Teleological social ontology

[Well, if it is indeed the case that “the social ontology of rights talk generally assumes that, at bottom, the kind of relation between social entities is conflictual or competitive,” then I dissociate myself from that generality. No guilt by association here; I don’t hang out with Hobbes... My affirmation and account of rights do not presuppose that conflict is “essential to sociality.” They presuppose instead that people have worth and dignity, and that there are ways of treating them that do and do not befit their dignity. Of course there is a great deal of conflict in social relations; but conflict is not, on my view, “essential” to social relations. And rights are components of social reality whether or not the situation is conflictual. That’s because people have worth whether or not the situation is conflictual. Look elsewhere for agonistic social ontology: A response to Smith
from The Immanent Frame posted by Nicholas Wolterstorff ]

[These social theories dismiss positivist arguments for reductive epistemology and highlight how biology can be used as an ideological tool. Additionally, early on at a time it was still popular, Sri Aurobindo discounted the more extreme implications of Spencer's Social Darwinism “survival of the fittest” strategy and clearly was repelled by the social engineering program of eugenics.
For example, Sri Aurobindo’s view of evolution does not suffer from the positivist gradualism of his day in which Darwinian evolution is ordered... Additionally, he also speaks of the misuse of the Hobbesean notion of nature tooth and claw applied to natural selection as the survival of the fittest rather, he speaks of symbiosis or co-operation and the co-evolution of phenomena which only emerged in a mature theory in Biology in the 1980s through the writing of Lynn Margulis and Dorian Sagan on endosymbiosis. 100 Years of Sri Aurobindo on Evolution: Anticipating Science and Society (part 3 of 6)
by Rich on Mon 23 Mar 2009 09:56 PM PDT Permanent Link]

The welcome convergence is owing to a teleological “social ontology." [TNM]