The unnatural

[The Persnickety Platypus]

Humans possess an inexplicable, often unsubstantiated fear of the unnatural. Notions of impossible abnormalities that defy the known laws of physics are often amoung our greatest fears. Science is often criticized for devising new ideas that differ from preconcieved assumptions. Anything "New" or "Different" is ridiculed and denunciated. Those who do not conform to popular belief or custom are are labeled as immoral, misfit, and unnatural.

Is "unnatural" an unfounded standard of ethical judgement? Are unnatural and unethical one and the same?

The best example I can think of is homosexuality. What is the most common argument against gay rights? "That's discusting", "things wern't meant to be that way", "this is in violation of natural law".

My most common response: So?

What if I wanted to incorperate gills into my respiratory system and live underwater (if such a thing were possible). "That's unnatural". So?

Lets assume I wanted to climb a 10,000 foot vertical cliff without the use of safety equiptment. "That's unnatural, humans wern't made to climb cliffs". So?

Suppose I want to use artificial medicine to cure a personal ailment. Medicines are unnatural, in that they can not exist without human intervention. And your point is?





I would like to challenge this concept of "unnatural". I am inclined to believe such a thing does not exist. And guess what? The dictionary seems to agree with me.

nat-u-ral: (nchr-l, nchrl)
adj.
"Present or produced in nature"

Well then. Seeing as everything has a basis in nature (or, "the material world and its phenomena"), I might be correct in assuming that everything we see, hear, touch, taste, and smell, is in fact, natural. What then, is the foundation of our fear?

Closed-mindness is a dominant charactaristic of human society. We instinctively shy away from things and ideas which we do not understand. I plee that we (as a people) might cease to judge things by their incorporation into our congenital concepts, but merely by how they negatively effect ourselves and others.





What do you think?

[Bugmaster]

Seeing as everything has a basis in nature (or, "the material world and its phenomena"), I might be correct in assuming that everything we see, hear, touch, taste, and smell, is in fact, natural. What then, is the foundation of our fear?

Eeergh, I can already sense harvey1 and other dualists foaming at the mouth (*). Remember, not everyone believes in materialism; in fact, most people on this forum are probably dualists of some form or another. Thus, they believe that some things belong to the mental/spiritual/Platonic realm, and thus do not have a basis in "the material world and its phenomena".

(*)Not that he has a tendency to foam, he's actually the nicest dualist I've ever met :-)

[Jose]

Well, y'know, PP, fear is entirely natural. It is an obvious result of millenia of natural selection. Animals that don't fear others get eaten. Animals that do fear others live to pass on their genes.

If I walk up to a ground-squirrel, even with no malicious intent, it nonetheless runs and hides. The instinct that has been selected is to hide first, and evaluate the danger second.

So why are we innately afraid of things that are new and different, or people who are different from us? Again, millenia of selection. We all know that "uncivilized" tribes tend to fight one another. Why shouldn't they? If food is limited, your tribe is more likely to survive if you fight off the competitors. The instinct to share lovingly tends to be lost over time, as the loving sharers get killed by the warlike non-sharers, or as they merely fail to survive winter because there wasn't enough food to go around.

You're going to be a lot happier killing other people if your instinct says that if they are "different" then they "aren't really people" so it's OK.

It's pretty easy for this basic instinct to spill over to knee-jerk reactions to people who look different (hairstyles, warpaint patterns, skin color, etc) or who have different group affiliations (political party, favorite football team, religion, etc.), or to people who behave differently (homosexuals, etc). If you can also label different behaviors as unnatural, then you've got it made. You can hate these people without guilt, based on two kinds of criteria. They are both different and unnatural.

There has also been selection for resistance to change. Consider: your tribe has been hungry for a while, since the last successful hunt. There are lots of plants out there, and you know which ones are good to eat. So, you eat them. Why don't you eat the bad ones--the ones that are poisonous? Maybe you know they are poisonous. More likely, you simply know that "what we do is right." The cultural tradition is to do things One Way. Often, that tradition has been woven into the tribal religion as well. The penalty for doing things differently, or trying something new, may be sickness or death. It seems logical that the instinct to do everything differently died out, and the instinct to resist change became the common human characteristic.

Some change is good, though. Otherwise, we'd never have discovered new food sources as we migrated into new territories. We would never have migrated out of our home regions if we'd been wholly afraid of new things. So, there's a balance, or a genetic variation between resistance-to-change and risk-taking. A successful culture needs a distribution of these instincts.

At present, we seem to have developed groups of people who examplify the resistance-to-change characteristic (religious fundamentalists) and those who exemplify the risk-takers (Navy Seals), and various intermediate positions in-between (political conservatives, political liberals, etc).

The trick is to make it generally known that all of these different viewpoints are perfectly fine, and perfectly natural, and that there's no point in squabbling as if any particular position in the distribution is Absolutely Right. But, since no one seems to be interested in talking to anyone else any more (except as black vs white, right vs wrong "soundbites"), it will probably be a while before this happens.

[mrmufin]

Seeing as everything has a basis in nature (or, "the material world and its phenomena"), I might be correct in assuming that everything we see, hear, touch, taste, and smell, is in fact, natural. What then, is the foundation of our fear?

As Jose pointed out, fear is a natural response and has fairly obvious survival advantages. But natural does not necessarily imply that a particular fear is necessary, warranted and/or rational.

Natural has a variety of definitions and connotations which vary with context. If, as you suggest, everything does have a basis in the material world and its phenomena, then fear (and love and hate and other emotional states and responses) are entirely natural. Should that be the case, then education, evaluation and enlightenment must come into play to guage whether or not the responses are justified in a given situation.

Perhaps most--if not all--applications of the term unnatural would be more accurately and concisely replaced with other words, such as unkown or misunderstood. For whatever it's worth, I share your inclination to challenge traditional concepts of unnatural. After all, to someone with no education in higher mathematics, expressions in integral calculus may appear entirely unnatural.

Regards,
mrmufin

[The Persnickety Platypus]

I contend that much of our fear of the "unnatural" is completely irrational, and greatly stifles progress.


Resisting change is an inherent human quality that has enabled us to survive millions of years, true. Resisting change has also brought about the fall of empires.

As you said, it is important to have the right distribution. Do we at the moment? I am not so sure.

The world is moving at a faster pace than ever, and the United States seems to be falling behind. Social and economic principles that worked in the past are now are ineffective (some never worked to begin with), yet there seems to be no movement in Washington to change policies. Global poverty, national debt, and unemployment are beginning to skyrocket. Yet our approach remains the same: support the rich, spend, and ignore (respectively). The world is as worse off as it always has been, and so that shall remain, granted we continue to take no risks.

Who here wouldn't welcome a little change? What have we got to lose?

The squirrel who runs away from the approaching human is playing it safe. However, he also might be forsaking the opportunity at some leftover peanut butter crackers. Might the squirrel possibly benefit from taking just a split second to evaluate the situation before evading? Couldn't we benefit as well? Instead of automatically blowing off the entire idea of say, genetically engineered food, shouldn't we first consider the possible economic and health benefits?

[AlAyeti]

Humans seem to exist outside of the natural world. We have the power to kill off our own species through ignoring that unnatural things are indeed harmful and it is by ignoring the danger of unrestrained unnatural behavior that has been seen to do just that in many places and examples worldwide.

Excess is the key.

As an example brought up in the main post, sexual unnaturalness is subjective. A human can actually kill another human through "normal" unnatural sexual behavior and through "excessive" unnatural sexual behavior. If there is no restrictions or defining of what is or isn't naturally good, then chaos will result.

If we embrace relativism in trying to define what is or what isn't healthy in terms of what is natural or naturally healthy, we can come to terms with defining the unnatural.

Otherwise the world becomes a place of brutality and those with the strongest muscles (or weapons) can literally overpower the weaker to satisfy the stronger person.

Mankind must come to terms with mankind's abilty to choose unnaturalness that can kill mankind.

Where is the line drawn and how?

If people of the same sex can define whatever unnatural sexual activity they want to engage in between themselves just because they can acheive it, then why can't a three hundred and fifty pound man convince an eighty pound nine year-old to engage in sex acts with him?

It is just as unnatural.

Should the issue be decided by relativism or absolutes?

[Dilettante]

I think there is an unjustified assumption that everything that is natural is good. That's a Romantic myth, but it's all around us. People who prefer "natural medicine" are among the many "victims" of that myth.
The hemlock drink that was given to Socrates was entirely natural, no additives, no preservatives. However, it killed him all the same.

There is, however, such a thing as "human nature" (as well as different human cultures) and I don't think it would be natural for us to permanently live under water. the problem is that we became who we are thanks to fire and other discoveries, so in a way, culture made us people. Man did not discover fire, it was fire that made man.

[Jose]

Yes, mrmufin, as you say, there is some learning involved with some fears. I imagine in the absence of data, that we have some fears hard-wired (from eons of selection), but we have...uhh...unused "slots" for additional subjects-of-fear. We fill these slots on the basis of learning. Sometimes, fairly reasonable things jump into these slots, like snakes, spiders, enclosed spaces, or high places. Sometimes, odd things jump into the slots, like hats. I imagine that some of these are some kind of association of something fearful with something non-fearful (like a hat), and maybe putting both things into fear-slots. It's hard to tell.

But some of our fears are not immediately defined from our own experience, but require instruction from our elders. I imagine that this is why we think certain foods are "yuckky" when other people eat them just fine. I also imagine that this is how we learn which races, religions, ethnic groups, etc we should automatically hate without even thinking about it.

So, why are we (the US in particular) going to the extreme of fear-of-difference when we used to be pretty much on the doing-new-things side of the distribution? Obviously, there's the political side of it: the current administration is afraid of everything, has no clue how to evaluate facts, and thinks that whatever they do is Right because god is on their side. The larger issue is more problematic than a small bunch of nitwits: the public is rather afraid of new things.

I think Al has put it very well:

Humans seem to exist outside of the natural world.

We seem to think that no matter what the problem is, we'll be able to fix it. I can't guess whether this is a result of religious teachings (we're supposed to have dominion over everything, and god is supposed to have promised to take care of his chosen ones, and even that god created us separately), or whether it is the result of scientific progress (we've always fixed everything before.

It's odd, though--as Persnickety has said, why not take an open-minded look at genetically engineered food? (Well, that one's easy. What did the poll show...that 47% of the public thinks that only genetically modified plants contain genes, and normal ones don't? If no one knows what's going on, of course they're unable to figure it out!)

Mankind must come to terms with mankind's abilty to choose unnaturalness that can kill mankind.

Where is the line drawn and how?

Mankind must also come to terms with the naturalness that can kill mankind. If we eat all of the fish, as we are well on the way to doing, then we'll be out of fish. Is starvation the best thing? If we do the natural thing, and pop out kids right and left, we're going to butt up against the earth's carrying capacity. Is that desirable? Maybe we should all do as China has, and force unnatural limitation of child-bearing. Or do we do it the natural way, and wait for disease and starvation? Can we stave off the starvation by genetic engineering of food crops? There are some pretty good ideas kicking around, and they're feasible. Do we refuse it because we don't understand it? It is "unnatural" because it was intelligently designed, or is it "natural" because DNA is just a chemical, and molecular biology follows the rules of molecular biology?

I'm afraid the issue cannot be decided by absolutes. There are too many variables, and no certain answers. In the absence of the clear best answer, we must turn to relativism, and evaluate the possible options relative to one another.

[A 3rd Gentleman]

As an example brought up in the main post, sexual unnaturalness is subjective. A human can actually kill another human through "normal" unnatural sexual behavior and through "excessive" unnatural sexual behavior. If there is no restrictions or defining of what is or isn't naturally good, then chaos will result.

But could the predominant abhorration of chaos in society not serve as our operating imperative and perogative to enforce behaviour that coincides with a moral framework? Why moral objectivism/prescriptivism needs to exist is transcendial or at least incidental to what ethics objectively provide; and why we would logically act morally in the first place.

Otherwise the world becomes a place of brutality and those with the strongest muscles (or weapons) can literally overpower the weaker to satisfy the stronger person.

Pending an anarchical social breakdown, ofc, which I'm sure not even most relativists/subjectivists (such as myself) would want.

If people of the same sex can define whatever unnatural sexual activity they want to engage in between themselves just because they can acheive it, then why can't a three hundred and fifty pound man convince an eighty pound nine year-old to engage in sex acts with him?

The difference is legal consent. The legal system recognises the fact that children are vulnerable and can be manipulated into behaving certain ways and traumatised/hurt just as easily. Therefore, we have a legal age of consent that applies specifically to the average age of appropriate social maturity to engage in sex with caution and reason. Once a person reaches the age of consent, they should be allowed to perform whatever sexual acts they please. Does same-sex sodomy actually have any reference or similarity to sexual consent that would allow the two to be paralleled or equalled in the minds of the public or lawmakers? I doubt it.

Should the issue be decided by relativism or absolutes?

I'm guessing you consider yourself an absolutist, and that you gain moral knowledge through God. Does God's will qualify as an absolute? Why can god's will be contradicted? Does the subjugative fear of judgement qualify as an absolute moral basis? No, morality because one's reasons to act morally would be relative to how much they fear hell or desire heaven.