The Moral Authority of Nature.

AuthorCheck, Terence
PositionBook review

The Moral Authority of Nature. Edited by Lorraine Daston and Fernando Vidal. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004; pp. vii + 519. $65.00 cloth; $26.00 paper.

Participants in debates over public policy have used Nature as a rhetorical trope to justify a wide range of ideological positions. Both moralists who preach against homosexuality and environmentalists who warn of the dangers of genetically modified organisms label "unnatural" those behaviors or actions to which they are opposed. Preservationists have invoked the sublime majesty of nature to call for the protection of wild spaces. Politicians respond to natural disasters by reminding audiences of nature's immense destructive power. In all of these instances, rhetors infuse nature with value and perhaps even motive, and then use the authority vested in nature to justify their positions.

Although they do not mention the Aristotelian concept of the enthymeme specifically, Lorraine Daston and Fernando Vidal, in their edited collection, The Moral Authority of Nature, remind readers that this process works best when audiences do not even perceive these appeals. Doing "what comes naturally," they argue, "hides a whole history of attempts to define what should come naturally" (23; emphasis in original). The authors have collected eighteen essays that attempt to chart this history by exploring how nature's authority works in different contexts and in different time periods. The contributors represent a diverse array of academic fields, including the history of science, classics, philosophy, psychology, and history.

The back cover of the paper edition of the book claims, correctly, that appeals to the moral authority of nature are with us today. But argumentation scholars who are interested in contemporary disputes such as cloning or gay marriage may be disappointed by the esoteric and obscure texts that the contributors analyze in this volume. The essays cover topics such as pedagogical naturalism in nineteenth-century Germany, descriptions of nature in late medieval Christian culture, and trial records and legal manuals from early modern European countries. Nonetheless, those with an interest in environmental rhetoric and the history and rhetoric of science will find many of these essays fascinating. Argumentation scholars always have been interested in understanding how people construct power and credibility through knowledge and experience, and this collection explicates the subtle...

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