Sitting on a log or a rock under a tree is natural; sitting in a comfy chair under a solid roof is unnatural. Lying down on a bed of leaves is natural; trying out 10 different mattresses is unnatural.
If we were to try to charitably steel-man the "unnatural = bad" argument, I wonder if it might not go something like this:
Humans have a particular nature (whatever that might be). Some technological developments are better suited to our nature than others - they help us sustain and restore health, for example. Others damage our nature. To the extent that an innovation is "unnatural," there may be an unrealized risk that we haven't appreciated its negative impact on our "nature." In medicine, it may be a "pharmakon" - where burdens and benefits are inextricably tied together, and the burdens can't be foreseen from what we know of the thing when we develop it.
This doesn't mean we stop innovating. However, we should innovate with an eye toward why we're doing what we're doing. The landscape has been afflicted by the automobile not because it's good for us, but because the tail has wagged the dog in how society reacted to mass produced automobiles. We fell into the present state of circumstances without much forethought. It feels the same with social media. Or, to use a medical example, no one could have anticipated such a thing as "chronic critical illness," people living in limbo for weeks or months in an ICU, when the mechanical ventilator was invented.
It's too simplistic a question to ask, "Well, does that mean we shouldn't have invented automobiles, social media, or the ventilator?" I think there are probably wiser ways to handle innovation than how we've done it. Neil Postman has some helpful guidance here: https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/classes/188/materials/postman.pdf
To the extent the "unnatural = bad" arguments holds any water, it might help us see how we should try to more wisely develop and use technologies in ways that help us, while also trying to anticipate the burdens of those innovations.
Wearing my philosopher hat now. I don't find any inherent moral or ethical dimensions to the adjectives, "natural" or "unnatural". But I do think the terms are extremely ill-defined generally. Progress or change is neither good nor bad inherently except when the ordinary use of the former term connotes change for the better, which is often the usage. But forward progress can be into a ditch or out of it!
I think technological reservation for many arises out of three tendencies: 1) a propensity to carry whatever we invent, however valuable, too far (witness: the auto; antibiotics/resistance), 2) a willingness to allow all of the control and much of the direct benefits of innovation to fall into fewer and fewer hands, and 3) change for changes’ sake (and change designed to keep people focussed upon having the “latest and greatest”) _intentionally presented_ as actual innovation—the mere fact of change inevitably presented innovative improvement to which everyone is simply intended to acquiesce.
I’ve been meaning to make a post about https://www.nuffieldbioethics.org/wp-content/uploads/Public-perceptions-of-naturalness-web.pdf for a while. Some of the public uses of “natural” are decent heuristics, for example “balanced or complex nature”: Novel technologies could upset this balance. I was planning to recommend figuring out which use of “natural” someone was using in order to properly address their concerns.
"Cultivated meat isn’t a dystopian future, factory-farmed meat is a dystopian present!"
I LOVE this line!
Sitting on a log or a rock under a tree is natural; sitting in a comfy chair under a solid roof is unnatural. Lying down on a bed of leaves is natural; trying out 10 different mattresses is unnatural.
Maybe I'm just being old fashioned, but I grew up believing that things could keep betting better and better.
If we were to try to charitably steel-man the "unnatural = bad" argument, I wonder if it might not go something like this:
Humans have a particular nature (whatever that might be). Some technological developments are better suited to our nature than others - they help us sustain and restore health, for example. Others damage our nature. To the extent that an innovation is "unnatural," there may be an unrealized risk that we haven't appreciated its negative impact on our "nature." In medicine, it may be a "pharmakon" - where burdens and benefits are inextricably tied together, and the burdens can't be foreseen from what we know of the thing when we develop it.
This doesn't mean we stop innovating. However, we should innovate with an eye toward why we're doing what we're doing. The landscape has been afflicted by the automobile not because it's good for us, but because the tail has wagged the dog in how society reacted to mass produced automobiles. We fell into the present state of circumstances without much forethought. It feels the same with social media. Or, to use a medical example, no one could have anticipated such a thing as "chronic critical illness," people living in limbo for weeks or months in an ICU, when the mechanical ventilator was invented.
It's too simplistic a question to ask, "Well, does that mean we shouldn't have invented automobiles, social media, or the ventilator?" I think there are probably wiser ways to handle innovation than how we've done it. Neil Postman has some helpful guidance here: https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/classes/188/materials/postman.pdf
To the extent the "unnatural = bad" arguments holds any water, it might help us see how we should try to more wisely develop and use technologies in ways that help us, while also trying to anticipate the burdens of those innovations.
Wearing my philosopher hat now. I don't find any inherent moral or ethical dimensions to the adjectives, "natural" or "unnatural". But I do think the terms are extremely ill-defined generally. Progress or change is neither good nor bad inherently except when the ordinary use of the former term connotes change for the better, which is often the usage. But forward progress can be into a ditch or out of it!
I think technological reservation for many arises out of three tendencies: 1) a propensity to carry whatever we invent, however valuable, too far (witness: the auto; antibiotics/resistance), 2) a willingness to allow all of the control and much of the direct benefits of innovation to fall into fewer and fewer hands, and 3) change for changes’ sake (and change designed to keep people focussed upon having the “latest and greatest”) _intentionally presented_ as actual innovation—the mere fact of change inevitably presented innovative improvement to which everyone is simply intended to acquiesce.
I’ve been meaning to make a post about https://www.nuffieldbioethics.org/wp-content/uploads/Public-perceptions-of-naturalness-web.pdf for a while. Some of the public uses of “natural” are decent heuristics, for example “balanced or complex nature”: Novel technologies could upset this balance. I was planning to recommend figuring out which use of “natural” someone was using in order to properly address their concerns.