John Stuart Mill

John Stuart Mill: “If there are any marks at all of special design in creation, one of the things most evidently designed is that a large proportion of all animals should pass their existence in tormenting and devouring other animals. . . If Nature and Man are both the works of a Being of a perfect goodness, that Being intended Nature as a scheme to be amended, not imitated, by Man.”

socialsciences.mcmaster.ca/econ/ugcm/3ll3/mill/utilitarianism.pdf

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Dinesh ^club

. . . . In 1903 the philosopher G.E. Moore decisively assaulted the idea of drawing values from evolution or, for that matter, from any aspect of observed nature. He labeled this error the “naturalistic fallacy.” Ever since philosophers have worked hard not to commit it.

Moore wasn’t the first to question the inference of “ought” from “is”. John Stuart Mill had done it a few decades earlier. Mill’s dismissal of the naturalistic fallacy, much less technical and academic than Moor’s, was more simply compelling. Its key was to articulate clearly the usually unspoken assumption that typically underlies attempts to use nature as a guide to right conduct: namely, the nature was created by God and thus must embody his values. And, Mill added, not just any God. If, for example, God is not benevolent, then why honor his values? And if he is benevolent, but isn’t omnipotent, why suppose that he has managed to precisely embed his values in nature? So the question of whether nature deserves slavish emulation boils down to the question of whether nature appears to be the handiwork of the benevolent and omnipotent God.

Mills’ answer was: ‘Are you kidding?’ in an essay called “Nature,” he wrote that nature “implies men, breaks them as if on the wheel, casts them to be devoured by wild beasts, burn them to death, crushes from with stones like the first Christian martyr, starves them with hunger, freezes them with cold, poisons them by the quick or slow venom of her exhalations, and has hundreds of other hideous death in reserve. And she does all this “with the most supercilious disregard both of mercy and of justice, emptying her shafts upon the best and noblest indifferently with the meanest and worst. . . .” . . . . . Page 331

~ Excerpt “The Moral Animal” Author ~ Robert Wright

2 years ago.

Dinesh ^club

2 years ago.

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