As a scientist, it's hard not to love Aristotle's approach to ethics. When considering the question: "what is the good life" for a human being, Aristotle went straight to the data and recognized the importance of first characterizing a "human being" using the empirical evidence. Humans, concluded Aristotle, don't just grow and move like plants and animals, respectively, but they also, unlike all other living things, rationalize, and so the good life for humans is to grow, move and, especially, reason well to act in accordance with virtue.
Aristotle did a damn good job for an ancient Greek. However, our empirical world has expanded and, consequently, our understanding of what makes a "human being" has *ahem* evolved since Aristotle's time. Any biologist or virtuous rational thinker with access to empirical evidence will tell you that, provided this world isn't the Matrix, humans evolved from chimps, chimps evolved from primates, primates from mammals, and so on to the base of the tree of life. All living things on Earth arose from a common ancestor, evolved, speciated and evolved some more. Out of this rotisserie of speciation, evolution, and extinction emerged a talkative bunch of apes that make tools, talk about themselves being human and moralize about the good life.
Over the next couple of posts, I'm going to entertain to what extent we can use modern biology to characterize human nature enough to postulate a good life for human beings and, if so, what is the good life? How are humans evolving with the rise of a rainforest of tools from iPhones to the internet, and how can we keep our sight on a good life in a changing world? All the while, we will beware the naturalist's fallacy of saying "because it is in our nature or evolutionary history, it is therefore good". Humans may have evolved psychological adaptations to allow us to murder, rape and be in polygamous relationships (as evidenced from the coronal ridge of the penis, which is remarkably good at uptaking competitors' sperm), but that doesn't mean it's good.
At best, I suspect that we can arrive at an ethical prescription combining some utilitarianism and enlightened self-interest with game-theoretic arguments for how humans react/interact and resource-consumption + innovation models for how human actions modify their environment. My hope is to avoid the worst, namely a modern eugenics somewhere near my current suspicions - a sad but honest realization that human nature is, as all evolutionary systems are, ultimately defined by a struggle for existence, a zero-sum competition between races or cultural groups, in which case perhaps the secret to a good life lies in finding peace with war: "may God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."
Tentatively, I plan to hack into the forest of unanswered questions with the following branches of thought in sight:
1) What is a human and its environment?
2) How are humans and their environment changing?
3) How do human actions and ethics modify the human environment?
4) What is a good life for a living thing, given the environmental context in which it has evolved?
5) What are possible "ethically stable states" - ethics which, if adopted by enough people, produces a stable environment and some form of stable, good life for the humans evolving in that environment.
In short, this modern approach will attempt to reconsider the biological insight into the good life, given the evolving human biological, cultural, political and tool systems in which this good life should take place. Can we give any lasting advice to humans 2,000 years from now?
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