ASEBL Journal – Volume 13 Issue 1, January 201 8
Kant’s antinomy of judgment and its inability to move from the observation of pur-
posiveness in individual organisms to a coherent account of purposiveness in nature as
a whole – there is no universal coherence at present, and any future movement to-
wards coherence requires human agency as a participating principle within the system
of nature – which is also consonant with Fox Keller’s argument for agency.
The ramifications of a pluralistic teleological scheme for debates about human di-
rected evolution are numerous, and I will only sketch out a small number before draw-
ing to a conclusion. At the outset, I would argue that pluralistic conceptions of human
nature should be assumed to be part of moral sense, and should be understood as hav-
ing pragmatic value.
As a way of employing this pluralistic teleological scheme to clarify the current de-
bate, I would start with the notion that competing claims for or against the advance-
ment of human directed evolution should first be examined to determine their teleo-
logical stance. These embedded teleological claims should then be judged, not by at-
tempting to evaluate or compare their claims to truth, based as they are on distinct,
incommensurable theistic or quasi-materialistic hypotheses. Instead, they should be
judged according to their power to actuate our deepest hopes and aspirations, to mar-
shal actual human communities towards a fuller discourse on what it means to be hu-
man, and what “bettering human life” might actually look like. Such a pragmatic dis-
course would actively work to incorporate multiple viewpoints, even sharply contra-
dictory ones, rather than seeking to silence the other side or reduce their arguments to
logical or spiritual impossibilities.
A pragmatic approach to teleology in this sense allows for the opening up of a “neu-
tral ground” where theologically-grounded arguments concerning human directed
evoluti