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View submission: There Is Nothing Natural
This was a good article, but I feel like it doesn't really engage with what Mill is claiming.
So what might we think “natural” means? Mill has a pretty influential proposal here (from his three essays on religion): “what takes place without the agency, or without the voluntary and intentional agency, of man.” Basically, unnatural things are those that are influenced by human agency, and natural things are the rest.
Here, Mill claims that the natural is what *takes place* without the agency of man. He is concerned about a category of "phenomena *produced by* human agency." But when the author here rewords it to "influenced by," the meaning is changed. Being influenced is a much weaker condition than being produced. Birds are certainly influenced by human agency, for example, but they were not *produced* by human agency. And it seems more broadly that if we actually take Mill seriously and go back to "takes place without" rather than "influenced by," most of the (real) problems mentioned in this blog post disappear.
There's nothing here!