Talk:Appeal to nature

message: To start this discussion, I wrote ,  We have two examples that fit this criteria, Baggini (2004) and Flew (1998). A superior Wikipedia article would not need any examples at all, but at least we should use inclusion criteria that gives us clear and useful examples while preventing spam, soapboxing, etc. --Ronz (talk) 16:16, 13 May 2019 (UTC)
replies: text:  fixed it, thank you. Barca (talk) 17:05, 20 May 2019 (UTC)
thread_title: Discussion

message: From my perspective, the following paragraph, which used to conclude the lead, is very far from a neutral, encyclopedic argument: 
For example, it might be argued that polio is good because it is natural. In practice, polio has little to recommend it, and if there were any good effects to be found, they would not be specifically because it's a natural disease, as an artificial disease could well have the same properties.
This is an argument against a certain kind of unthinking bias, which adds more bias than it subtracts. 
What it rejects could be termed a philosophy of biocratic fatalism (parallel to theocratic fatalism; see problem of evil). 
The theocratic argument goes like this: 
* God created the universe 
* God is infinitely good 
* therefore the sum total of the universe is infinitely good 
* polio is part of the universe 
* God moves in mysterious ways 
* free will is not free as in beer 
* suck it up, pussycat 
* adversity breeds character 
* character breeds admission into the eternal kingdom 
It your culture is steeping in that argument chain (as my childhood was, with my father in the Christian ministry) you might be tempted to bring a certain set of perspectives to the question of appeal to nature, such as allowing the legitimacy of any appeal to nature mandating a broad-spectrum fatalism concerning all things "natural". 
Closer to the heart of the matter, we live in a philosophically uncertain relationship with nature. We want to change things, but we don't want to drive the sustaining apple cart over a cliff. There's a central problem of induction in determining precisely where this boundary lies. 
I would slot polio 80% into the "clear" quadrant of the Cynefin framework. In that sense, it's a cherry picked example. Normally we don't expend a great deal of philosophical hot air debating deep conceptual issues in the clear quadrant. 
We already have the eradication of smallpox as an example of surprisingly few unanticipated consequences. We always do this. When we get any result this clean, we completely forget about it as we fixate on the ones that got out of hand. Without blame, no attention. QED. 
On the other hand, a great deal of nature lies on the boundary between chaos and complex (almost as vexing). Pretty much the whole of ecology lies in "complex", despite much spilling out into true chaos or mere complications. 
A central, existential issue in any biological context is reproduction and continuation of the species. 
There are many people these days who believe that cultural plasticity has entirely kicked nature to the curb concerning the ancient nature versus nurture debate. However, there's an unstated superposition principle. If culture can remake any single aspect of nature that you point to, there's no principled reason why culture can't win all these battles simultaneously. You see, every one of these cultural interventions (over nature) is linearly additive without friction. Linear systems don't generate chaos. But non-linear systems generate chaos at the drop of a pin, and with more elements interacting simultaneously, tendency toward chaos as a governing dynamic rises exponentially. It's barmy to leave this unstated. We have no philosophical reason to believe that thousands or millions of disparate cultural innovations are linearly additive; meanwhile, there is much empirical evidence to the contrary.  
There are two main issues in the reproductive domain that are culturally active. We mainly fixate on sexual preference. This debate has a long history of invoking the natural order (whether biocratic or theocratic). Far less contentious is modern birth control. We all know this is a giant, unknowable experiment in the constitution of the human species and our final footprint on planet Earth. We are 100% playing with something we don't understand. Already with the inversion of the population pyramids in almost all wealthy societies, we are in terra incognito in our intergenerational politics. Populism is surging. Chaos has many possible fathers. This is one. 
In the formal context, modern induction works by extrapolating over similarity. See AIXI for the gory details. When we start looking for similarities in the rest of global biodiversity for apex populations with highly inverted population pyramids, we don't find any. It's not "natural" in the sense of having any natural history to contemplate (or ransack for supposed guardrails). 
Oh, but because our intervention against polio troubles us barely at all, the extension of "natural" to the introduction of the birth control pill in the 1950s is a bird of the same feather? 
I would argue the contrary. Birds of the same feather only if the bird is a scarecrow, and its wings are fabricated out of straw. 
I'm clearly too deep into this to make an impartial edit, so this shall count as my entire contribution. — MaxEnt 14:29, 1 October 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Removed paragraph from lead