DOI: 10.11648/j.ijp.20261402.15 ISSN: 2330-7455

Relational Normativity: A Fragility-Based Account of Biological Functions

Jianhui Li
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Biological systems confront philosophy with a distinct form of normativity that resists both supernaturalist and projectivist accounts. The heart ought to pump blood, the immune system ought to recognize pathogens, yet neither evolutionary history nor organizational structure, taken alone, adequately explains where this normative force comes from. Selected-effects theory traces function to natural selection's historical record; organizational theory locates normativity in the self-maintaining causal structure of the living system. These two approaches have been treated as rivals. I argue that this rivalry is illusory. Normativity, I propose, is fundamentally relational: 'X ought to do Y' is always relative to the biological system as a whole, and normative judgments exhibit a triadic structure involving an object of evaluation, a normative standard, and a systemic perspective. Understood relationally, selected-effects and organizational theories capture complementary dimensions of the same phenomenon: the historical origin and the structural realization of functional facts. I further argue that normative judgments acquire substantive force only when a system's self-maintenance is fragile: when component failure is biophysically possible, potentially irreversible, and threatens the continued existence of the system. Biological functions carry normative force, I conclude, not because normativity is imported from outside nature or projected by observers, but because the precarious, self-maintaining character of living systems makes their continued existence something that is at stake in their own operation.

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