Social Darwinism

Spencer's Evolutionary Progressivism

In 1857 Spencer, under the influence of Thomas Malthus's 1798 work (An Essay on the Principle of Population), published his major work, Progress: Its Law and Causes. It was 2 years before Charles Darwin published his seminal, 1859 work, On the Origin of Species. Spencer's later theorizing (e.g., see First Principles, published in 1860) was strongly influenced by Darwin's ideas.

Spencer applied Darwin's ideas to interpret social phenomena. He coined the term survival of the fittest, maintaining that through competition and natural selection, social evolution would lead to prosperity and personal liberty unparalleled in human history. Spencer argued that the individual (rather than the collective) evolves, and thus government intervention should be minimal in social and political domains. This view fit well with the dominant ideologies of the capitalist economics in the late 19th century, especially those of laissez-faire economics, and it was strongly supported by both intellectuals and businessmen, including Andrew Carnegie, who hosted Spencer's visit to the United States in 1883.

Spencer's theory was essentially a prescriptive, ethical theory. He did not simply argue that natural selection descriptively works with humans much as Darwin theorized it worked with animals and plants, but that the survival of the fittest in human society is morally correct and should be promoted. As a result, social Darwinism was used to justify various political and economic exploitations that are generally inconsistent with modern moral values, including colonialism, imperialism, neglect of poor living and working conditions, oppression of labor unions and similar organizations, and so on.

Among others, a major problem with social Darwinism as an ethical theory is that the theory commits what is called the naturalistic fallacy in philosophy, whereby an ought statement is derived rather directly from an is statement. That is, it is a logical error to assume that what is natural is equivalent to what is morally correct. Social Darwinism made this fatal error in using the principle of survival of the fittest not only to explain how human society might actually operate (a statement that could, in principle, be verified empirically) but also to prescribe morally how social institutions (and human society in general) ought to be designed. Although social Darwinism arguably had some beneficial effects (e.g., providing the poor with resources for production and education rather than simply with handouts), its moral basis is now widely rejected.

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