Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences
Ethics in Darwin’s melancholy vision
Section snippets
Introduction: Darwinian evolution and ethics
Darwin’s On the Origin of Species mentions ‘man’s origins’ only at the very last. But the implications of his general claim of common descent were clear: the animals that most resemble humans, the great apes, must share a relatively recent common ancestor with us. Furthermore, unlike previous evolutionary hypotheses, Darwin’s mechanism of natural selection is explicitly non-teleological. Instead of progress towards some end, evolution by natural selection reflects only the accumulation of
Malthus’ essay and Darwin’s harsh vision of nature
Reading the Reverend Dr. Thomas Malthus’ An Essay on the Principle of Population contributed to both Darwin’s and Wallace’s invention of the hypothesis of natural selection. Malthus’ essay also inspired a harsh tradition of social thought, some of whose themes are still familiar. More importantly for my purposes here, however, there is a strongly theodical element in Malthus’ essay—a point that sharply differentiates Malthus’ response to the grim facts he describes from Darwin’s.
As Malthus says
Evolutionary views of ethics today
In this section I want to briefly examine two examples of philosophical work on the relation between ethics and evolution. Despite taking opposite sides on the fundamental question of whether normative standards are objective or real, there is an important element that both these accounts share: neither involves a real transition between organisms to which norms and values don’t really apply except perhaps by analogy, and organisms to which they really do apply.
The reason for this resemblance,
The roots of normativity: an evolutionary tale
Like Sellars’ famous ‘Myth of Jones’, which offers a story about the development of our account of inner ‘mental’ states, including beliefs and phenomenal experience, the story I present here is not intended as a detailed account of the actual origins of normativity or even of normative language. Instead, I aim to set out a view of the status of normative language and its relation to the descriptive story evolution tells about our origins. The proposal is tentative and sketchy, but I believe
On drawing the Line
As we’ve seen, evolutionary approaches to normativity have difficulty drawing a line between organisms, behaviours and adaptations that are merely functionalb and those that are functionalf. If we begin by assuming our own actions, along with tools and machinery are functionalf and governed by normsf, evolutionary continuity makes it difficult to say where a transition to mere functionsb and normsb occurs. It becomes tempting to follow Collier and Stingl, and see certain things as goodf for
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