Evolutionary Ethics

The obvious as well as the ideal place from which to begin a consideration both of social Darwinism and of evolutionary ethics is the work of Charles Darwin and the ideas he developed and presented in On the Origin of Species (1859), which advocates both of social Darwinism and of evolutionary ethics have tried to apply more widely. This is not, of course, to say that Darwin had no intellectual ancestors, any more than it is to say that biological theory has stood still since his death. To say or to suggest either of these things would be wrong.

It would not even be true to say that nothing was published with any claim to the label “evolutionary ethics” until after the first appearance of On the Origin of Species.Herbert Spencer was strictly correct when, in the general preface to The Principles of Ethics, he claimed that the “doctrine of organic evolution” as it applied to humans had come earlier than that. Spencer was on this occasion referring to his Social Statics, first issued at the end of1850 and containing an outline of the ethical ideas he was about to develop. He could also have claimed, and elsewhere did claim, to have been the first to use the notion of the “survival of the fittest” in an evolutionary context, in an article in the Westminster Review for 1852.

The very phrase a “struggle for existence,” which epitomizes the gladiatorial view of human life so often taken to be the true moral to be drawn from On the Origin of Species, is to be found already, in a similar context, in 1798,in what should be called “the first essay of Malthus on The Principle of Population,” in order to distinguish it from the substantially different work Malthus issued in1803 as if it were merely a second edition. Darwin himself acknowledges his debt to this first essay of Malthus in On the Origin of Species. Nevertheless, after all due cautions have been given, it is On the Origin of Species that is, and must be, the reference point here. It was the ideas of that work which the forerunners foreran. It was the triumph in biology of the theory that it presented which lends vicarious prestige to whatever can be put forward as Darwinism.

Since many sharp things need to be said about some particular sorts of attempts to develop an evolutionary ethic, it becomes important to emphasize from the beginning that the desires to connect, to see microcosms in relation to the macrocosm, are in [Page 922]themselves excellent; and certainly, they should be shared and not despised by anyone who aspires to the title of “philosopher.” It is therefore neither surprising nor discreditable that in every generation since Darwin, some of the liveliest and least blinkered of students of biology have wanted to explore the possibility of connections between Darwinian evolution and ethics.

The main reason why professional philosophers are apt very brusquely to dismiss all such efforts is that we mistake it that they must involve the committing of what philosophers call the “naturalistic fallacy.” The nerve of this fallacy is the attempt to deduce a conclusion about what either ought to be or ought to have been the case from premises stating only, in morally neutral terms, what either actually is or actually was the case. Once this fallacy has been recognized for what it is, it may seem that with evolutionary ethics, this is both the heart of the matter and the end of the affair.

...