The Moral Authority of Nature

by Lorraine Daston (Editor), Fernando Vidal

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.


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

Genres: Philosophy, History, Nonfiction

519 pages, Paperback

First published December 15, 2003

About the author

Lorraine Daston (born June 9, 1951, East Lansing, Michigan)[1] is an American historian of science. Executive director of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) in Berlin, and visiting professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, she is considered an authority on Early Modern European scientific and intellectual history. In 1993, she was named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Reviews

[Pete · Rating 3 out of 5]

Daston and Vidal's introduction makes some interesting points about the role of nature in making possible scientific disinterestedness. I also thought their point about the specific conditions under which the 'denaturalizing' work of critique can function was interesting. Daston's chapter is fascinating and really fun to read, concerning how zealous naturalists during the Enlightenment provided an historically specific model of attention and disciplined observation that served as the basis for future ideals of the scientific gaze. I assume this chapter is the seed for her book on objectivity with Gallison. Price's chapter on value in neoclassical and ecological economics, and environmental ethics was a good summary, especially with regard to his remarks on the shared ground between neoclassical and ecological economics. All three of these theorizations of value could usefully be compared to Taylor's discussion of the 'modern, buffered self' in A Secular Age. One particular point that I found interesting was that, in theory, under both neoclassical and ecological economics, nature has no moral authority apart from its ability to sustain human life (this would be Taylor's modern, anthropocentric, immanent morality, I guess). The chapter by Fan and Thomas were interesting explorations of how nature has been used in the context of different variants of nationalism (Japanese and Chinese, respectively). Finally, Mitman's chapter is really interesting, charting how anthropogenic activity has created the conditions for ragweed (a native species) to thrive, how social institutions have responded by regulating ragweed, and how we now regulate our bodies medically to deal with it. Overall, interesting and eclectic.