The Evolutionary Approach to Ethics

THE EVOLUTIONARY APPROACH TO ETHICS I N THE LAST hundred years evolutionary ethics has been upheld by several well-known thinkers, besides gaining a wide popular audience. We propose to study it here from the methodological point of view. By analyzing the way evolutionary moralists proceed, we shall try to show to what extent their manner of theorizing is acceptable in the light of such usual methodological criteria as consistency and applicability. We shall therefore first review how evolutionary ethics has developed . In a second section we shall discuss various points about the procedure of its contemporary adherents. In conclusion we shall briefly indicate some general conclusions which seem required. I Evolutionary ethics is one form of the biological approach to moral philosophy. It thus has its roots in the hedonistic and materialistic currents of Greece and, in modern times, the English empiricists. It had other important sources in the eighteenth century: the Encyclopedists did much to spread empiricist and hedonist views; Condorcet popularized the idea of indefinite progress in all fields, including the moral; the rise of romanticism further prepared the psychological climate by its insistence on the irrational and disorderly aspects of the umverse. The immediate sources of evolutionary ethics are found, however , in the utilitarianism and positivism of the early nineteenth century. These provided its basic positions and attitudes, while biology gave it a " scientific " basis. Evolutionary theories had been current since the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Thus, Buffon explained the biological development of species as the effects of environment, perpetuated by heredity; Lamarck 341 342 GERAIID J. DALCOURT claimed these changes were due to the inheritance of acquired characteristics. It took several decades, however, for such ideas to develop into what we now refer to as evolutionary naturalism. In 1851 Spencer published his Social Statics, in which he attempted to shape these trends into a cohesive unity. A real science of ethics is necessary, he held, and it shows that evil arises because we are ill-adapted to natural conditions. The development of life entails a progressive physical and mental adaptation which will result in the eventual disappearance of evil. The evolution of human society is in the direction of complete concord and cooperation. A scientific ethics can thus guide men to happiness by pointing out to them the conditions under which they can attain it. In such a moral theory the method consists essentially of trying to infer from the data and hypotheses of biologists the direction in which the human species is developing, accepting this as the purpose of life, and deducing from it a moral obligation to act always in such a way as to be in step with evolution. Eight years after the appearance of Spencer's Social Statics Darwin published the Origin of Species in which he amassed in a persuasive lineup the scientific evidence for biological evolution . Then in 1871, in The Descent of Man, he attempted to show that men's intellectual and moral faculties were also the result of the evolutionary process. Thus, he said, the purpose of life is " the rearing of the greatest number of individuals in full vigour and health, with all their faculties perfect, under the conditions to which they are subjected." 1 Darwin, however, was primarily a scientist, and he preferred to leave to others the task of developing the philosophical implications of his theory. Hence his importance in the history of ethics is due mostly to the use which others made of his biological discoveries. Thus Spencer's later work, The Principles of Ethics, is largely a re-presentation of his early ideas buttressed by the facts which Darwin and other biologists had established. He believed that 1 The Descent of Man (American edition, 1896), p. 97. THE EVOLUTIONARY APPROACH TO BTHICS 343 the evolutionism he had previously championed was now substantiated scientifically. His aim and method, however, remained the same. Ethics was to be developed in the light of both the evolutionary direction of life and the utilitarian criterion of the happiness of individuals and groups. In the nineteenth century evolutionary ethics had a number of zealous adherents and they popularized the doctrine in numerous books and articles throughout...