On Telos and Genetic Manipulation

Abstract

In 1981, in my Animal Right~ an~ HI.lllBJl Morality, [1] I gained the perhaps dubious distinction of attempting to rouse the Aris­ totelian concept of teJ.:os from the dogmatic slumber in which it had long lain, attended to only by Scholastic philosophers. It ap­ pearedto me (and still does) that the notion of telos provides a sound basis from which to deduce the rights of animals of different species, even as human rights have been based in plausible hypotheses about hl.lllBJl nature. In so far as different kinds of animals are built in different sorts of ways for differ­ ent sorts of things and in so far as these differences are rooted in biological, gene­ tically based, empirically ascertainable, environmentally expressed blueprints, I saw nothing problematic about the concept of telos that would not also trouble both the ordinary and the scientific notions of spe­ cies, or perhaps, sub-species, depending upon what one takes as a basic unit of classifica­ tion. Both cOIllllOn sense and mcx:1ern biology, after all, note that fish gotta swim and birds gotta fly, as Professor Harlan Miller put it in reviewing my book. Furthenrore, as I argued later, once one had leaped positiv­ istic and behavioristic hurdles about animal consciousness, one could generate a notion of happiness and unhappiness for different sorts of animals in terms of whether or not they were in a position to fulfill their telos, or to engage in those activities whose infringe­ ment or thwarting matter most to them. [2]

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