Article e01683 April 2020 1 Book Reviews The Good, the Bad and the Universal. Lorraine Daston, on Nature and Morals Nicolás Kwiatkowski CONICET, Universidad Nacional de San Martín, Roque Sáenz Peña 832, 6º, Buenos Aires, Argentina Review of Daston, L. Against Nature, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, UK, MIT Press, 2019. Lorraine Daston is one of the leading historians of science in international academia. During her long and fruitful career, she has produced several enlightening works on Early Modern European intellectual history, particularly on the construction of knowledge and on laws and observation in the natural sci- ences. Against Nature, first published in Berlin in 2018, now part of the “Untimely Meditations” series from MIT, is not a book about ecology, but about the relationship between the human and the natural in Western thought. As such, it is part of a tradition that Daston knows deeply, reaching at least fifty years into the past, when Clarence J. Glacken published the magnificent Traces on the Rhodian Shore (1967), and up to the beginning of this century, when the French anthropologist Philippe Descola gave us his complex Par dela nature et culture (2005). The issue Professor Daston tackles in Against Nature is one that has worried philosophers for centu- ries and we know as the “naturalistic fallacy,” at least since British philosopher G. E. Moore first coined the term in his Principia Ethica (1903). Western thought, the argument goes, acknowledges in general that there are no values in nature, and thus “it takes a human act of imposition or projection to transmute what ‘is’ into an ‘ought’. […] we can draw no legitimate inference […] from the facts of the natural order to the values of the moral order” (p. 4). Moreover, authors as diverse as Friedrich Engels and John Stuart Mill were convinced that such an operation frequently had political consequences, namely the naturalization of social situations, be them positive (nature as the guarantor of human equality) or nega- tive (nature as the foundation for racism). However, despite systematic philosophic criticism, the moral resonance of nature persists. Daston provides evidence of this continuity and searches for its grounds, which she finds mostly in the perception of order. Within the Western intellectual tradition, three types of natural order have exerted strong influence about these issues: specific natures, local natures, and universal natural laws. By “specific natures,” Daston understands the order of nature that defines the essence of a thing and circumscribes its inborn properties and tendencies, organic species being the chief example. The practice associated with the idea of specific nature is taxonomy, encompassing what an individual of a species is, has been, and can become. “Local natures” are different and refer to “characteristic combinations of flora and fauna, climate and geology that give a landscape its physiognomy” (p. 15). They will be more familiar to ecologists, given their interest in the interaction of organisms and their environment. However, long before the emergence of this science, from Herodotus to Montesquieu and Humboldt, people were not only aware of the differences between the familiar and the exotic, but also formulated hypothesis regard- ing the bond that supposedly ties local natures with local customs. As ancient as these ideas might be, they received new impulse in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when nature was reimagined as a har- monious but precarious whole, made out of interlocked parts in a delicate equilibrium. Finally, “universal © 2020 The Authors. The Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America, published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc., on behalf of the Ecological Society of America. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Kwiatkowski, N. 2020. The Good, the Bad and the Universal. Lorraine Daston, on Nature and Morals. Bull Ecol Soc Am 101(2):e01683. https://doi. org/10.1002/bes2.1683