Morality Naturalized in La Mettrie's Machine Man (and Violated by Sade)
Presented by Dr. John Grey, MSU Department of Philosophy, Introduction by Michael Rodriguez, MSU Libraries.
Cosponsored by Romance and Classical Studies, The Laurence Porter Colloquium Series
Materialism had a bad reputation in eighteenth century Europe. Many
held that materialist philosophy would, via the slipperiest of slopes,
lead its proponents into degenerate, immoral, and irreligious behavior.
Materialist authors in this tradition responded to such criticism by
developing naturalistic moral theories; typically, these were theories
according to which humans are by nature inclined toward some canonical
moral virtues, and by nature averse to some moral vices. Materialists
who pursued this strategy, like Julien Offray de la Mettrie, had a nice
reply to their critics' moralizing: there are purely natural forces
causing humans to tend toward virtue and away from vice, so recognizing
that humans are merely biological machines will not lead to moral decay.
But this argumentative strategy has an interesting flaw. It requires us
to draw a line between those passions that nature dictates we act on
and those that nature dictates we resist. Yet (as the writings of the
Marquis de Sade suggest) philosophical naturalism, drawn to its logical
conclusion, makes it difficult to draw such a line in any non-arbitrary
way.
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