Deconstructing Mill's Status of Nature

When I first saw the title to John Stuart Mill’s essay “The Amoral Status of Nature”, I became excited and figured that it would be a simple report on nature, as the very title suggests Nature as ‘having no moral restraints, standards, or principles’—neither moral or immoral.

Mill takes up the task set down by many previous thinkers and attempts to unpack what we should consider nature to be as humans and understand how we interact with it. He begins by expressing that the nature of any given thing is the aggregate of all of that thing’s powers and properties. He therefore claims that Nature is inherently the aggregate of the powers and properties of all things. By definition, Nature is ‘the sum of all phenomena’, meaning it encompasses all that does, does not, and could happen; it is a collective name for all the facts of the world, both actual and possible.

Mill philosophizes that to better understand nature we must operationalize it and decide whether it A—is the sum of all powers, properties, and everything that happens as a result of them, or B—only what takes place outside of intentional human intervention. However, as he states earlier, Nature is the sum of all phenomena; does this mean, then, that human intervention should be classified as a distant, perhaps indirect result of nature or as an aberration of such? Mill explains that human action is not centered on what we do to get around nature but rather what law of nature do we use to contradict/surpass another?

Mill writes that man may obey nature but does not guide himself by it—that he may even act directly through nature but it is not always knowingly. Reflecting on Bacon’s piece “The Mastery of Nature”, Mill seems to disagree with his logic of man ‘obeying’ nature as a means of controlling it to his own idea of controlling nature. Mill writes that to ‘control’ one aspect of nature is merely obeying or succumbing to another, and therefore asks if that is not nature merely controlling us? Mill further claims that even if you do count human interaction as a part of nature, any action other than obeying our natural, basic instincts would be an act of meddling with nature. Therefore, if the artificial is no better than the natural, to what end are the arts of life?

Given Mill’s understanding of man’s actions as simply using one aspect of nature to over-power another, I think we could include our intentional actions as a legitimate part of nature, even though he would argue they are deviant acts. I ask then, however, how some actions we take such as tilling and fertilizing a field or mining wells count as such? If they are technically just indirect results of us using nature to overcome nature, they are neither good nor bad, simply natural actions. Finally I think that the way in which Mill writes about humans conquering nature seems to create a concept of nature as ‘the other’, which personifies it into an enemy. Essential to a better and more widespread understanding of nature is our initial acceptance of it as a body to work with, rather than against.