Is there something teleological about the half-life of an isotope?
Here is a summary and comments on the essay Freedom and Resentment by PF Strawson. He makes some great points, and when he is wrong, it is in such a way as to clarify things a great deal. My non-deterministic position is much better thanks to having read this. I’ll summarize it in this post and respond in a later one. In a nutshell: PFS first argues that personal resentment that we may feel toward another for having failed to show goodwill toward us would have no problem coexisting with the conviction that determinism is true. Moral disapprobation, as an analog to resentment, is likewise capable of coexisting with deterministic convictions. In fact, it would seem nearly impossible for a normally-constituted person (i.e., a non-sociopath) to leave behind the web of moral convictions, even if that person is a determinist. In this way, by arguing that moral and determinist convictions can coexist in the same person, PFS undermines the libertarian argument ...
Comments
I would think of isotopic composition as more of a quality of a thing than as a thing itself with a purpose.
But that same decay is the source of an interesting philosophical problem that I'm seriously trying to address. To give you a sense of that problem, I will first tell a story: before quantum theory was formulated, some folks said there's no need for God because we live in a deterministic universe, where every physical event is determined entirely by previous physical events. After quantum theory became known some folks (probably the same folks) said there's no need to posit God because, if we look at radioactive decay, we find events that have no cause.
An alternative to these two positions is to say that there are causes that are NOT deterministic. As long as physics takes math as its paradigm of knowledge, then such a proposal will seem ludicrous, for causes, to be intelligible, must exhibit necessity. If an event is not necessitated, then it's uncaused.
The alternative position would be that radioactive decay has some kind of cause, but it's not the type that guarantees that the event will happen here and now.
That description overlaps somewhat with a final cause: it's almost as if atoms were trying to decay and eventually do so.
So, in response to your question, I'm talking about the eventual decay rather than the initial composition. But yes, I am not sure that it makes sense to talk about purposes here. The truth is that, for Aristotle, it might not make sense, when considering non-living things, to talk about the purpose of this or that part. Perhaps he is principally committed to regarding nature as a whole as teleological: parts (such as particles) are telic only in a secondary manner.