nature and nurture

"Ethics, Imagination, and the Method of Wittgenstein's Tractatus"
by Cora Diamond
in The New Wittgenstein
edited by Alice Crary and Rupert Reed
London: Routledge
2000

I've mentioned a couple of times that I'm not terribly interested in the nature vs. nurture debate. This is because I think it actually occludes the issue - people don't talk about what they mean to be talking about. This is because of the belief that what is produced by nature is immutable, and what is produced by nurture is within our control. And if something is immutable, it is off the table, in a way - there's no point in trying to change it, or having a value system that says it should be changed. It would also be unrealistic as a policy matter to try and change things.

Unfortunately this is false. That which is a result of nature, as well as that which is a result of nurture, is mutable. We can change it, if we know how. (Consider that it could be rather hard to figure out how to change something by raising people differently - perhaps almost as hard as figuring out how to change it by other means).

The real issue is different. The real questions we should be asking: what is in our reach, and in what sense? What sort of necessity is in play here - practical, physical, logical? What should we be trying to change?

To get back to Diamond: in her article, she discusses an idea of evil as an attitude towards the world that is something like frustration that it does not simply bend to one's whims. I would put the point rather differently: there are a lot of things that we're not, and never will be, in a position to change - like what I ate for lunch yesterday, or whether energy is conserved in a closed system. Getting frustrated by these things - indeed, getting frustrated by the very idea of factual necessities - is a problem. It means that you haven't really taken to heart the point that the business of human life is action. Part of that means coming to grips with being a finite creature. Part of it means getting a clear view of what can be changed - what it is in one's power to change - and deciding what to do.