Teleology and the normal/abnormal distinction

Believers in teleology also tend to believe in a distinction between the normal and the abnormal. I think teleology can be prised apart from a normal/abnormal distinction, however, if we do something that I think we should do for independent reasons: recognize teleological directedness without a telos-to-be-attained, a target to be hit. An example of such teleological directedness is an athlete trying to run as fast as possible. There isn’t a target telos: for any speed the athlete reaches, a higher speed would fit even better with the athlete’s aims. But there is a directional telos, an aim tlos: the athlete aims in the direction of higher speed.

One might then say the human body in producing eyes has a directional telos: to see as well as possible. Whether one has 20/20 or 20/15 or 20/10 vision, more acuity would fulfill that directional telos better. On this view, there is no target telos, just a direction towards better acuity. If there were a target telos, say a specific level of acuity, we could identify non-attainment with abnormalcy and attainment with normalcy. But we need not. We could just say that this is all a matter of degree, with continuous variation between 20/0 (not humanly available) and 20/∞ (alas humanly available, i.e., total blindness).

I am not endorsing the view that there is no normal/abnormal in humans. I think there is (e.g., an immoral action is abnormal; a moral action is normal). But perhaps the distinction is less often applicable than friends of teleology think.

The Fifth Way, also remixed

Thomas writes:

We see that things which lack intelligence, such as natural bodies, act for an end, and this is evident from their acting always, or nearly always, in the same way, so as to obtain the best result. Hence it is plain that not fortuitously, but designedly, do they achieve their end. Now whatever lacks intelligence cannot move towards an end, unless it be directed by some being endowed with knowledge and intelligence; as the arrow is shot to its mark by the archer. Therefore some intelligent being exists by whom all natural things are directed to their end; and this being we call God.

Central to Aristotle’s thought is the normative thesis that all substances have proper functions or ends defined by their immanent forms. Moreover, Aristotle makes the statistical claim that for the most part things things function correctly—they function to fulfill their ends.

The statistical claim is epistemologically important: that an activity or structure is usually exhibited by members of a kind is a central piece of evidence for that activity’s or structure’s correctness. But logically the statistical facts and the normative facts are independent: it is logically possible for all sheep to be three-legged, or for only a few pecan trees to produce pollen.

To see that we are committed to the connection between the normative and the statistical facts, consider the ridiculousness of the hypothesis that one of the ends of salmon is to prove theorems about high-dimensional topology. The utter unsuitability of the salmon brain to that end is conclusive evidence against the hypothesis. But this is only if we think there is a connection between the normative and the statistical facts—without such a connection, we could simply suppose that all salmon fall short of their topological researcher nature.

Note, too, just how massive the coincidence between the normative and statistical facts is: we see it across millions of species.

As Aquinas concedes, in intelligent substances we have some hope of an explanation of the coincidence: the intelligent substance consciously aims at its self-fulfillment. (Though leaning on this may be too much of a concession, because we still need to explain why this aiming isn’t futile, like a crank’s attempts to trisect angles.) But why do unintelligent substances’ activities in fact harmonize with their self-fulfillment, and do so massively, across all the millions of species we have? Why is it that we do not salmon-like fish with mathematical activity as their purpose, snake-like reptiles with flying as their end, and apes whose primary purpose is turning their bodies into gold by exposure to solar radiation?

A theistic explanation of the massive coincidence is compelling, and it provides another theistic solution to the shortcomings of a pure Aristotelian system.

Supererogation on Aristotelianism

The cheetah whose maximum speed is 40 mph is subnormal. The cheetah whose maximum speed is 58 mph is merely normal. The cheetah whose maximum speed is 80 mph is supernormal. An Aristotelian can accommodate these three judgments by saying that the form of the cheetah sets two things for the cheetah’s speed: a norm and a comparison. The norm specifies what is needed for being a healthy cheetah, and the comparison specifies what is a better speed than what. And the comparison can hold among instances that meet the norm, in which case the better instance is supernormal, and it can hold among instances that fail to meet the norm, too.

Having both a norm and a comparison for a type of good is especially important in the case of open-ended goods with a lower limit but no upper limit. Thus, no matter how much a human knows, knowing more would be better (in respect of knowledge). But there is such a thing as knowing enough to be a flourishing human knower. But we can also have a norm and a comparison in the case of things where there is an upper limit. Thus, a heart that is too small or too big is unhealthy. But is a range of healthy heart sizes (specified by the norm), and some of those sizes are healthier than others (specified by the comparison). Somewhere in that range there could even be (though vagueness and multidimensionality of comparison make that unlikely) a single optimal heart size.

What is true for dispositions (maximum speed) and physical arrangements is also true for operations. There is a normal cheetah running operation, a subnormal and a supernormal one. (Note that in some cases the supernormal one will be slower than the merely normal one, since sometimes energy needs to be conserved.)

The central Aristotelian insight I want to have in ethics is that just as there is proper function in the operation of the legs, there is proper function in the operation of the will. If so, then we would expect there to be a norm and a comparison: some instances of the will’s operation are normal and some are subnormal. And among the normal ones some will be better than others. Thus, in a case where multiple operations of the will are possible, that operation that is normal but better than another normal operation is supererogatory, while an operation that is normal but not better than another normal operation is merely permissible.

There is metaphysically nothing special about the supererogatory or the obligatory on the Aristotelian picture. They are just the instances of a general phenomena in the special case of the operation of the will.

Supervenience and natural law

The B-properties supervene on the A-properties provided that any two possible worlds with the same A-properties have the same B-properties.

It is a widely accepted constraint in metaethics that normative properties supervene on non-normative ones. Does natural law meet the contraint?

As I read natural law, the right action is one that goes along with the teleological properties of the will. Teleological properties, in turn, are normative in nature and (sometimes) fundamental. As far as I can see, it is possible to have zombie-like phenomena, where two substances look and behave in exactly the same way but different teleological properties. Thus, one could have animals that are physically indistinguishable from our world’s sheep, and in particularly have four legs, but, unlike the sheep, have the property of being normally six-legged. In other words, they would be all defective, in lacking two of their six legs.

This suggests that natural law theories depend on a metaphysics that rejects the supervenience of the normative. But I think that is too quick. For in an Aristotelian metaphysics, the teleological properties are not purely teleological. A sheep’s being naturally four-legged simultaneously explains the normative fact that a sheep should have four legs and the non-normative statistical fact that most sheep in fact have four legs. For the teleological structures are not just normative but also efficiently causal: they efficiently guide the embryonic development of the sheep, say.

In fact, on the Koons-Pruss reading of teleology, the teleological properties just are causal powers. The causal power to ϕ in circumtances C is teleological and dispositional: it is both a teleological directedness towards ϕing in C and a disposition to ϕ in C. And there is no metaphysical way of separating these aspects, as they are both features of the very same property.

Our naturally-six-but-actually-four-legged quasi-sheep, then, would differ from the actual world’s sheep in not having the same dispositions to develop quadrapedality. This seems to save supervenience, by exhibiting a difference in non-normative properties between the sheep and the quasi-sheep.

But I think it doesn’t actually save it. For the disposition to develop four (or six) legs is the same property as the teleological directedness to quadrapedality in sheep. And this property is a normative property, though not just normative. We might say this: The sheep and the quasi-sheep differ in a non-normative respect but they do not differ in a non-normative property. For the disposition is a normative property.

Perhaps this suggests that the natural lawyer should weaken the supervenience claim and talk of differences in features or respects rather than properties. That would allow one to save a version of supervenience. But notice that if we do that, we preserve supervenience but not the intuition behind it. For the intuition behind the supervenience of the normative on the non-normative is that the normative is explained by the non-normative. But on our Aristotelian metaphysics, it is the teleological properties that explain that actual non-normative behavior of things.

The context problem for Lewisian functionalism

One problem for functionalism is the problem of defect. David Lewis, for instance, talks of a madman for whom pain is triggered by something other than damage and whose pain triggers something other than avoidance. Lewis’s functionalist solution is to define the function of a mental state in terms of the role it normally plays in the species.

Here is a problem with this. Suppose that in mammals pains is realized by C-fiber firing. But now take the C-fibers inside a living mammalian skull, disconnect their outputs and connect external electrodes to their inputs. Make the C-fibers fire. Since the C-fiber outputs are disconnected, causing them to fire does not cause any of the usual pain behaviors, the formation of memories of pain, etc. In fact, it seems very plausible that there is no pain at all. Yet according to Lewisian functionalism, there is pain, because it is the normal connections of the C-fibers that define their functional role.

This thought experiment shows that the physical realizers of mental states need to occur in their proper context. But this bumps up against Lewis’s madman, in whom the pain states, and presumably their physical realizers, do not occur in their proper context.

It seems that what the functionalist needs to say is that in order to realize a mental state, a physical state must occur in a sufficient approximation to its proper context. If it’s too far, as in the case of the C-fibers with severed outputs, there is no mental state. If it’s close enough, as in a moderate version of the madman case (I don’t know what to say about Lewis’s more extreme one), the mental state occurs.

But how is the line to be drawn?

Perhaps there is no problem. Pain is not in fact C-fiber firing. Perhaps enough of the brain needs to be involved in conscious states that one cannot plausibly remove the states from their normal functional context? Still, this is worth thinking about.

Are we all seriously impaired?

When I taught calculus, the average grade on the final exam was around 55%. One could make the case that this means that our grading system is off: that everybody’s grades should be way higher. But I suspect that’s mistaken. The average grasp of calculus in my students probably really wasn’t good enough for one to be able to say with a straight face that they “knew calculus”. Now, I think I was a pretty rotten calculus teacher. But such grades are not at all unusual in calculus classes. And if one didn’t have the pre-selection that colleges have, but simply taught calculus to everybody, the grades would be even lower. Yet much of calculus is pretty straightforward. Differential calculus is just a matter of ploughing through and following simple rules. Integral calculus is definitely harder, and exceling at it requires real creativity, but one can presumably do decently just by internalizing a number of heuristics and using trial and error.

I find myself with the feeling that a normal adult human being should be able to do calculus, understand basic Newtonian physics, write a well-argued essay, deal well with emotions, avoid basic formal and informal fallacies, sing decently, have a good marriage, etc. But I doubt that the average adult human being can learn all these things even with excellent teachers. Certainly the time investment would be prohibitive.

There are two things one can say about this feeling. The first is that the feeling is simply mistaken. We’re all apes. A 55% grade in calculus from an ape is incredible. The kind of logical reasoning that an average person can demonstrate in an essay is super-impressive for an ape. There is little wrong with average people intellectually. Maybe the average human can’t practically learn calculus, but if so that’s no more problematic than the facts that the average human can’t practically learn to climb a 5.14 or run a four-minute mile. These things are benchmarks of human excellence rather than of human normalcy.

That may in fact be the right thing to say. But I want to explore another possibility: the possibility that the feeling is right. If it is right, then all of us fall seriously short of what normal human beings should be able to do. We are all seriously impaired.

How could that be? We are, after all, descendants of apes, and the average human being is, as far as we can tell, an order of magnitude intellectually ahead of the best non-human apes we know. Should the standards be another order of magnitude ahead of that?

I don’t think there is a plausible naturalistic story that would do justice to the feeling that the average human falls that far short of where humans should be at. But the Christian doctrine of the Fall allows for a story to be told here. Perhaps God miraculously intervened just before the first humans were conceived, and ensured that these creatures would be significantly genetically different from their non-human parents: they would have capacities enabling them to do calculus, understand Newtonian physics, write a well-argued essay, deal well with emotions, avoid fallacies, sing decently, have a good marriage, etc. (At least once calculus, physics and writing are invented.) But then the first humans misused their new genetic gifts, and many of them were taken away, so that now only statistically exceptional humans have many of these capacities, and none have them all. And so we have more geneticaly in common with our ape forebears than would have been the case if the first humans acted better. However, in addition to genetics, on this story, there is the human nature, which is a metaphysical component of human beings defining what is and what is not normal for humans. And this human nature specifies that the capacities in question are in fact a part of human normalcy, so that we are all objectively seriously impaired.

Of course, this isn’t the only way to read the Fall. Another way—which one can connect in the text of Genesis with the Tree of Life—is that the first humans had special gifts, but these gifts were due to miracles beyond human nature. This may in fact be the better reading of the story of the Fall, but I want to continue exploring the first reading.

If this is right, then we have an interesting choice-point for philosophy of disability. One option will be to hold that everyone is disabled. If we take this option then for policy reasons (e.g., disability accommodation) we will need a more gerrymandered concept than disability, say disability^*, such that only a minority (or at least not an overwhelming majority) is disabled^*. This concept will no doubt have a lot of social construction going into it, and objective impairment will be at best a necessary condition for disability^*. The second option is to say only a minority (or not an overwhelming majority) is disabled, which requires disability to differ significantly from impairment. Again, I suspect that the concept will have a lot of social construction in it. So, either way, if we accept the story that we are all seriously impaired, for policy reasons we will need a disability-related concept with a lot more social construction in it.

Should we accept the story that we are all seriously impaired? I think there really is an intuition that we should do many things that we can’t, and that intuition is evidence for the story. But far from conclusive. Still, maybe we are all seriously impaired, in multiple intellectual dimensions. We may even be all physically impaired.

Do we need two fundamental teleological concepts?

There are two teleological concepts: that of a telos and that of proper function. Each of them helps us make certain teleological judgments. Do we need them both? Could we, for instance, define the telos of a system as what is achieved when the system is properly functioning? Or define proper function as the achievement of the telos in a system and all its (relevant?) subsystems?

I don't know for sure that we need them both, but neither of the two specific proposals is correct. Consider the case of an excellent mathematician is striving to solve an extremely difficult mathematical problem, her mathematical faculties are all working properly, but she fails. It is not a necessary condition for the proper function of mathematical faculties that they be able to solve every mathematical problem there is. Both of the attempted reductions neglect the phenomenon that our teleologies can push us above our proper functioning. An excellent mathematician or athlete may already be functioning above our proper level of functioning, but nonetheless there will be telê that she doesn't have fulfilled. (Though, perhaps, we may want to say that all humans are mathematically and athletically defective, due to the Fall, in which case we could maintain that the mathematician is not functioning properly if there are any soluble problems she can't solve. But even if this view of humans is true, we could imagine that mathematicians of some other species are functioning properly and yet failing to solve problems.)

It seems that we need the concept of proper function to tell us what is good enough, what is normal. But we need the concept of a telos to supply us with comparisons between instances of proper function. The mathematician who solves and who fails to solve are both functioning properly, are both functioning sufficiently well, but the one who solves is functioning better--precisely because she achieves her telos in respect of that process. Or, alternately, we may say that both are functioning properly, but one is functioning merely normally and the other supernormally--again, a distinction that mere proper function does not seem capable of making.

Maybe there is a more clever way of relating the two concepts.

Teleological personhood

It is common, since Mary Anne Warren's defense of abortion, to define personhood in terms of appropriate developed intellectual capacities. This has the problem that sufficiently developmentally challenged humans end up not counting as persons. While some might want to define personhood in terms of a potentiality for these capacities, Mike Gorman has proposed an interesting alternative: a person is something for which the appropriate developed intellectual capacities are normal, something with a natural teleology towards the right kind of intellectual functioning.

I like Gorman's solution, but I now want to experiment with a possible answer as to why, if this is what a person is, we should care more for persons than, say, for pandas.

There are three distinct cases of personhood we can think about:

1. Persons who actually have the appropriate developed intellectual capacities.
2. Immature persons who have not yet developed those capacities.
3. Disabled persons who should have those capacities but do not.

The first case isn't easy, but since everyone agrees that those with appropriate development intellectual capacities should be cared for more than non-person animals, that's something everyone needs to handle.

I want to focus on the third case now, and to make the case vivid, let's suppose that we have a case of a disabled human whose intellectual capacities match those of a panda. Here is one important difference between the two: the human is deeply unfortunate, while the panda is--as far as the story goes--just fine. For even though their actual functioning is the same, the human's functioning falls significantly far of what is normal, while the panda's does not. But there is a strong moral intuition--deeply embedded into the Christian tradition but also found in Rawls--that the flourishing of the most unfortunate takes a moral priority over the flourishing of those who are less unfortunate. Thus, the human takes priority over the panda because although both are at an equal level of intellectual functioning, this equality is a great misfortune for the human.

What if the panda is also unfortunate? But a panda just doesn't have the range of flourishing, and hence for misfortune, that a human does. The difference in flourishing between a normal human state and the state of a human who is so disabled as to have the intellectual level of a panda is much greater than the total level of flourishing a panda has--if by killing the panda we could produce a drug to restore the human to normal function, we should do so. So even if the panda is miserable, it cannot fall as far short of flourishing as the disabled human does.

But there is an objection to this line of thought. If the human and the panda have equal levels of intellectual functioning, then it seems that the good of their lives is equal. The human isn't more miserable than the panda. But while I feel the pull of this intuition, I think that an interesting distinction might be made. Maybe we should say that the human and the panda flourish equally, but the human is unfortunate while the panda is not. The baselines of flourishing and misfortune are different. The baseline for flourishing is something like non-existence, or maybe bare existence like that of a rock, and any goods we add carry one above zero, so if we add the same goods to the human's and the panda's account, we get the same level. But the baseline for misfortune is something like the normal level for that kind of individual, so any shortfall carries one above zero. Thus, it could be that the human's flourishing is 1,000 units, and the panda's flourishing is 1,000 units, but nonetheless if the normal level of flourishing for a human is, say, 10,000 units (don't take either the numbers or the idea of assigning numbers seriously--this is just to pump intuitions), then the human has a misfortune of 9,000 units, while the panda has a misfortune of 1,000 units.

This does, however, raise an interesting question. Maybe the intuition that the flourishing of the most unfortunate takes a priority is subtly mistaken. Maybe, instead, we should say that the flourishing of those who flourish least should take a priority. In that case, neither the disabled human doesn't take a priority over the panda. But this is mistaken, since by this principle a plant would take priority over a panda, since the plant's flourishing level is lower than a panda's. Better, thus, to formulate this in terms of misfortune.

What about intermediate cases, those of people whose functioning is below a normal level but above that of a panda? Maybe we should combine our answers to (1) and (3) for those cases. One set of reasons to care for someone comes from the actual intellectual capacities. Another comes from misfortune. As the latter reasons wane, the former wax, and if all is well-balanced, we get reason to care for the human more than for the panda at all levels of the human's functioning.

That leaves (2). We cannot say that the immature person--a fetus or a newborn--suffers a misfortune. But we can say this. Either the person will or will not develop the intellectual capacities. If she will, then she is a person with those capacities when we consider the whole of the life, and perhaps therefore the reasons for respecting those future capacities extend to her even at the early stage--after all, she is the same individual. But if she won't develop them, then she is a deeply unfortunate individual, and so the kinds of reasons that apply in case (3) apply to her.

I find the story I gave about (2) plausible. I am less convinced that I gave the right story about (3). But I suspect that a part of the reason I am dissatisfied with the story about (3) is that I don't know what to say about (1). However, (1) will need to be a topic for another day.

Treatment versus enhancement

I don't think you have much hope of having a distinction between treatment and enhancement unless you have the notion of the normal state or proper function of the human body. I previously thought we want a distinction between treatment and enhancement for such purposes as figuring out what the task of the physician as such is and what requests from the patient the physician has a right to turn down flat. For instance, a physician who receives a request to remove a cancer, and who judges that removal of the cancer is feasible, safe and ethically permissible, has a medical duty to either remove the cancer or refer to someone else. On the other hand, a physician who receives a request to pierce a patient's ears for earrings, even though she no doubt judges this to be feasible and ethically permissible, has no medical duty to perform the procedure or refer to someone else, since it is not a medical treatment.

But a new kind of case seems to me to make the distinction even more pressing, and this is cases where it is not possible to ask the patient's consent. Suppose that in the middle of heart surgery, the surgeon notices an old bullet lodged near the heart. The bullet does not impair the heart's functioning, so the patient's consent to the heart operation does not extend to the bullet. But it is intrinsically morally permissible for the surgeon to remove the bullet if she reasonably judges that doing so is good for the patient (of course, there may be laws and regulations that prohibit this, in which case it will be extrinsically impermissible). On the other hand, if a brain surgeon removing a cancer from someone's brain reasonably judges, on the basis of the latest research, that moving a few neurons around will make the subject super-fast at arithmetic with large numbers, that is unacceptable. Likewise, if in the course of a Caesarian the physician notes that the tubes could be tied and judges that the patient would be better off not getting pregnant, that too is unacceptable, whether or not consensual sterilization is permissible (this is, alas, not a hypothetical case).

One can try to handle this with "presumed consent", but that's kludgy, and probably doesn't work. Presumed consent from an unconscious suicidal patient for emergency treatment following the attempted suicide is going to involve dubious counterfactuals, like asking what the patient would want if the patient were fully sane (there might be no fact of the matter about this), and, besides, you probably can't make sense of "sane" without the concept of normalcy. Moreover, we can imagine cases where one can presume that the patient would consent if asked, but the action is still wrong. For instance, one may well know of many patients that they would agree to have a gift of diamonds worth millions sewed into them as a part of surgery, if they were going to be later notified and could have the diamonds safely removed through another surgery and if there was no other way for them to be given the diamonds. But to sew in the diamonds as part of heart surgery, without having sought the patient's consent, is morally impermissible--or at least it's bad medicine.