BioInspired! So What? Now What!

Online Talk by Philipp Höfele on Monday, 13. November 2023, 20:00 CET / 14:00 EST

In this debate [about the Antropocene], the potential and the special position of nature-imitating technologies is increasingly emphasized, that they offer promising approaches to solve many of these challenges. From an ontological, epistemological and ethical perspective, however, the question arises as to the reasons why such imitation can be accompanied by normative claims such as the so-called ‘biomimetic promise’. Natural phenomena and processes can neither be understood as sustainable per se, nor can they be ascribed normativity, if one does not want to succumb to a naturalistic fallacy from what is to what ought to be.

It seems to be promising to broaden the view for the evaluation of this nevertheless widespread opinion and to ask for the ontological-ethical approaches to justification and their validity as a basis for such an assumption by going back to the nature-ethical ‘naturam sequi’ argument, which has already been advocated several times and discussed intensively. Here, two things have to be considered: on the one hand, what is axiologically understood as having value, i.e. the ‘object domain’ of ethical appreciation. But the principle ‘to follow nature (naturam sequi)’ is at the same time to be understood as guiding action; it is, in other words, at the same time deontologically relevant, insofar as duties or at least orientations judged as ‘good’ are to be derived from nature for ethically right action.