It occurs to me that the
section of Annas’ Intelligent Virtue that I last commented on can be
interpreted to strengthen both Aristotelian and Platonic frameworks.
Consider this passage from
Annas, Chapter 5.
From the Aristotelian point of
view, this raises the familiar distinction between the good citizen and the
good man. The good citizen is good
relative to the regime. Someone who is a
good citizen in a democracy may not be a citizen at all in an aristocratic or
oligarchic regime, since Aristotle defines citizenship in terms of eligibility
for some level of public office. A good
citizen in the latter will necessarily defend aristocratic standards which
would be bad form in a democracy.
However, a good man is the same in every regime.
Aristotle points to reality as
it is observed in any time and place and tends to regard the invisible and the
intangible as abstractions. Plato, by
contrast, tends to regard the invisible and intangible as more real than the
concrete observables. I hold that
thinking of evolution in terms of “design-space”, as Daniel Dennett famously
does in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, is Platonic rather than Aristotelian.
Design space indicates all the
possible arrangements that a given system allows. Consider a simple, sequential toss of two
coins. The design space of this system
allows for four possibilities: heads, heads; tails, tails; heads, tails; and
tails, heads. Only one of these
positions in the system’s design space can be realized in a single action, but
all are equally possible.
While these possibilities can
be conceived of as mere abstractions from the coins actually in hand, this
seems metaphysically stingy. The four possibilities
are as real as the four routes stretching away from a crossroads. They are extensions of the time/design space
that open up from the ontological character of the coins and the practice of
coin-tossing. They are intangible and
invisible to be sure, but so is the potential energy of the coins held above
the ground; yet the potential energy is real and so are the positions in design
space.
Annas’ skill analogy suggests something
much more complex but equally real about a wide range of human activities. Consider baseball for an example. There are, perhaps, alternative ways that the
rules of the game might be designed.
That does not mean that the rules are arbitrary or that the arrangement
of the game is merely conventional. The
time it takes for a ball to be delivered from the pitcher to the catcher and
again from the catcher to the second baseman is very nearly the same as the
time it takes to run from first to second base.
From that the rules governing base stealing emerge. There might be other arrangements of the diamond
that would preserve the play; however, there are very many arrangements that
would ruin it. Baseball design space is
rather narrow in what it allows if the game is to be realized. I happen to think that is a case of
perfection that resulted from a close attention to Platonic forms.
Likewise with the development
of virtue, a rather narrow design space opens up out of human ends
(flourishing) and human capacities.
Virtue is no more selected for in evolutionary history than baseball;
however, both are the result of evolved capacities and inclinations. Only so many games are possible and only one
virtue is possible, regardless of the wide diversity of human cultures. Here Plato seems to me to be more informative
than Aristotle.
I would add a larger
reflection. Evolutionary cladograms in
the sense that they can be rearranged depending on what traits one is focusing
on. Yet the claim that these cladograms
reflect the actual history of organisms means that something very invisible and
intangible is nonetheless very real. That
every organism is the offspring of successful breeders is an ontological fact
about every organism, regardless of the fact that the ancestors are mostly all
gone. The fact that design space contains
certain possibilities for future evolution but not others (we probably aren’t
getting wings) is equally real. This
looks to me like a case of Platonic forms.
