhaps unwitting) ally, Isaiah Berlin.

References

Berlin, Isaiah. Four Essays on Liberty. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969.

--. The Proper Study of Mankind. Eds. Henry Hardy and Roger Hansheer. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998.

Jonas, Hans. The Imperative of Responsibility. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.

Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1949.

Mayr, Ernst. One Long Argument. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991.

--. This is Biology. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997. Whitehead, Alfred North. "Nature Lifeless" and "Nature Alive." Modes of Thought. New York: Free Press, 1968.

Strachan Donnelley, Director of the Humans and Nature Program at the Hastings Center, is the author of Wolves and Human Communities (coeditor with Sharpe and Norton, 2000), and the article "Human Nature, Views of" in the Encyclopedia of Applied Ethics (1998). His current project is entitled "Ideas of Humans and Nature."

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