I.i. Preliminary qualification: anti-subjectivism

In this section, I attempt to explicate Hegel's conception of evaluative judgments or ‘judgments of the concept’. Before doing so, however, I should make a clarificatory point to forestall possible misunderstandings. In offering an account of a certain type of judgment, namely, judgments of the concept, Hegel does not take himself to be giving an account merely of our evaluative attitudes towards or subjective take on the world, which might for all we know possess or lack the normative features we project onto it. Rather, Hegel's account of judgments of the concept is meant to describe features (in particular, normative properties like goodness and badness) that the subjects of those judgments can have independently of our subjective states or representations. For Hegel, value in general is not a merely subjective projection on our (or any other valuing creatures’) part. In other words, certain things would be good or bad, normatively sound or defective, even if creatures capable of using evaluative language had never evolved.

By way of support for this anti-subjectivist point, as we might label it, consider the following pieces of textual evidence. Hegel prefaces his discussion of judgments (evaluative or otherwise) in the Encyclopaedia by telling us that ‘[t]he judgment is not our subjective doing, by which this or that predicate is ascribed to the object’ (Enz.: §166Z).Footnote ² He begins the next paragraph by elaborating:

What are we to make of these passages? Hegel here pits his account of judgments against the orthodox or ‘usual’ view, according to which judgments are a ‘subjective doing’ or a mental ‘operation’ whereby some predicate or universal representation ‘is ascribed to the object’. Accordingly, when he goes on to say that ‘every thing is a singular which is inwardly a universality’, he cannot be using ‘universality’ to describe a feature of certain subjective representations (namely, concepts as they are ‘usually taken’) that are predicated, in some mental ‘operation’, of an object. Rather, when Hegel writes, as a gloss on the claim that ‘every thing is a judgment’, that ‘every thing is a singular which is inwardly a universality or inner nature’, he is telling us that every object or thing (that is, every ‘singular’) bears certain properties or universals which jointly articulate that thing's ‘inner nature’. That a ‘singular’ bears some property or universal might (but need not) be registered by a ‘subjective doing’ (that is, by a judgment as these are ‘usually taken’). These general considerations about judgments go for evaluative judgments in particular, too. When we make some evaluative judgment, understood as a mental ‘operation’, we are not (primarily or only) attributing to an object some subjective representation, namely, a predicate like ‘good’ or ‘bad’. We are instead registering that some object, thing or ‘singular’ bears some property or universal, in this case, a normative property. And again, that some object bears a normative property, for example, goodness, might be (but does not depend on its being) registered by a ‘subjective doing’ or mental ‘operation’ on our part.

I.ii Truth as the correspondence of object and concept

With this anti-subjectivist qualification in place, let us now focus on Hegel's account of evaluative judgments or ‘judgments of the concept’ itself.Footnote ³ Some of the examples of judgments of the concept that Hegel provides are ‘This house is bad’, ‘This action is good’, ‘This body is diseased’, ‘A certain work of art is beautiful’. What characterizes judgments like these? The most general feature of these sorts of evaluative statements—Hegel tells us—is that they ‘can contain truth’ (Enz.: §172A) or have a content that is true (or untrue, as the case may be). In order to understand the precise sense in which evaluative judgments can contain truth for Hegel, we need to consider the contrast he draws between truth and what he calls ‘correctness [Richtigkeit]’.

Correctness—we read—consists in ‘the formal agreement of our representation with its content’ (Enz.: §172Z). Thus, to use Hegel's own example, the judgment ‘The rose is red’ will be correct just in case our representation, expressed in that judgment, agrees with its content, that is, just in case the rose that judgment is about is indeed red. Truth, for its part, ‘consists in the agreement of the object with itself, i.e. with its concept’ (Enz.: §172Z). In other words, an object (a house, living body, an action or a work of art) counts as ‘true’ just in case it satisfies certain criteria that define the concept, kind or type to which the object belongs.Footnote ⁴ Houses, for example, are the type of things whose function or end is to provide shelter to its inhabitants. A bad house will be bad or untrue in that it fails to meet criteria that characterize houses as members of the function kind to which they belong, for example, by having thin walls, leaks in the ceilings or being otherwise badly insulated.Footnote ⁵

Truth, then, understood as the correspondence of an object with its concept, or of a thing with its kind or nature, is the most general concept of normative appraisal, which encompasses the more specific terms mentioned in the examples of judgments of the concept above: good, healthy, just or beautiful. Judgments of the concept characterize a thing or object as good (or healthy, just, beautiful or, in general, true) in the light of its satisfaction of criteria that define the kind or concept to which the thing belongs. As Hegel puts it: ‘The predicates good, bad, true, beautiful, correct, etc. express that the thing is measured against its general concept […] and is, or is not, in agreement with it’ (WL: 344/657–58).Footnote ⁶

Two implications of Hegel's account of truth and judgments of the concept, as I have here sketched it, bear underscoring. First, the concept or kind to which a thing belongs serves as an ‘ought’, a normative standard or rule against which that thing is compared and accordingly judged to be good or bad: ‘In [the] judgment [of the concept] the concept is laid down as the basis [ist zugrunde gelegt] […] it is an ought to which the reality may or may not be adequate’ (WL: 344/657). Thus, normative evaluation for Hegel is internal or immanent in that it proceeds in accordance with criteria that are the object's own (qua member of its kind) and not in accordance with some external standard, including our or any other valuing creatures’ interests or attitudes.

The second implication of our foregoing discussion that is worth emphasizing is this: According to Hegel's account, a thing (be it a house, action, living body or artwork) can be bad or untrue, and so fail to correspond to the concept to which it nevertheless belongs, without ceasing to exist altogether. In as much as it does not agree with, or correspond to, its own concept, a thing fails to ‘agree with itself’ (Enz.: §172Z) or exists in ‘contradiction’ (Enz.: §382Z), as Hegel puts it.

In the next section, I examine Hegel's account of normative evaluation as it applies to animal organisms. My treatment of Hegel's (somewhat scattered) discussion of the normativity of animal life will be guided by the following pair of questions, corresponding to the two implications of Hegel's theory of truth and normativity that I have just highlighted: In what sense is the normative evaluation of animal organisms internal or immanent, exactly? And how can an animal organism continue to exist as a member of its kind while failing to correspond to the concept or kind to which it belongs? In what sense, that is, can animals endure ‘contradiction’?

II.i. Formation, assimilation, reproduction

In this section, I aim to understand what makes animal organisms appropriate subjects of normative evaluation, according to Hegel. As I noted above, in the course of my discussion, I contrast my interpretation with recent work on the topic by Rand and Alznauer. I begin, however, by offering a summary of Hegel's general account of animal life in the final chapter of his Philosophy of Nature. This summary will provide the necessary background for our more detailed discussion of the normativity of animal life in the remainder of the paper. More specifically, as we will later see, two of the features by which Hegel characterizes animals, namely, their teleological structure and their membership in a species via reproduction (what Hegel refers to as the ‘genus process’), explain what it is that makes animal organisms appropriate subjects of normative evaluation.

Very generally, animals for Hegel are complex causal systems whose parts and whole are reciprocally determined, in particular, each, parts and whole, are simultaneously cause and effect. As Hegel is reported as saying: ‘As animal life is its own product and purpose, it is simultaneously both end and means’ (Enz.: §352Z). The individual parts of an animal organism (for example, its liver or heart) are causally dependent on other individual parts, and ultimately on the organism as a whole, for their proper functioning. Animal life is thus a means to the proper functioning of its parts. But animal life is also an end, as we have just seen in Hegel's quote. The individual parts are also causally responsible for the subsistence of the whole. By cleansing our blood, for example, our liver causally contributes to the survival of the human organism to which it belongs.

To be sure, not only animal but also vegetable organisms seem to exhibit this two-way causal structure. Plants and their parts appear to be simultaneously cause and effect, or means and end. It is thus worth considering what status Hegel awards plants vis-à-vis animals. As I understand it, the main difference between plants and animals, on Hegel's account, is that (a) plant parts can often subsist apart from the whole to which they originally belong and (b) the causal role of some part within the whole can frequently be carried out by other parts, thereby guaranteeing the continued existence of the whole. I take Hegel to be making each of these two points respectively, for example, when he writes:

Hegel makes the first point, (a), perhaps more clearly in the introduction to the ‘Organics’ section of the Philosophy of Nature:

From (a) and (b) it follows that at least some vegetable organisms are in fact not teleological systems in the sense defined, that is, they are not such that their parts are causally dependent on the whole and vice versa. From (a) it follows that some plant parts do not causally depend on the whole. From (b) it follows that some plant wholes do not causally depend on any of their specific parts (since ‘one part can easily assume the function of the other’). In as much as Hegel's account of the normative evaluability of animal organisms relies on their teleological organization, as we will see below, it would also seem to follow from (a) and (b) that not all plant specimens are susceptible of evaluation as normatively sound or defective. Accordingly, if my remarks about Hegel on plants are interpretively on the right track, then it would seem to be a mistake to group together plants and animals and claim that they are both similarly evaluable (or unfit to be subjects of normative evaluation).Footnote ⁷

Having offered these remarks about the status of plants for Hegel, I return to his discussion of animal organisms. In addition to characterizing them in general terms as teleological systems, Hegel further describes animal organisms in terms of three specific end-directed processes or operations: (i) the ‘shape process’ or ‘formation process [Gestaltungsprozess]’, (ii) the ‘assimilation process’ and (iii) the ‘generic process’ or ‘genus process [Gattungsprozess]’. All animals are subject to these three kinds of processes, according to Hegel. Hegel describes this ‘triad of processes’ as follows:

The first, ‘shape process’ consists of the set of operations of the nervous and other physiological systems of the animal organism. More generally, the ‘shape process’ is that process (or set of processes) whereby the animal relates to its own body parts and operations, without consideration of these parts’ interaction with the animal's external surroundings. ‘The first process’, Hegel writes, ‘is that of the self-relating organism’ (Enz.: §352, emphasis added). By contrast, the second, ‘assimilation process’ is comprised of both the ‘theoretical’ operations (sensations) and the ‘practical’ operations (for example, breathing or nourishment) whereby the animal relates to its external surroundings. In this second process, ‘[t]he organism is […] considered […] as idea which relates itself to its other, its inorganic nature’ (Enz.: §352, emphasis added). Finally, the Gattungsprozess consists at least in part in the production, by some exemplars of an animal species, of other specimens of the same sort or with the same structure. This third process represents the ‘unity’ of the previous two—as Hegel notes in §346 above—in that the animal ‘relat[es] to an other which is itself a living individual, and thereby relat[es] itself to itself in the other’ (Enz.: §352, emphasis added). To bring together the different pieces of Hegel's description of animal organisms in a single statement: For Hegel, animals are causal systems that are teleologically structured, both (i) internally or physiologically and (ii) externally or in their relations to the environment, so as to guarantee their own survival or individual preservation as well as (iii) their reproduction or the preservation of the species.

II.ii. Normativity, teleology and the Gattungsprozess

Against the background of Hegel's account of animal life, I now summarize Rand's and Alznauer's views, against which I pit my reading of Hegel on the normativity of animal life below. As I noted at the outset of the paper, Rand maintains that animal organisms are not appropriate subjects of evaluative judgments or ‘judgments of the concept’, according to Hegel. By way of an initial defence of his view, Rand notes that ‘[w]hen considering non-evaluative judgments, [Hegel] routinely uses examples from organic (and also inorganic) nature’, whereas ‘when he turns to consider evaluative judgment […] he stops using natural examples altogether’ (Rand Reference Rand2015: 74). Rand believes that the pattern he claims to find in Hegel's examples is not fortuitous. He argues that lack or defect (Mangel) is a feature of animal organisms generally. All animal organisms undergo some Mängel (for example, feelings of thirst and hunger), in response to which they assimilate or take in part of their environment. This process of assimilation, as we have seen above, is one out of the ‘triad of processes’ that makes up animal life as such. Since Mangel, as just described, characterizes healthy, well-functioning organisms, it cannot be a sign of badness or normative failure, Rand says. Now, he admits: ‘It would be obtuse to deny that there is a difference between getting thirsty and losing a limb’ (Reference Rand2015: 78). Nevertheless, he adds that ‘whatever that difference may be, it is not relevant here’ (Reference Rand2015: 78).Footnote ⁹ As I show below, reflection on the role of the Gattungsprozess in animal life reveals that there is a difference between, say, a thirsty and a three-legged gazelle, for Hegel, which Rand does not consider but is very relevant here.

Unlike Rand, Alznauer holds that animal organisms are appropriate subjects of evaluative judgments, in Hegel's view. Alznauer's focus is not narrowly on the normative evaluability of animal organisms. His aim is rather to provide an overview of Hegel's theory of normativity generally, both natural and spiritual. Nonetheless, he is adamant (contra Rand) that both plant and animal specimens can be appraised as normatively sound or defective in as much as they exhibit or lack features that characterize the species or kind to which they belong. Alznauer rightly notes that ‘Hegel does not think that every divergence of the organism from one of the general characteristics of its species counts as a defect’ (Alznauer Reference Alznauer2016: 204). What matters for the purposes of the normative evaluation of organisms are the ‘essential’ features or characteristics. Alznauer continues:

No doubt due to the scope and aim of his essay, however, Alznauer leaves it underexplained what features play an ‘important role’ in animal life and thus are essential. How do we determine what features play said ‘important role’? And what makes for an ‘important role’, anyway? Alznauer tells us this much: We should look to the ‘necessary determinations of the concept of life itself’ (Reference Alznauer2016: 204), which Hegel spells out in terms of the three processes I outlined in the previous subsection. But is this inquiry into the ‘necessary conditions of the concept of life itself’ an a priori enterprise? What role does experience play in the normative evaluation of animal specimens? And are each of those processes of life equally relevant to picking out the essential features of an animal species? Or does one of the processes have some privileged status in this regard? Below, I answer the latter question in the affirmative and identify the Gattungsprozess as that process. I thus supplement Alznauer's view by arguing that we can extract from Hegel's discussion of the ‘genus process’ a principle for identifying a species’ essential features, which serve as the criteria by which to evaluate specific members of that species. I also indicate the role that empirical observation plays in Hegel's account of the normativity of animal life.

Having summarized Rand and Alznauer's positions, I now sketch my interpretation of Hegel on the normative evaluability of animal organisms. To this effect, I begin by recalling the two general points I drew from Hegel's discussion of evaluative judgments at the end of Section I, namely: First, that the criterion or standard according to which a thing or object is normatively evaluated is internal to the thing evaluated, in particular, the criterion is to be found in that thing's own kind or concept and, second, that a thing or subject of evaluation can continue to exist as an exemplar of its kind while nevertheless failing to correspond to the concept to which it belongs.

That Hegel thinks that animal organisms are appropriate subjects of normative evaluation is, I believe, evident from some of Hegel's examples of judgments of the concept (‘an ill body is not in agreement with the concept of life’ [Enz.: §172Z]) as well as from his remarks about normative failure and success in the chapter on animal organisms in the Philosophy of Nature, where we read for instance:

In order to understand the precise sense in which animals are appropriate subjects of evaluative judgments for Hegel, I believe that we need to answer two questions (or sets of questions) about animal organisms, corresponding to each of the two points I have just reviewed: First, in judging an organism to be good or bad, sound or defective, in what sense are we judging it on the basis of an internal standard and not some criterion imposed upon it from without? Second, how is it that an animal organism—as Hegel puts it—can endure ‘contradiction’ or ‘self-negation’ in that it can fail to agree ‘with itself, i.e. with its concept’ (Enz.: §172Z)? That is, what makes it the case that organic nature (unlike its inorganic counterpart) can exist as a member of a kind or fall under a concept with which it fails to correspond? A first pass at these questions would presumably have it that their answer lies in part in the fact that animals are teleological systems. Although the presumption is correct, both answers are somewhat more intricate than what this bare appeal to teleology might suggest, as we will straightaway see.

I tackle the question about internal evaluation first. That the status of animal organisms as subjects of normative evaluation is very closely connected to their teleological structure is suggested by the following consideration: An organism is as it ought to be when its parts function properly, that is, when they benefit or advantage, or serve the ends of, the whole (at a minimum, self-preservation or survival). Indeed, it seems that inorganic nature (a pebble, for example) is not an appropriate subject of normative evaluation precisely because its parts are not teleologically structured, they have no ends or purposes that they can attain or fail to attain. Hegel seems to be expressing something like this thought about teleology and normativity when he writes:

An organism is thus defective (or, more precisely, diseased) when one or more of its parts ‘obstructs the fluidity of [the] activity [of the whole]’, that is, as we might put it, when the functioning of those parts is not conducive but obstructive to the end or ends of the organic whole to which they belong.

Although teleology does certainly play a role in the normative evaluation of animals, the story I have told so far about benefit or conduciveness to the end of biological survival or self-preservation is not by itself sufficient to account for the ways in which we judge animal parts, and accordingly the organic wholes to which they belong, to be well or malfunctioning, normatively successful or defective. In particular, benefit by itself cannot account for the sense in which the evaluation of animals is internal or proceeds in accordance with those animals’ own concept. To realize that the account of the normativity of animal life provided up to this point, based solely on the idea of advantage, must be incomplete, consider the question: Why is a three-legged gazelle (but not a four-legged gazelle that lacks wings) defective? The answer cannot rely on benefit or conduciveness to biological survival or self-preservation, for the possession of wings might well—let us imagine—be more beneficial or help gazelles more efficiently attain the end of self-preservation than any number of legs, three or four, in the absence of wings. For example, we might imagine that a winged gazelle would more quickly and safely escape predators than any of its three- or four-legged yet wingless counterparts.

One noteworthy feature of Hegel's remarks about the normativity of animal life in ‘The Animal Organism’ chapter of his Philosophy of Nature is that they occur more specifically in the context of his discussion of the Gattungsprozess.Footnote ¹¹ By reflecting now more closely on the relation between teleology, on the one hand, and membership in a species via reproduction, on the other, we can understand how exactly the evaluation of organisms is internal or proceeds by comparing an object with its own concept (and is not a matter of judging it in accordance with some external standard). As we have seen, an animal is characterized by having parts that are structured in a purposive or end-directed way. To return to a previous example: The function of a human liver is to cleanse blood in order to help guarantee the survival of the organic whole of which it is part. A part of some specific organism, this particular human liver for example, owes its function to the role that parts of that sort play within the kind or species as a whole. More precisely, if human livers in general did not serve the function of cleansing blood, and in this way contributed to the biological survival of the species or kind, specimens or exemplars of that kind would not have managed to survive and reproduce to give rise to other exemplars with similarly functioning parts (human livers). In short, the existence of animal specimens endowed with parts with specific functions or purposes depends on the existence of prior organisms with similarly functioning parts and, more generally, on a species, kind or ‘concept’ of which those animal specimens are exemplars.

Against the background of the connection between the teleological structure of particular organisms and their membership in a kind via reproduction, we can now return to the gazelle example above. What is it, if not benefit or advantage alone, that makes a three-legged yet not a four-legged but wingless gazelle defective? And how is the verdict about these two gazelles the upshot of an internal evaluation of them, of a comparison of each of them with some internal standard? The answer is that the four legs (unlike the hypothesized wings) of any particular gazelle owe their existence and function to the existence of parts with that same role in other, prior gazelles, and ultimately and more generally, in the species or kind to which that particular gazelle specimen belongs. So a three-legged gazelle (but not a four-legged gazelle that lacks wings) is defective in as much as it lacks a feature without which its species or kind would not have been able to survive and reproduce to give rise to that specific three-legged gazelle. In other words, our three-legged gazelle specimen is defective, or not as it ought to be, in that it fails to exhibit a feature without which its kind or species (and so also our limp gazelle) would not have survived at all. The evaluation of animal organisms is internal in that it is thus the features or characteristics of each animal kind or species that set the standard or criterion by which we judge specimens of that very kind to be successful or defective. The features or, as Hegel puts it, the ‘determinations’ of a kind or ‘concept’ constitute a rule or ‘ought’ against which animal specimens of that kind are measured.Footnote ¹²

On this reading of Hegel on the normativity of animal life, then, whether or not some feature of an animal species (for example, a certain number of limbs) qualifies as essential depends on the contribution that that feature makes to the survival and reproduction of the species. And an animal specimen is defective if it lacks an essential feature so characterized. The role that reproduction plays in Hegel's account of animal normativity, as I have here sketched it, is worth precisifying. Not all features of an organism that are causally dependent on the existence of ancestors with similar features will qualify as essential features, by Hegel's lights. The essential features of an animal organism are just a subset of those transmitted via reproduction, namely, those features of a species without which a current animal organism (defective or otherwise) could not have come about in the first place. What features figure within this subset, exactly, and how long it would take for a species to cease to survive and reproduce in their absence, are empirical and contingent matters and not ones that can be settled on the basis of a priori reflection on the concept of animal life alone.

Having addressed the first question I posed above, about internal evaluation, let us now turn more briefly to the question about contradictory existence. How is an existence in disagreement with itself so much as possible? How, more specifically, can animal organisms exist as exemplars of a kind with which they do not correspond? Inorganic nature is incapable of this feat. A stone, for example, cannot fail to correspond to its concept or kind (without ceasing to exist as a specimen of its kind altogether), it ‘is unable to survive chemical decomposition’ (Enz.: §371Z).

In dealing with this second question, the connection between the teleological structure of a current animal organism and the Gattungsprozess (that is, its membership in a species via reproduction) proves once again to be helpful. Consider an instance of gold. Its concept or kind consists in a certain chemical structure. If an alleged piece of gold does not correspond to its concept, or if it has a chemical structure other than that of gold, then the piece of metal in question is not gold at all. In §382Z of the ‘Philosophy of Spirit’, we read: ‘What belongs to external nature is destroyed by contradiction; if, for example, gold were given a different specific gravity from what it has, it would have to perish as gold’. There is thus no defective gold. By contrast, an animal organism can be defective (in that it has a malfunctioning liver, say), and so fail to correspond to its concept, while nevertheless continuing to exist as a specimen of that concept or kind. What explains this difference between inorganic and organic nature? The answer, I propose, is this: A current animal organism with a malfunctioning liver is still an organism of its kind in that it exists, and its parts exist and have (or lack) certain specific causal roles, on account of its being the product of organisms of the same kind or species, a species that could not have survived and reproduced without its parts fulfilling certain causal roles (for example, without livers cleansing the organisms’ blood).Footnote ¹³

With the answer to the two questions I posed above, about internal evaluation and contradictory existence, on the table, I now situate my reading with respect to Rand and Alznauer's positions. Rand claims that there is no way, within the context of Hegel's Philosophy of Nature, to distinguish between defects like the feeling of thirst and the absence of a limb (in a limbed species). But in the light of our foregoing discussion in this subsection, there does seem to be such a way. The species-specific ways in which organisms assimilate the environment to overcome Mängel like thirst are part of what characterizes the kind or species in question and help guarantee the species’ survival and reproduction. Not so in the case of a missing limb. The absence of a limb will not figure in the description of that creature's concept or kind and is not conducive but obstructive to the survival and reproduction of the species. More specifically, as I have said, a three-legged gazelle is defective in that it lacks a feature without which its kind would not have been able to survive, reproduce, and so give rise to that three-legged specimen. A healthy, four-legged gazelle, whether thirsty or not, is normatively sound in that it lacks no such features.

For his part, Alznauer, as we have seen, writes that essential features, namely, those that serve as a standard by which to appraise organisms as sound or defective, are picked out ‘by seeing which features play an important role in the way organisms of that kind grow, assimilate, and reproduce’ (Reference Alznauer2016: 204). The connection I have drawn between Hegel's Gattungsprozess, teleology, and normativity spells out Alznauer's position by providing a principled way of identifying the features that play that ‘important role’ in animal life, according to Hegel. A feature of an animal species or kind qualifies as essential just in case it is a feature without which the species as a whole would not have been able to survive and reproduce so as to give rise to further specimens of the species, defective or otherwise. It is thus only by viewing organisms through the lens of their reproductive process that we are able to identify the essential features of the species and, in the light of those features, normatively evaluate its members.

Having offered an account of Hegel on the normativity of animal life, and contrasted it with other interpretations, I close by considering the question: Where does Hegel's view of the functions of animal parts fit, if it does, within the debate on functions in the philosophy of biology over the past several decades? My goal in raising and answering this question is to further clarify Hegel's position, as I understand it.

The main camps within the debate on functions can be sorted into historical and non-historical accounts.Footnote ¹⁴ On the first, causal role account defended by Robert Cummins, in order to identify the functions of the parts of some animal organism we need not look any further than that current organism itself.Footnote ¹⁵ On this causal role view, the function F of some part P of a current animal organism is just whatever causal role P has within the more complex system that contains it. The causal role and so the function of our livers is inter alia to cleanse our blood. The causal role of the liver can itself be explained in terms of the causal roles of its component parts: lobes, ligaments, membranes. The heart has the causal role, and so the function, of pumping blood. But, as others have pointed out, the heart also causes other effects in the organism of which it is a part: for example, it produces a repeated thumping sound.Footnote ¹⁶ Is producing a sound thereby also a function of the heart? Many participants in the debate have wanted to resist answering this question in the affirmative, as the causal role account seems to commit us to do.

A second, more recent non-historical view attempts to escape the counterintuitive consequences of Cummins's position by restricting the function or functions F of some current organism part P to those causal roles performed by P that contribute to the self-maintenance of that current organism. Versions of this view are defended by Peter McLaughlin and Mateo Mossio, et al.Footnote ¹⁷ Roughly, part P has a function F just in case P contributes to its own existence as well as that of the organism to which it belongs.Footnote ¹⁸ Thus, even though both pumping blood and producing thumping sounds are effects caused by the heart, only the former of these two causal roles has a functional character, for only that former causal role contributes to the maintenance of itself and the organism of which it is a part.

Contrary to the two views I have just summarized, Ruth Millikan argues that in order to identify the function F of some part P of a current animal organism, we should not look at the organism's current features and causal dispositions but turn instead to that organism's history.Footnote ¹⁹ Succinctly, according to this historical account, a part of P of some current animal organism has a function F just in case that organism exists and is endowed with P in part as a result of its ancestors possessing P and having actually performed F in the past. Why this heart exists here now and has the function of pumping blood is causally explained by the contribution of hearts in the current, hearted organism's ancestors. Using this account of functions, Millikan moreover maintains, we can explain failure of purpose or defect in ways that the non-historical theorists seem to be unable to. Although some current animal organism may lack P or be unable to fulfil F, it is nonetheless a member of a species or function category defined by F, so long as the current organism is the descendant of other organisms endowed with P and that actually performed F.

Hegel's view, as I understand it, is similarly historical. As we have seen, a part P of some current animal organism has for Hegel the purpose or function that it does on account of the existence of past organisms with similarly functioning parts, which have reproduced to give rise to the current organism under consideration.Footnote ²⁰ If the current organism lacks part P, or if P does not fulfil in it the causal role that it fulfilled in its ancestors, then the current organism is on that account defective. This negative appraisal of the current organism is internal in as much as it results from the comparison of some of its parts or features with a subset of the parts or features of its ancestors, namely, those features without which they would not have been able to survive and reproduce to give rise to the current organism.