The Moral Authority of Nature For thousands of years people have used nature to justify their political moral and social judgments. Such appeals to the moral authority of nature are still very much with us today as heated debates over genetically modified organisms and human cloning testify. The Moral Authority of Nature offers a wide ranging account of how people have used nature to think about what counts as good beautiful just or valuable. The eighteen essays cover a diverse array of topics including the connection of cosmic and human orders in ancient Greece medieval notions of sexual disorder early modern contexts for categorizing individuals and judging acts as against nature race and the origin of humans ecological economics and radical feminism. The essays also range widely in time and place from archaic Greece to early twentieth century China medieval Europe to contemporary America. Scholars from a wide variety of fields will welcome The Moral Authority of Nature which provides the first sustained historical survey of its topic. Contributors: Danielle Allen Joan Cadden Lorraine Daston Fa ti Fan Eckhardt Fuchs Valentin Groebner Abigail J. Lustig Gregg Mitman Michelle Murphy Katharine Park Matt Price Robert N. Proctor Helmut Puff Robert J. Richards Londa Schiebinger Laura Slatkin Julia Adeney Thomas Fernando Vidal Frontmatter Contents Introduction : Doing What Comes Naturally Introduction 1 : Measuring Authority Authoritative Measures: Hesiods Works and Days 2 : Nature in Person: Medieval and Renaissance Allegories and Emblems 3 : Burning The Fable of the Bees: The Incendiary Authority of Nature 4 : Attention and the Values of Nature in the Enlightenment 5 : The Erotic Authority of Nature: Science Art and the Female during Goethes Italian Journey 6 : Nature and Bildung: Pedagogical Naturalism in Nineteenth Century Germany 7 : Economics Ecology and the Value of Nature Introduction 8 : Trouble in the Earthly Paradise: The Regime of Nature in Late Medieval Christian Culture 9 : Nature on Trial: Acts Against Nature in the Law Courts of Early Modern Germany and Switzerland 10 : Onanism Enlightenment Medicine and the Immanent Justice of Nature 11 : Ants and the Nature of Nature in Auguste Forel Erich Wasmann and William Morton Wheeler 12 : To Become As One Dead : Nature and the Political Subject in Modern Japan 13 : Liberation through Control in the Body Politics of U.S. Radical Feminism Introduction 14 : Complexio Complexion: Categorizing Individual Natures 1250 1600 15 : Human Experimentation in the Eighteenth Century: Natural Boundaries and Valid Testing 16 : Nature and Nation in Chinese Political Thought: The National Essence Circle in Early Twentieth Century China 17 : When Pollen Became Poison: A Cultural Geography of Ragweed in America 18 : Three Roots of Human Recency: Molecular Anthropology the Refigured Acheulean and the UNESCO Response to Auschwitz List of Contributors Index