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Letters
Letters
What Is Life, Anyway? • Coerced Into Liberty • Strung Out Physicists • Divine Hope Dries Up • States Of Souls • Morality Lives On, And On • Poetic Morality
What Is Life, Anyway?
Dear Editor: In Issue 83 of Philosophy Now, under the heading ‘The Soup and the Scaffolding’, Raymond Tallis considers Craig Venter’s changed “view of the definition of life and of how life works” following Venter’s announcement that the team he leads had created the world’s first artificial life form. Tallis goes on to challenge “the implication that it should have the same effect on us” through a detailed analysis of the biochemistry of living cells.
A reader may be forgiven for thinking that Tallis was writing for New Scientist rather than for Philosophy Now. And yet he urges scepticism “toward those who think that current biological concepts – useful and illuminating though they are – will take us all the way to understanding life.” So would not conceptual questions concerning the category ‘life’ be more appropriately considered in this magazine by addressing such matters as the extent of the concept’s rational and logical application, life’s stability or otherwise, its ontological distinctiveness and metaphysical status, etc, rather than addressing the biological concepts on which he focuses?
Colin Brookes, Leicestershire
Coerced Into Liberty
Dear Editor: In his essay ‘What is Liberalism?’ in Issue 82, which contrary to the suggestion of its title is quite didactic instead of informational, Phil Badger writes: “there are ways to defend the aspects of autonomy we want to jealously guard – religious freedom, choice of life partner, etc (I call these our ‘large-scale concepts of the good’) – and simultaneously accept that certain other choices might be curtailed on the grounds of preventing suffering or promoting the autonomy of others (taxation to subsidise support for disabled people, for example).
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