Abstract

Aristotle’s teleological explanations are most successful in the domain of living things, and there is good reason to think that organisms are the objects of his most important teleological remarks. The attempts to apply teleological explanations to less complex entities and more complex entities have been judged by history a failure. His explanations of organisms, on the other hand, have been celebrated by molecular biologists, embryologists and developmental biologists, and advocates of adaptationism in evolutionary biology. Teleology as a scientific proposition seems to require a sufficient level of complexity, but to break down at levels of too much complexity or too little complexity. But whatever the scientific verdict on Aristotle’s teleology, it is clear that his conception of intrinsic ends has important implications for axiology. For he has shown how it is possible to identify objective goods, independent of human minds, and to avoid the dilemma between radical egalitarianism on the one hand and arbitrary or self-serving hierarchy on the other.