A different way of summarizing telos that may be helpful when discussing this topic is that an object or agent fulfilling it’s telos is supposed to be the most fully itself. So, for Aquinas and Aristotle, because the quality that most clearly sets off the category ‘human’ is “a reasoning animal” actions that interfere with that part of human identity are unnatural and interfere with telos.
When Charlton Heston was on the Planet of the Apes and he found that human beings were no longer differentiated by their reasoning powers (which were sub-par) but by their hairlessness, should he have devoted his life to keeping exceptionally well-shaved?
I might end up saying that reasoning was still the ne plus ultra and that apes and humans had a lot of overlapping telos. Apes and humans might end up like men and women or like Einstein and normal people; there are other salient differences, but the ability to reason would still be the thing you’d pare off last. (People would be more likely to recognize a hairy human as human than one that didn’t claim to be conscious).
When Charlton Heston was on the Planet of the Apes and he found that human beings were no longer differentiated by their reasoning powers (which were sub-par) but by their hairlessness, should he have devoted his life to keeping exceptionally well-shaved?
(this question brought to you by my continuing confusion with teleology)
I posted answers, so far as I have them, to your questions in the linked discussion.
Very many thanks!
I might end up saying that reasoning was still the ne plus ultra and that apes and humans had a lot of overlapping telos. Apes and humans might end up like men and women or like Einstein and normal people; there are other salient differences, but the ability to reason would still be the thing you’d pare off last. (People would be more likely to recognize a hairy human as human than one that didn’t claim to be conscious).