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Books

Ethics and Evolution

Ralph Blumenau reviews The Ethical Primate by Mary Midgley.

The purpose of this book is to suggest how the ethical sense of humans is likely to have developed in the course of evolution. Many so-called Darwinians have seen this development as ‘merely’ another mechanism in the struggle for survival. They have argued that morality, properly understood, is nothing other than a more or less enlightened codification of self-interest, a view that had already been put forward by Hobbes and by Bentham. For Herbert Spencer moral feelings that weaken the human species in the struggle for survival were aberrations to be corrected: on these grounds he thought that the desire to help the unfit poor should not find a place in a proper system of ethics. Man was part of Nature; Nature was ‘red in tooth and claw’; and this fierce competition was supposed to make evolutionary progress.

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