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Methods of ethics and the descent of man: Darwin and Sidgwick on ethics and evolution

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Abstract

Darwin’s treatment of morality in The Descent of Man has generated a wide variety of responses among moral philosophers. Among these is the dismissal of evolution as irrelevant to ethics by Darwin’s contemporary Henry Sidgwick; the last, and arguably the greatest, of the Nineteenth Century British Utilitarians. This paper offers a re-examination of Sidgwick’s response to evolutionary considerations as irrelevant to ethics and the absence of any engagement with Darwin’s work in Sidgwick’s main ethical treatise, The Methods of Ethics. This assessment of Sidgwick’s response to Darwin’s work is shown to have significance for a number of ongoing controversies in contemporary metaethics.

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Notes

  1. I shall be using the term ‘epistemic credentials’ throughout this paper to signify the status an ethical belief has to the extent that it merits our confidence as a judgement. I shall take this understanding of epistemic credentials to be relatively neutral with respect to (1) the metaphysical question of what in the world (such as the existence of moral or other facts) would ultimately explain such credibility as our ethical beliefs may have, and (2) any purely pragmatic value (such as making its holder feel better about him or herself) that may be associated with holding any individual ethical belief. For further discussion of the issues mentioned in (1) and (2), see Lillehammer (2003) and Street (2006).

  2. The reference to Mandeville is apposite in the context of Darwin’s appeal to an imaginary example of human beings ‘reared under precisely the same condition as bee-hives’ (Darwin 2004, 122). In his early eighteenth Century work The Fable of the Bees, Mandeville had depicted a society of purely self-interested bees bound together in a mutually beneficial system of social cooperation by means of what we now know as an ‘invisible hand’ mechanism. I return to Darwin’s example of the bees and its possible interpretations below.

  3. According to R.J. Richards, Darwin made an extensive study of Mill’s utilitarianism prior to publishing The Descent. It is therefore arguably Mill who should be seen as the main target of Darwin’s argument at this point (see Richards 1987, 234–41).

  4. Sidgwick devotes a small amount of space in later editions of The Methods to criticism of the ‘the evolutionary ethics’ of Herbert Spencer and Leslie Stephen (Sidgwick 1907, ix; 469–474). These criticisms do not touch on the main questions at issue between Sidgwick and Darwin discussed in this paper.

  5. On the basis of this evidence, it may be asked if Sidgwick actually ever studied The Descent of Man itself, or whether his knowledge of it was either mainly or exclusively second-hand. The texts I have been able to consult fail to unequivocally answer that question.

  6. As previously noted, the discussion that follows need not be read so as to presuppose a commitment to any philosophically interesting ontology of moral facts. It is heuristically useful to talk loosely in terms of moral facts in this connection, given a shared commitment to at least some comparative sense of epistemic credibility for ethical beliefs by all sides in the parallel debate in moral metaphysics (c.f. Blackburn 1998; Putnam 2004).

  7. Relative to our ethical beliefs, our evolutionary circumstances (excluding those beliefs) must be taken to include factors both external and internal to the individual.

  8. In this passage, Darwin does not distinguish between evolutionary circumstances external and internal to the individual. I return to this indeterminacy in Darwin’s description of the evolution of our ethical beliefs below.

  9. In fact, the textual evidence points away from the claim that Darwin would accuse the imaginary bee-creatures of being ‘irrational’. On the contrary, it would seem that much of their ‘moral sense’ (possibly including their approval of fratricide) would meet with approval by a ‘criterion’ of morality based on ‘the good of the community’. Supposing that even in these circumstances fratricide would be wrong, Joyce is nevertheless right that Darwin’s response to Cobbe offers few hints as to how this could be.

  10. Sidgwick arguably concedes as much when he writes in a later paper that ‘if… an apparently self-evident proposition is to be discredited on account of its derivation, it must be because…it can be shown from experience that these particular antecedents are more likely to produce a false belief than a true one’ (Sidgwick 2000, 34). He then adds: ‘I do not seem to remember to have seen it systematically attempted’.

  11. In his 1876 paper Sidgwick puts forward only (1) and (2) as his basic ethical principles (Sidgwick 2000, 16–17). I shall not pursue the significance of this fact further here.

  12. In The Descent, Darwin describes the so-called ‘golden rule’ as ‘the foundation-stone of morality’ (Darwin 2004, 157). He gives two, non-equivalent, formulations of the ‘golden rule’. The first formulation is: ‘as ye would that men should do to you, do ye them likewise’’ (Darwin 2004, 151). As Sidgwick points out, this formulation leaves morality hostage to the destructive instincts of those who wish themselves harm (Sidgwick 1907, 379–380). Darwin’s other formulation (and the one he explicitly identifies as ‘the foundation-stone of morality’) is: ‘To do good onto others—to do unto others as ye would they should do onto you’ (Darwin 2004, 157). According to Sidgwick, this claim does embody a fundamental ethical insight, but one that is analyzable in terms of his three intuitive propositions of real clearness and certainty.

  13. The analogy with geometry present also in The Methods, where Sidgwick writes: ‘I undoubtedly seem to perceive, as clearly and certainly as I see any axiom in Arithmetic or Geometry, that it is ‘right’ and ‘reasonable’ for me to treat others as I think that I myself ought to be treated in similar situations’ (Sidgwick 1907, 507; 383). There is at least one sense in which treating geometry and arithmetic as on a par in this respect could be seriously misleading. I return to this question below.

  14. It might be thought that Sidgwick could resolve the problem of practical inconsistency by appealing to something like the notion of a prima facie duty introduced by his intuitionist descendant Ross (1930). This response underestimates the extent of Sidgwick’s difficulty. True, the fact that not all of your prima facie duties are practically compatible in every situation does not entail that they are not therefore your prima facie duties. Yet reflection on conflicting prima facie duties must still somehow yield some conclusion about an overall duty with at least one of the conflicting duties being cancelled or outweighed as a remainder. It follows that the basic concern driving Sidgwick’s dualism survives when it is reinterpreted along Rossian lines.

  15. There is a potentially interesting line of thought to be pursued here about the extent of the analogy between ethics on the one hand, and geometry (as that relates to space) and arithmetic on the other. Sidgwick appears to notice this issue at the start of The Methods, but never seems to pick up on it in the course of developing his argument (c.f. Sidgwick 1907, 18–20).

  16. These exegetical questions are complicated by the near absence from Sidgwick’s work of the terms ‘a priori knowledge’ or ‘necessary truth’. There is evidence that he thinks the truth of self-evident intuitions is in some sense knowable a priori (c.f. Sidgwick 1907, 381; 386, 2000, 131). As for necessity, Sidgwick does not appear to make any significant use of the now standard modal vocabulary of necessity or contingency, writing instead of ‘absolute practical principles’, ‘absolute rules, applicable to all human beings without exception’ (Sidgwick 1907, 379), and ‘fundamental precepts’ being ‘essentially reasonable’ (Sidgwick 1907, 383, c.f. 1872, 231).

  17. It is true that the notion of ‘wide reflective equilibrium’ has been frequently used in the philosophical literature so as not to require the kind of empirical input made epistemologically relevant by the contingency challenge (c.f. Singer 2005). This is the fault of the philosophical literature in question, not of the notion of ‘wide reflective equilibrium’ as such (c.f. Daniels 1979). An opposite defect might be thought to have affected certain manifestations of nineteenth and twentieth Century European philosophy, including some of the work growing out of the so-called ‘Frankfurt School’ (c.f. Geuss 1989).

  18. This is not to imply the (wildly implausible) claim that the very project of abstraction thereby entails immunity from any such, or any other related, disturbance (c.f. Geuss 2010).

  19. Parts of this material have been previously presented at a conference on evolution and epigenesis at the University of Bergamo in 2008, at the Heythrop College London Philosophy Society (also in 2008), and at a Philosophy Department colloquium at Stockholm University in 2009. I am grateful to members of the audience on these occasions for their questions and comments, and also to the Editor and an anonymous referee for Biology and Philosophy for their useful suggestions in completing the paper for publication.

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Lillehammer, H. Methods of ethics and the descent of man: Darwin and Sidgwick on ethics and evolution. Biol Philos 25, 361–378 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-010-9204-8

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