Hacker News Reader

Wonderful essay. I strongly recommend After Virtue as an introductory text to why virtue ethics is so important in the modern world. I find it very unfortunate that telos, the end-directed nature of people and our tools, has been wiped out by a focus on Darwinian evolutionary explanations.

View on HN

I feel like the main barrier to teleological thinking is an overreliance on generalisations and statistical thinking to navigate hard problems, which inherently erase important details rather than highlighting them.

Nature does not have telos, but human creations very much do!

Evolution does not contradict teleology, BTW; you can use genetic algorithms in an attempt to reach a well-defined outcome.

nature can have telos without a supernatural explanation. I would argue that evolution is itself a teleological process: it optimises organisms to a fitness function over time. It's purpose-driven without an entity in control.

Reality is full of teleological processes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com