[Serious] The Good

[Angrboda]

There are no objective final causes.

This seems strange to me. 

If you find an acorn on the ground, you know its final cause: to grow into an oak tree. That's objective.

It might fail to grow, or it might grow a little bit into a stunted oak tree. But it won't grow into an elephant or a dwarf star. That's all the Aristotelian four causes structure says. 

With humans it's more complicated. A human baby has a number of potentials, not all of which it can fulfill fully. The baby's teleology is to grow into a healthy human adult, that part is clear. But whether it should develop, say, musical potential, or choose to neglect that in favor of something else, makes the human case more complex than the acorn's. 

Ultimately the question of the Good, approached from this angle, is whether we can take this truth about human nature and work out what would be good for humans in every case. And again, nothing specific, probably, like "taking Flintstones vitamins" but more general, like health and opportunity.

That's efficient causes, not final causes. In the case of an acorn, final causes do no actual work. They are only causes in a figurative sense. It may be a useful way of conceiving things in order to facilitate understanding, but as far as picking out objective features of the universe, final causes aren't among them. I may intend to become a firefighter when I grow up. My intention alone doesn't cause my actually becoming a firefighter except insofar as it is an efficient cause which sets certain brain processes in motion. It is perhaps the confusion between intention as a metaphysical entity apart from matter and intention as a material, efficient cause which facilitates seeing final causes as causes at all. It's hard to see an acorn as having any kind of an intention at all. And the impotence of an acorn's so called final cause is amply illustrated by placing that acorn in outer space where no energy or matter interacts with it. Under such conditions it will not become anything other than what it is, an acorn. To attribute some sort of mysterious, metaphysical force as a final cause to its becoming an oak tree is simply to confuse the actual effect of efficient causes for something else. It may seem sensible to conceive of final causes as causes in the same sense that we conceive of mental causes as causes in and of themselves under a folk psychological theory of mind in which thoughts give rise to other thoughts, but it isn't the thoughts themselves that are magically causing the other thoughts to occur, it is the fact that the thoughts are a part of a physical system in which efficient causes transform energy and material states that are identified as one set of mental contents to result in the system assuming another state in which those other mental states exists. To speak of the thoughts themselves as causes independent of the system which they are a part is simply nonsense. And so the idea of final causes. To speak of final causes as something separate from and in addition to efficient causes is to ignore and neglect the actual efficient causes which are responsible for the effects attributed to the final causes. As such, the final causes are basically a fiction, to allow us to easily characterize complex processes as consisting of simpler mechanisms like intentions, goals and so on. But this is little more than a manner of speaking and understanding, and the mental abstraction of such doesn't exist in the world. It would be like saying that there are chemical reactions and that, even though theses chemical reactions ultimately reduce to quantum mechanical processes, in some sense chemical reactions are an objective part of the universe independent of the quantum mechanical processes. They aren't. In the same way, to speak of final causes as something other than a mental shorthand for the efficient causes is also nonsense. In that sense, final causes do not exist in the universe. They are a mental abstraction we use to aid our understanding of complex sets of efficient causes, nothing more. So to say that there are objective final causes is simply wrong, because there aren't. An acorn, regardless of any supposed natural course of development is never going to develop into an oak from final causes alone. The final causes contribute nothing to the acorn's development because they don't exist.

Robert Ingersoll once said that in nature there are no rewards and punishments; there are consequences. In a similar vein, there is no teleology in nature, and no final causes in the universe; only efficient causes and material processes. You've mistaken what is essentially nothing more than a mental abstraction for something more than a mental abstraction. Your mistake is understandable, but a mistake nonetheless.

Getting back to the original question, if there are efficient causes but not final ones, and this seems to be the case, then there is no teleology in the universe, as efficient causes do not have goals. Gravity doesn't seek to attract things together, it just does. The acorn doesn't become an oak tree because it has the potential to be an oak tree and a final cause of being an oak tree, an acorn becomes an oak because certain invariants of ordered relations, namely the laws of physics exist, and those laws of physics under the right circumstances yield an oak tree, and under another circumstance they yield nothing at all. It's sometimes said that it's the desires to make a baby which result in a person's creation, but it's rightly pointed out that it is the cheeseburgers that a mother eats which had more to do with your creation. Material causes cannot choose to be other than what they are, and so them being one way or the other is simply an inevitability. My heart does not pump blood "because" that's its function. Suspend a few of the laws of nature and you'll find the heart no longer does that at all. It is the regularity or nature, the ordered predictability of material processes, which allows us to infer that something is fit for one behavior and not fit for another. But this fitness for function is only a consequence of the heart being a part of a system in which its supposed "natural" function will take place, failing any interference in it doing so. Like the acorn, this isn't because the heart is somehow "naturally" destined to pump blood, but simply because of the absence of those other circumstances in which the heart would not actually pump blood. You are mistaking the contingent features, the existence of specific circumstances and the existence of specific laws of nature, for necessary features of the universe. It is not a necessary fact that a heart will pump blood, nor that an acorn will grow into an oak. To say that one set of circumstances is an example of the natural function of the heart or the acorn and the other is not is simply to express a preference for one set of contingent facts over the other. The preference for the one rather than the other, and the confusion that one typically sees the one set of contingent facts and not the other and thus infers that in more than a statistical sense the circumstance is "normal," are both mere facts of mind. The universe doesn't care whether the acorn grows into an oak, or that the heart actually pumps blood. To say that these are in some sense the "natural" function is purely a subjectivity, not an objective truth about the universe. An acorn sitting alone in deep space is every bit as much fulfilling its function to not become an oak under that set of conditions, just as another acorn, fortunately finding itself on the surface of a planet will grow into an oak and under those circumstances, growing to an oak will be its function. But there is nothing in either the acorn itself, or the universe at large, which says that an acorn sitting in deep space is somehow an aberration and a pathological existence and one comfortably ensconced in rich soil is not. An acorn is just an acorn. It has no necessary function, and there is no "right" set of conditions under which it "should" exist. Any such attributed function is simply a misunderstanding.

If, as I say, there are no final causes, and there aren't, then nothing has a necessary or intended function, and the non-theistic case for the good essentially collapses. Do you have another way of conceiving of the good which doesn't rely upon your particular, in my view mistaken, understanding of the nature of final causes, function, and teleology?

(ETA: It might help to visualize a slightly different world than the one we currently inhabit. Currently, the overwhelming majority of acorns grow into oaks because their existing under the right set of circumstances to grow into an oak is more common than anything else. But imagine a world in which that is not the case. Imagine a world in which the overwhelming majority of acorns exist in deep space and never become anything other than acorns. In that world, we would come to the conclusion, along your line of reasoning, that the function of an acorn was to remain an acorn. Sure, the odd acorn might accidentally become an oak, but it's doing so would simply be an accidental frustration of its natural function to remain an acorn. My question is what necessary feature exists in our actual world which doesn't exist in that hypothetical world? If you can't name such a necessary feature, then I'd suggest it is because there is no such necessary feature, and to speak of an acorn's function as growing into an oak is nothing more than either to infer that the way things are is the way they should be (a fallacy), or to infer that one's preference for the actual world rather than the hypothetical world is an objective truth (which it is not). Both avenues lead to failure. Do you see any other way of arguing that the actual world is somehow the way the world should be and the other world is not?)

(ETA2: Oh, and a point of fact. Under the right circumstances, say a world filled with mad scientists perverting the biology of innocent acorns, an acorn might very well grow into an elephant. It might take a different kind of mad scientist for it to grow into a dwarf star, but that, too, is certainly possible. Your claim that an acorn will not grow into an elephant or a dwarf star simply reveals your lack of imagination, and a general inability to conceive of such possibilities. So, no, even there you are wrong. It is the existence of one specific set of circumstances rather than another which determines whether the acorn grows into an oak, or an elephant, or a dwarf star. There is no reason for one set of circumstances to prevail rather than another, aside from contingent facts of existence and the possibly contingent laws of nature.)

(As an aside for Khem, imagine a world in which people like to die, like to be stabbed, and prefer dysfunction to order and well being. In such a world, that which you identify as harm would no longer be considered harm and would no longer be bad. Thus it is our living in one world rather than the other which makes what you have identified as harm in your set of morals as harm and therefore bad. But morality isn't simply an accidental set of circumstances which give rise to certain empirical truths and not others. If morals are objective, and harm being bad is an objective feature of the universe, then there must exist some necessary feature other than the mere contingent facts of existence which results in, say, killing someone being bad in one world, and killing someone not being bad in the other world. If there is no necessary reason for the facts being one way rather than the other, your moral theory collapses as it depends upon identifying contingent facts as necessary ones, which is simply a mistake.)