The Morality of Nature: A Response to Mill's On Nature

Mill’s On Nature explores the morality of the environment and questions whether nature should be approached as a guiding set of principles for ethical living. In order to make these distinctions and evaluate nature on a moral scale, Mill posits that we must differentiate between the multiple definitions of nature to prevent the fallacy of equivocation and hence, ambiguity. The first definition denotes Nature as a collective name for everything which is and the aggregate of all its properties. However, Mill asserts that the obedience of nature in this sense is meaningless and absurd: it is impossible to defy the laws of nature if man has no other power but to follow it. 

Therefore, Mill presents an alternative definition of Nature that “is a name for everything which is of itself, without voluntary human intervention” (Mill 4). The doctrine of following nature in this second sense assumes natural as intrinsically good and artificial as inherently bad.

In fact, there seems to be a double standard of expectations: “Nearly all the things which men are hanged or imprisoned for doing to one another are nature’s every-day performances” (Mill 11). Society accepts that nature impales men, burns them to death, and hunts them with wild beasts, but cannot tolerate when humans carry out those actions. 

In short, Mill asserts that “conformity to nature has no connection whatever with right or wrong” (Mill 13). I concur with Mill’s view and argue that if the so-called right thing must be taught to us through our parents and our natural behavior must be disciplined, who is to say that nature itself is something good that we should strive to emulate? Suppose we consider voluntary human intervention as the qualification of artificiality and unnaturalness. In that case, virtuous character should be evaluated through the instinctual actions humans perform without influence and teachings from mankind. If we consider our artificial selves more capable of ethical judgment, we must consider why humans still associate ‘Nature’ or ‘natural’ as the ideal guiding example of morality. 

To this end, Mill identifies and acknowledges that humans’ fascination with big, grand things in nature “excite feelings which make all human enterprises and powers appear so insignificant” that nature assumes sublimity over us and imposes underlying terror to subconsciously subdue humans into obedience through a sense of moral obligation (Mill 10). Nonetheless, aesthetic sophistication does not correlate with morality and therefore, we should not follow the laws of nature blindly simply because we are in awe of it.

Ultimately, Mill asserts and I agree that “the duty of man is to cooperate with the beneficent powers, not by imitating, but by perpetually striving to amend, the course of nature (Mill 15). The exercise of our control to alter nature does not nullify the awe-striking quality of our environment or diminish its greatness in any sense but purely concedes that although nature can guide or suggest humans toward a moral or ethical decision, we have to power to improve upon it to conform to a high standard of justice and goodness.