7. Syntheses, Modern and Otherwise:
1918-1968

By the conclusion of the Great War, evolutionary ethics was approaching a dead end. Philosophers had abandoned discussion of evolutionary approaches to ethics and disdainfully ignored "illconceived" attempts to revive them. Professionals in other disciplines that treated man's moral sentiment and its expression had shifted their perspectives away from evolutionary explanations and were now asking different questions and using different methods to answer them. Anthropology, for instance, focused less on developmental schemes and concepts than it had in the last third of the nineteenth century. Even before the war, the German Franz Boas, who settled in the United States and was a major influence in the definition of the relatively new field of anthropology here, espoused in his Mind of Primitive Man (1911) a more relativistic conception of culture than earlier American social evolutionists such as Lewis Henry Morgan or John Wesley Powell.^[1] Under Boas's influence, American anthropology came to stress the psychological dimension of culture and the individual's relationship to it.^[2] In Britain, a different but similarly less evolutionary approach dominated anthropology through the research and writing of "func-

[1] See George W. Stocking, Jr., ed., The Shaping of American Anthropology 1883-1911: A Franz Boas Reader (New York: Basic Books, 1974); Stocking, Race, Culture and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1968); Degler, In Search of Human Nature; John S. Haller, Outcasts of Evolution: Scientific Attitudes of Racial Inferiority, 1859-1900 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971); William Culp Darrah, Powell of the Colorado (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951); Curtis M. Hinsley, Jr., Savages and Scientists: The Smithsonian Institution and the Development of American Anthropology, 1846-1910 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1981); Bernhard J. Stern, Lewis Henry Morgan: Social Evolutionist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1931); Carl Resek, Lewis Henry Morgan: American Scholar (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960); and John Zernel, "John Wesley Powell: Science and Reform in a Positive Context," Ph.D. dissertation, Oregon State University, 1983.

[2] See Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, 287.

tionalists" such as Bronislaw Malinowski who sought to bring the insights of psychology to anthropology to understand the function of social practices in a cultural context. Other functionalists, like A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, stressed the comparative study of social structures.

The shift away from an evolutionary perspective was evident in psychology also, where the emergence of behaviorism signaled a new approach to the study of mind. The experimentalism of the biological sciences led to impressive and initially fruitful results when applied to psychology, and the "evolution of mind" looked decidedly old-fashioned, a lethal trait in scientific fashion.

It is hardly surprising, then, that in spite of the extensive research on biological evolution, extensions of, or analogies with, evolutionary thought were increasingly shunned in the social sciences during the latter part of the first half of the twentieth century.^[3] Instead, researchers chose approaches that they believed were more appropriate and would be more productive. The cultural disillusionment in the Anglo-American world following in the wake of the First World War served to reinforce this flight from evolutionary philosophy. The inevitability of human progress was less obvious given memories of trench warfare and mustard gas. Spencer's optimistic evolutionary philosophy, for example, no longer commanded the serious attention it had before the war. Increasingly, sets of his dated work appeared on the shelves of used book dealers where they in time became a drug on the market.^[4]

Interwar Evolutionary Ethics

With the demise of evolutionary social thought, one might have expected an end to evolutionary ethics in the 1920s. But intellectual history is unpredictable. Far from disappearing, evolutionary ethics experienced a rebirth in the first half of the twentieth century among speculative thinkers who continued to seek a naturalistic foundation for a progressive view of nature and man. These

[3] Carl Degler discusses the ideological dimension of this shift in his In Search of Human Nature.

[4] Lack of any subsequent revival of interest has left hundreds of sets of Spencer in used book shops, to be sold primarily to historians or to the general public as inexpensive decorator items. They have become cheaper, even, than sets of Thackeray or Scott.

attempts, which differed significantly from earller ones, and the reactions to them constitute the second episode in the history of evolutionary ethics.

Although the Victorians' faith in progress allegedly was killed off on the fields of Flanders, even a cursory reading of the popular literature of the 1920s reflects that alongside expressions of deep disillusionment and despair, there were many attempts to recast and revive a positive and inspiring faith in man's progress—actual or potential. Some biologists thought that the earlier interpretations of evolution, which stressed natural selection and competition, had been misguided both in distorting our picture of nature and in promoting deleterious courses of human action. The moral lesson was clear to these writers: German Darwinists' emphasis on natural selection and the struggle for existence had contributed to German militarism and to war. In reaction, scientists like Vernon Kellogg, David Starr Jordan, William Patten, and Edwin Conklin advocated alternative visions that stressed cooperation on both the biological and social levels.^[5] Although these writings stressed moral issues, they did not propose fully developed systems of evolutionary ethics. William Patten, for instance, in his book The Grand Strategy of Evolution (1920), discussed the parallels among all living beings and associations of life.^[6] He argued that it was cooperative action that characterized the living world and was responsible for its progress. Altruism was not confined to the human domain but was basic to the evolution of all living forms. The "struggle for existence" was not, according to Patten, to be interpreted in a crudely Darwinian fashion; instead it was "a struggle of the individual to find the right way out of the obstructive conditions created by its own growth and by that of other individuals, in order to give itself to a larger life."^[7] This process occurred among cells of an organism, or individuals of a social group, and was the guide

[5] See the very interesting and well-documented article by Gregg Mitman, "Evolution as Gospel: William Patten, the Language of Democracy, and the Great War," Isis 81, no. 308 (1990): 446-463. Mitman places this story into a wider context in his The State of Nature: Ecology, Community, and American Social Thought, 1900-1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). Also see J. W. Atkinson, "E. G. Conklin on Evolution: The Popular Writings of an Embryologist," Journal of the History of Biology 18, no. 1 (1985): 31-50.

[6] William Patten, The Grand Strategy of Evolution (Boston: Richard G. Badger, 1920).

[7] Ibid., 55.

for proper living. The lesson was simple: mutual service "creates a larger unity, and a larger individuality out of smaller ones. Service that flows out of one individuality to another we call benevolence, or altruism. When a constructive way is found, we call it the right way, or rightness, because it is creative and preservative to that extent."^[8] For Patten, man's challenge for the future was in the creation of social structures that fostered "national and international cooperation, commercial and educational, resting on some common understanding; on some basic community of methods and motives."^[9]

Closer to a new evolutionary ethics were numerous "emergent evolution" theories that purported to account for the appearance of man and his unique cultural characteristics. Some were clearly religiously inspired and were a continuation of the syncretistic thinking of the previous century. C. Lloyd Morgan, the famous student of animal behavior, for example, wrote numerous works on emergent evolution. He acknowledged Samuel Alexander as a major influence,^[10] but he differed from Alexander in his assessment of the relevance of natural selection for ethics. Like T. H. Huxley, Morgan separated the lower forces of speciation from the higher processes of moral development and claimed that with the emergence of man, a new level of evolution had come into being. In his early Habit and Instinct, Morgan wrote,

No one can read the ninth volume of Huxley's "Collected Essays,"—that on "Evolution and Ethics"—without seeing that he clearly perceived the distinction between the method of natural selection and that of conscious choice which supersedes it in social evolution. The criticisms called forth by his Romanes Lecture and the reiterated assertions that he had abandoned the naturalistic interpretation of ethical phenomena, together with the defence of his position in the prolegomena prefixed to this ninth volume, all serve to indicate how essential it is that the method of conscious choice should be clearly distinguished from that of natural selection. What we strive to effect in the social evolution which embodies the results of human choice, is often very

[8] Ibid., 167.

[9] Ibid., 390.

[10] Morgan often cited Alexander and was open in his acknowledgment. See, for example, Conway Lloyd Morgan, Habit and Instinct (London: E. Arnold, 1896): 335, and his later Gifford Lectures of 1922, which were published as Emergent Evolution (New York: Henry Holt, 1923): 9.

different from that which natural selection alone would produce. Our ideals are the products of a mental evolution which has escaped from the bondage of natural selection.^[11]

Although man's moral development was not a function of natural selection, it was part of an evolutionary process, one that ultimately allowed individual human minds to glimpse the divine purpose encompassing all evolutionary advance. For Morgan, as for many inspired evolutionary writers of this period, human development was capable of reaching a stage that went beyond the acquisition of rational thought, that properly could be called a spiritual level. Morgan discussed this spiritual level in his second Gifford Lectures (1923)^[12] in which he referred to the writings of the Marburg professor of theology Rudolf Otto. Otto discussed the concept of the "holy" in his widely read book, Das Heilige (1917), which was published in English translation in 1923.^[13] Although Morgan did not accept the formulation of the "numinous," as Otto chose to call it, he did suggest that evolutionists, like himself, held a similar point of view. "For I, too, am now concerned to urge that what in naturalistic regard is 'epigenetic' emergence is from first to last the temporal unfolding of Divine Purpose in which there is no first nor last since it Is."^[14] The divine purpose, according to Morgan, was not separate from nature, nor did he believe it was in any way personal. Rather human evolution had reached a stage where some individuals could contemplate the awesome mystery of the cosmos. For Morgan, this mystical appreciation was ancillary to religion, and it allowed him to reconcile his commitment to Christianity with his equally deep commitment to a naturalistic, evolutionary perspective.^[15]

Morgan's writings were in the tradition of nineteenth-century evolutionary syntheses of religion and science, like those of Drummond and Alexander. Similar to theirs, it was a highly individual faith that merged ideas from different domains. His approach to

[11] Morgan, Habit and Instinct, 335-336.

[12] C. Lloyd Morgan, Life, Mind, and Spirit, Being the Second Course of the Gifford Lectures (New York: Henry Holt, 1925).

[13] Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1923).

[14] Morgan, Life, Mind, and Spirit, 308.

[15] Ibid., 313.

ethics, although loosely "evolutionary," did not derive in any serious way from evolutionary insights. Evolution was part of a cosmic process that partly explained human advancement. Human values came from a contemplation of that process and an understanding of its greater purpose.

Some popular writers in the 1920s and 1930s accepted the notion of progress based on evolution but without a theological underpinning. Their ethical writings tended to depend more closely on biological evolution. Alfred Machin, for example, argued,

If evolution is a fact, and there is a vast body of evidence which suggests that it is, and if man is a product and outcome of evolution, then an understanding of the process of evolution must explain man to himself. It must show him why he is what he is, and also why he is a member of a society which has such a distinctive structure. It must, in short, explain human nature, and show the human organism in relation to its environment in just the same way as it explains plant and animal organisms in relation to their environment.^[16]

Machin did not rely on notions of emergent evolution but instead proposed a version closer to the original Darwinian formulation, which stressed the central role of natural selection. He had his own view of natural selection, however, which was based on his rejection of the Malthusian view of populations and his belief that the unit of selection was the group, not the individual.^[17] Machin agreed with Darwin that natural selection operated on the animal level but insisted that human selection differed in being conscious. On both the animal and human levels, however, natural selection operated to regulate societies and their members to promote fitness. "Man is, in short, like all other living things, just a bundle of survival values," he wrote.^[18]

Although Machin incorporated some of his own values into his retrospective account of the mental and moral history of man—such as his view that the main driving force of human evolution was the desire for wealth^[19] —he stated that presently no adequate moral philosophy existed. So, to that extent, he was not attempting to

[16] Alfred Machin, Darwin's Theory Applied to Mankind (London: Longmans, Green, 1937): xvii.

[17] Machin elaborated these ideas in The Ascent of Man by Means of Natural Selection (London: Longmans, Green, 1925).

[18] Machin, Darwin's Theory Applied to Mankind, 276.

[19] Ibid., 193.

justify an a priori moral or political position by an appeal to evolution. He did, however, make it clear that he believed that evolution would provide the key to any future moral philosophy. "But as yet there is no true philosophy, no rationalization which gives effective guidance. The answers of the Greeks, Romans and of Christianity, are outworn and unadapted to the new conditions of this industrial age. New philosophies are in their birth throes, and it seems most probable that evolution philosophy must furnish that foundation which can alone give stability to any new gospel."^[20] He also viewed the future with hope. In spite of predictions that war would be "grim scientific affairs" and that the strains of civilization would increase as a result of the replacement of physical labor by mental labor, Machin believed that progress would continue. He stated that natural selection could not be arrested and that we were participating in what was perhaps the greatest drama of the universe.^[21] With the memory of the Great War still fresh in the minds of many people and the political clouds over the continent increasingly dark, his high-minded optimism must have appealed to those who wanted to envision a future that was brighter than the past.

The New Psychology

The evolutionary approach to ethics found a sympathetic hearing among many in the 1920s and 1930s who wished to maintain a belief in the progress of man. Although none of them constructed a systematic evolutionary ethics, they, at a minimum, kept the association between evolution and ethics alive. Ironically, greater support came from a group that ultimately contributed to undermining the unquestioned belief in progress: the advocates of the "new psychology." Recall that one of the major philosophical questions asked by Sidgwick and other moral philosophers was, what constituted the basis of individual moral obligation? Although evolutionary ethics might explain how concepts of moral obligation first arose, philosophers pointed out that origins were not the same as justifications. Some supporters of the theories of the psychoanalytic movement claimed that psychology provided new grounds for evolutionary ethics. In spite of its controversial

[20] Ibid., 279.

[21] Ibid., 283.

nature and the hostility of many academic psychologists, who increasingly were drawn to experimental questions, the psychoanalytical school suggested to a few writers that the dated evolutionary ethics of Leslie Stephen or Herbert Spencer might be reworked to yield a satisfactory evolutionary perspective on human morality.

Not that the implications of psychoanalysis pointed to an agreed upon moral interpretation. A. G. Tansley, the Cambridge botanist whose New Psychology and Its Relation to Life (1920) was one of the leading popularizations of the time, made a clear distinction between psychological influences and the "higher moral self." Drawing on Freud's concepts, Tansley attempted to show how the individual was driven by unconscious causes that could lead him to rationalize selfish actions. Tansley also drew on the widely read work of Wilfred Trotter, Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War, 1916-1919 (1916). Trotter, a physician who had an interest in social psychology, held that although Freud was a pioneer in the scientific analysis of human psychology, he had not given enough attention to an instinct of central importance: gregariousness. It was this instinct, which was essential in understanding social animals, Trotter claimed, that had given rise to the sense of duty among individuals in human society. The conflict between our sense of duty and the promptings of our other instincts was the origin of much human mental conflict. Our herd instinct, moreover, was the key to understanding why "a very considerable proportion" of human beliefs were nonrational.^[22] Trotter contended that although most individuals would argue that their beliefs were rationally founded, a close examination would show that "on the great majority of these questions there could be . . . but one attitude—that of suspended judgment."^[23] What was accepted as rational foundation, in fact, was merely rationalization.

Tansley agreed with Trotter that the tendency to rationalize was strong in man. He also accepted Trotter's contention that the new Freudian perspective suggested the possibility of an objective analysis that could go beyond the rule of the herd, that is, the customs of the day, or what were called "moral codes." A reflective mind

[22] Wilfred Trotter, Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War, 1916-1919 (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1923): 35. Trotter's book was first published in 1916. A second edition came out in 1919. The 1923 edition is a reprint of the second edition. It was reprinted in 1975 by Gale Research Company, Detroit.

[23] Ibid., 36.

could free itself from the herd instinct and its formalized external codes.^[24] Psychology, according to Tansley, not only explained how and why moral codes regulated behavior but also demonstrated the ego's capacity to go beyond them. "This highly-developed self-regarding sentiment, which enables a man thus to escape from the immediate pressure of the herd, is nothing else than the ethical self, which . . . is the highest authority in conduct, and the existence of which is necessary to moral freedom."^[25] The ethical self transcended the herd. Its development was based on the rational judgments of a well-consolidated ego with an appreciation of and respect for its relationship to the herd.^[26]

Tansley and others saw modern psychology providing a new analysis of the feeling of moral obligation. For them, its scientific insights surpassed the vague writings in British moral philosophy on human sympathy and established a suitable foundation for understanding morality. However, it is not clear that it actually solved any of the philosophical issues engulfing evolutionary ethics. Trotter and Tansley exemplified an attempt to understand the psychic origins of our altruistic promptings. Our biological background, according to them, predisposed us to conform to the conduct of our peers and to feel a sense of obligation to them. But such a sense, they admitted, was merely a development that we shared with wolves and sheep. "We must be free from the unchecked sway both of our instincts and of all external moral codes before we can set reason free to do its work in the ethical sphere," Tansley wrote.^[27] But did not this recognition of the independence of the moral domain vitiate any help that psychology could offer philosophy? Sidgwick, among others, had argued that the rational examination of morals was independent of their origins or psychological motivation.

As the history of evolutionary ethics demonstrates, however, scientists sometimes have rushed in where philosophers fear to tread. In spite of the clear separation that many psychologists made between the higher ethical self and the deeper psychological currents of the mind, a new factor had been made available to the

[24] A. G. Tansley, The New Psychology and Its Relation to Life (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1920): 176.

[25] Ibid., 189.

[26] Ibid., 189-190.

[27] Ibid., 176.

discussions on evolutionary ethics. And just as psychoanalysts insisted that the rational mind could take the confused and self-rationalizing individual ego to a healthier, better-integrated, more honest self, so, too, did several biologists believe that the Freudian revolution could complement the Darwinian one and lead to a revitalized evolutionary ethics. Julian Sorell Huxley and C. H. Waddington were the most well known figures in the life sciences who took this position.

Champions of Evolutionary Ethics

Julian Huxley

Julian Huxley was born in the house of his aunt, Mrs. Humphry Ward, and the connection was significant. Her best-selling novel, Robert Elsmere (1888), resolved its hero's crisis of conscience by applying his religious energy to secular problems. The book made a deep impression on Huxley, and in his memoirs he indicated, "[It] helped convert me to what I must call a religious humanism, but without belief in any personal God."^[28] Like his famous grandfather, Julian Huxley was locked in an ambivalent battle with organized religion all his life and saw in science a new force to guide action. But unlike Thomas Henry Huxley, Julian Huxley believed that science could not only tell us how to do things but that it could also supply a foundation for discussing what we ought to do.

Julian Huxley was one of the architects of the modern synthesis, the neo-Darwinian theory that reasserted Darwin's emphasis on the natural selection of small random variations as the central driving force of evolution. His importance derived more from his ability to synthesize the information and ideas that were current at the time than in formulating new biological concepts. Like his grandfather, who also did solid but not revolutionary zoological research, his fame rested on his ability to take the ideas of others to a wider audience.

But it was more than just a revitalized evolutionary theory that Huxley espoused. It was also a vision of progressive evolution with significant social and philosophical implications. Huxley be-

[28] Julian Huxley, Memories (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1970): 153.

lieved evolution was a process with three distinct phases: physical, biological, and psychosocial. Although he updated the conventional evolutionary picture of reality with the most modern biological information, the general picture was one that was common from Darwin's and Spencer's day: a cosmological evolution stressing the formation of the solar system; a biological evolution from simple organic soup to the pinnacle of biological existence, man; and a cultural evolution from barbarism to civilization and the hope of future higher development.^[29]

During the interwar years and their aftermath, intellectuals like Huxley were confronted with an unsettling array of new cults, which were competing to replace the declining accepted creeds. Like their Victorian grandfathers, Huxley's generation sought new foundations for belief and for social organization. For Huxley, the theory of evolution provided a key element for a new humanist faith based on a scientific worldview and a liberal social philosophy.^[30] What distinguished Huxley from other humanists was his emphasis on the modern synthesis and his belief that the human phenomenon had to be viewed from a cosmic perspective.

All humanists did not see the necessity of such an inclusive vision. Walter Lippmann, in his Preface to Morals (1929), sketched a moral philosophy based simply on liberal values and modern psychology. For him, the path was adequate, indeed obvious, without the appeal to evolution. "When men can no longer be theists, they must, if they are civilized, become humanists."^[31]

But Huxley sought a more "religious humanism," and he believed the key lay in linking his broad social vision with the theory of evolution. If Lippmann had the good sense to realize that all gospels of science "do violence to the integrity of scientific thought and they cannot satisfy the layman's need to believe,"^[32] Huxley still

[29] One of Huxley's best statements of his evolutionary picture is in his New Bottles for New Wine (London: Chatto and Windus, 1957).

[30] Evolutionary humanism was a theme that ran through Huxley's entire career. For a good introduction see Julian Huxley, ed., The Humanist Frame: The Modern Humanist Vision of Life (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1961). Huxley's humanism was part of the broader, twentieth-century humanist movement; see A. J. Ayer, ed., The Humanist Outlook (London: Pemberton, 1968); Paul Kurtz, The Humanist Alternative: Some Definitions of Humanism (London: Pemberton, 1973); and Morris Storer, ed., Humanist Ethics: Dialogue on Basics (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1980).

[31] Walter Lippmann, A Preface to Morals (New York: Macmillan, 1929): 137.

[32] Ibid., 125.

hoped for a vision that would succeed where others had failed. He sought a "religion without revelation" that would overcome Lippmann's caveat on "the difficulty of reconciling the human desire for a certain kind of universe with a method of explaining the world which is absolutely neutral in its intention."^[33]

Huxley attempted to establish the reality of biological progress as a background for a broader philosophy. His concluding chapter of Evolution: The Modern Synthesis was an extended argument for the acceptance of evolutionary progress.^[34] In it he reviewed the history of life and argued that it reflected a series of dominant types representing advances in increased control of and independence from the environment.^[35]

Huxley's general concept of evolutionary progress met with considerable criticism. Other evolutionists of the modern synthesis were uncomfortable with his discussion, even those who were generally predisposed to see some form of progress over time. The paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson, for example, who wrote more about evolutionary trends than any of the other architects of the modern synthesis, was skeptical about the concept of "improvement" that Huxley used to characterize evolutionary change and that served as a link to his ethical ideas.^[36]

Huxley's views on ethics were integrated with his writings on evolutionary progress.^[37] However, his evolutionary ethics was based

[33] Ibid., 131. Huxley's fullest discussion on religious humanism is in his Religion without Revelation (London: Ernest Benn, 1927).

[34] This was not a new theme for Huxley. He had argued for it since early in his career. See, for example, his Essays of a Biologist (London: Chatto and Windus, 1923), where he developed most of the ideas on progress that he later published in Evolution: The Modern Synthesis (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1943).

[35] Huxley, Evolution, 556-578.

[36] George Gaylord Simpson, Biology and Man (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1969): 141. For some recent views see Matthew H. Nitecki, ed., Evolutionary Progress (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). Stephen Jay Gould also has argued against "distorting the evolutionary record" by squeezing our interpretations of it into progressive molds; see, for example, his Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), and his article "On Replacing the Idea of Progress with an Operational Notion of Directionality," in Nitecki, ed., Evolutionary Progress, 319-336.

[37] On Huxley's worldview based on evolutionary progress, see John C. Greene's essay, "From Huxley to Huxley: Transformations in the Darwinian Credo," in his Science, Ideology, and Worldview, and his article "The Interaction of Science and World View in Sir Julian Huxley's Evolutionary Biology," Journal of the History of Biology 23, no. 1 (1990): 39-55. Also see Sister Carol Marie Wildt, "Julian Huxley's Conception of Evolutionary Progress," Ph.D. dissertation, Saint Louis University, 1973.

more on an acceptance of human progress than on the general idea of biological progress. Although he wrote extensively of the evolutionary unity of the world, he nonetheless made a clear distinction between human and biological progress, and for that reason one might accept his arguments for one while holding reservations about the other.

Human progress differed from biological evolution, according to Huxley, in two significant ways. First, it involved only one species, and more important, it was a progress that was not based on any new biological trend. Instead, human progress was predicated on cultural advance. Cumulative transmission of experience had given humans the ability to communicate knowledge beyond one generation. This ability allowed for cultural evolution, which proceeded at a rate much faster than biological evolution. Huxley held that not only was psychosocial evolution faster than biological evolution but also that it was the only line open to future progress. Life had exhausted its potential for major physiological improvement, and human cultural evolution was unique in escaping the dead end of 700 million years of life on earth. Huxley revealed his anthropocentric bias in a curious comment elaborating on this position, where he argued not only that man was the only organism capable of major evolutionary advance but that "even should the conclusion prove unjustified that purely biological evolution has reached its limit and become stabilized, and some new animal type should arise which threatened man's dominant position, man would assuredly be able to discern and counter the threat in its early stages."^[38]

Of greater importance for the issue of ethics were the different criteria that Huxley employed in gauging cultural evolution. Unlike other species, humans were unique in their ability to utilize conceptual thought and speech, and those characteristics distinguished humans from all other animals.^[39] Or, as he put it in 1941, "There is but one path of unlimited progress through the evolutionary maze."^[40] That path was man's mental self-control and mental independence. Intimately connected to that control and indepen-

[38] Huxley, New Bottles for New Wine, 48. Presumably Huxley meant that a life form that was physically more fit would be destroyed by humans who had the added advantage of culture and could recognize the threat.

[39] Julian Huxley, The Uniqueness of Man (London: Chatto and Windus, 1941): 115.

[40] Ibid., 16.

dence were the fulfillment of human possibilities and the formation of values. Cultural evolution and the progress of mankind were the result of the struggle between ideas and values. Instead of a struggle for physical existence and reproduction that characterized the rest of the living world, human evolution was judged by cultural evolution. Unlike most of the earlier writers on evolutionary ethics, Huxley did not stress the adaptive value of cultural evolution. Although he certainly did not underrate the importance of man's ingenuity in controlling his environment, or the great advances in man's ability to feed, clothe, and shelter himself, it was by the increase of aesthetic, spiritual, and intellectual satisfaction that Huxley judged human evolution. And it was in the formation of values for their own sake that the future of progress was to be realized.

Like his grandfather, Julian Huxley envisioned a discontinuity between animal and human evolution. However, where T. H. Huxley was satisfied to acknowledge a shared moral sentiment that came from the heart, Julian wanted to use the science of his day to grapple with what "from the heart" meant. His Romanes Lecture (1943) was a conscious attempt to resolve the problems left by his grandfather's lecture of fifty years earlier, and he published an edition of both lectures together in 1947.

Julian Huxley concentrated on two issues that he considered basic. The first concerned moral obligation; the second, moral standards. These not only have been the central concerns of ethics as an intellectual discipline but also have been central in the criticism of evolutionary ethics, and Huxley correctly realized that any attempt to establish an evolutionary ethics would have to confront them.

To explain moral obligation, Huxley relied on the new psychology, particularly Freudian analysis of infantile mental development. It was in the universal conflict between the desires of the infant relative to its mother that a primitive mechanism came into being, what the Freudians called the primitive superego but what Huxley called, using a "more non-committal term," the "protoethical mechanism."^[41] As the infant, early in its second year of ex-

[41] Thomas Henry Huxley and Julian Huxley, Touchstone for Ethics 1893-1943 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1947): 117. Julian Huxley's Romanes Lecture first appeared as Evolutionary Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1943).

istence, distinguishes itself from outer reality, it is its mother who "comes to represent the external world, and to mediate its impacts on the child."^[42] The mother did so by being its source of gratification but equally its source of frustrating "authority." The conflict of aggression and love thus engendered was potentially chaotic, but it constituted the proto-ethical mechanism that repressed aggression by branding it with guilt and therefore allowed the infant to act in the face of conflict. This sense of guilt, of basic wrong as opposed to right, was at the heart of the moral sense.

Our modern knowledge also helps us to understand the absolute, categorical, and other-worldly quality of moral obligation, on which moral philosophers lay such stress. It is due in the first instance to the compulsive all-or-nothing mechanism by which the primitive super-ego operates. It is also due to the fact that, as Waddington points out, the external world first intrudes itself into the baby's magic solipsism in the form of the parents' demands for control over primitive impulses, so that infantile ethics embody the shock of the child's discovery of a world outside itself and unamenable to its wishes.^[43]

The primitive moral sense, of course, represented no more than an "embryonic mental structure." Like Lippmann, whom he admired and quoted in spite of their differences, Huxley held that from this early mental structure the main lines of development were yet to come in the "passage to maturity." Individual human mental development could lead to an "excess load of unrealistic guilt" with all the distortions the Freudians described. But in favorable circumstances, "human beings are able to develop without these overdoses of untruth and unreality in their moral system."^[44] Humans could "achieve an internal ethical realism," that is, "the proper adjustment of the sense of guilt to reality."^[45]

But ethics involved more than explaining our sense of individual moral obligation through psychology, and Huxley discussed it from a social perspective as well. The ethical standards of the social group in which a person could find himself might be "unrealistic." Just as our individual conscience was not an absolute authority, so, too, were social ethics relative to time and place. But

[42] Huxley and Huxley, Touchstone for Ethics, 117.

[43] Ibid., 120.

[44] Ibid., 124-125.

[45] Ibid., 125.

were there independent ethical standards? Certainly not in the sense of a set of absolute values, either current or, as in Spencer's judgment, defined by a future society. Instead standards have evolved in the course of human history and could now provide guidance.

In the broadest possible terms evolutionary ethics must be based on a combination of a few main principles: that it is right to realize ever new possibilities in evolution, notably those which are valued for their own sake; that it is right both to respect human individuality and to encourage its fullest development; that it is right to construct a mechanism for further social evolution which shall satisfy these prior conditions as fully, efficiently, and as rapidly as possible.^[46]

Huxley expanded on some of the implications of his position.

When we look at evolution as a whole, we find, among the many directions which it has taken, one which is characterized by introducing the evolving world-stuff to progressively higher levels of organization and so to new possibilities of being, action, and experience. This direction has culminated in the attainment of a state where the world-stuff (now moulded into human shape) finds that it experiences some of the new possibilities as having value in or for themselves; and further that among these it assigns higher and lower degrees of value, the higher values being those which are more intrinsically or more permanently satisfying, or involve a greater degree of perfection.^[47]

The direction of progress, then, was toward human fulfillment and the realization of things that humans judge to have value. The highest of these values were ones of "intrinsic worth." Society, therefore, should be structured so as to promote them. Huxley elaborated on what sort of society he believed would best realize these goals. It was one that respected the rights of its individuals, one that did not warp the structure of individual personalities, one that stressed education, fostered responsibility, encouraged the arts; that is, the liberal society that fellow humanists and progressive Christians envisioned.

Huxley's evolutionary ethics is interesting because it recognized the degree to which culture had gone beyond purely biological development. As a vision of reality, it must be considered on a par with other inspired dreams of reason of our century, like Teilhard

[46] Ibid., 136.

[47] Ibid., 136-137.

de Chardin's. Huxley's outpouring of essays, which rivaled his grandfather's in bulk, were read eagerly by many who appreciated the richness of modern evolutionary biology and who were searching for a synthesis that preserved traditional, Western liberal values. Huxley's scientific humanism attempted to liberate modern man from outmoded creeds and to be more complete than Marxism, existentialism, or liberal theology.

But it is not clear that he made any progress in resolving the numerous criticisms raised by Sidgwick and others to earlier systems of evolutionary ethics. Indeed, by tying his ethics to a cosmic scheme of progress, Huxley, like Spencer, risked having his argument dismissed without a fair hearing by those who regarded such speculative visions with disdain.

Critics of evolutionary ethics have traditionally focused on its lack of an adequate explanation of moral obligation, on both the individual and the group level. Huxley's move to a psychoanalytical account of moral obligation was similar to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century attempts to derive our notions of the moral sentiment from psychology. The problem with such strategies, as Sidgwick pointed out, was not the validity of the hypothesis but its relevance for ethics. Even Huxley admitted that the sense of moral obligation was no more than a psychological factor, which, to an important degree, needed to be mediated by the rational mind. Huxley noted that guilt, which was central to the Freudian interpretation of moral obligation, could be psychologically and morally damaging. For example, in his description of the Nazi mind, Huxley claimed that "an excess load of unrealistic guilt" led individuals to project their sense of unbearable condemnation onto Jewish scapegoats. "Most Nazis genuinely believe that Jews are a major source of evil; they can do so because they have projected the beastliness in their own souls into them. The terrible feature of such projection is that it can turn one's vices into virtues: thus, granted the Nazi believes the Jews are evil, it is his moral duty to indulge his repressed aggression in cruelty and violence towards them."^[48]

The value of psychoanalysis lay in its ability to probe and resolve rationally the pathological mental state of individuals. How did Freudian explanations illuminate the ethical problem of moral

[48] Ibid., 123.

obligation? In Huxley's discussion, they provided an explanation of why humans might feel obligation, but they did not provide an ethical justification for those feelings. The new psychology, therefore, did not supply a solution to the problem Thomas Henry Huxley recognized in evolutionary accounts of the moral sentiment. Like earlier treatments of the moral sentiment that relied on "custom" for answering the philosophical question of why we "ought" to help our neighbor, Julian Huxley's extended psychological derivation failed to justify what it described.

Huxley's discussion of general ethical standards was no more successful. He argued for those actions, policies, and beliefs that furthered human progress. He measured human progress by the realization of values that were intrinsically worthy, the furthering of individual fulfillment, and the changing of society to promote social evolution. But these were very vague categories. What did intrinsically valuable mean? For Huxley they were obvious: aesthetic, spiritual, and intellectual experiences. But aside from asserting their importance, Huxley did not attempt any justification of them. He was clear that they did not contribute to survival. Rather, they were the values of "high culture"; of considerable importance to a small fraction of the population and traditionally the yardstick by which they measured civilization. But they could, and have, been viewed differently: as the tools of repression, the products of vanity, commodities, and so on. Jerry Falwell, Jacques Derrida, the Ayatollah Khomeini, Allan Bloom, Václav Havel, Madonna, and Noam Chomsky (to name just a few) probably would have differed with Julian Huxley about the significance of high culture as well as what was "intrinsically valuable."

Similarly, the value of individual fulfillment and the social engineering to bring it about were values typifying Western, democratic, liberal thought. In Huxley's day, as in ours, it was not universally accepted, even in the West. And even if it were, the issue in ethics has not been consensus but justification.

Huxley's ethics was a projection of his values onto the history of man. In classic Whig fashion, he conceptualized the past as leading to what he valued in the present and posited the direction of future evolutionary progress from the same perspective. Sincere—and often inspired—as his rhetoric was, it ultimately depended on a shared commitment by his reader rather than logical arguments. Cosmic evolution and biological evolution were blind

processes, as Huxley described in numerous publications. And yet he demanded his reader accept the idea that this neutral universe had a direction and that man had an obligation (real, not merely psychological) to further its progress. He could do this by creating values and purpose, according to Huxley. But if man created these values and goals, how were we to be assured of their moral value? To project man's beliefs (the ones of which Huxley approved) onto the cosmos was to create a modern myth, and perhaps there is the key to Huxley's position.

From early in his career Huxley wanted to replace the Christian worldview with a scientific humanism. Huxley believed that the difference between his philosophy and religion was that religion was based on the hypothesis of the existence of a god, whereas his views were based on the scientific method. But what he actually proposed was the creation of a new myth, one dressed in the guise of evolutionary biology but nonetheless with an entire set of assumptions, values, and beliefs. Like many of the attempts since Comte to use science to go beyond religion but still maintain the sense of religious awe, Huxley's naturalism assumed the vision he pretended to discover.

C. H. Waddington

C. H. Waddington was another figure who championed evolutionary ethics in the period between the end of the First World War and the creation of the field of sociobiology. Waddington's ideas were developed in conjunction with Huxley, and therefore it is not surprising that there was considerable similarity in their mature views.

Waddington appears to have been more sensitive than Huxley to the contemporary problems that faced the construction of an evolutionary ethics, indeed, any ethical system. In the beginning of his Science and Ethics (1942), he indicated what a leading philosopher had once said to him on the subject: "'This,' Wittgenstein once said to me, 'is a terrible business—just terrible! You can at best stammer when you talk of it.'"^[49] And although Waddington additionally noted that psychoanalysis, anthropology, Marxism, and logical positivism had undermined traditional philosophical justifi-

[49] C. H. Waddington, ed., Science and Ethics (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1942): 7.

cations of ethics, he still thought that evolution provided a new possibility. For him, "the framework within which one can carry on a rational discussion of different systems of ethics, and make comparisons of their various merits and demerits, is to be found in a consideration of animal and human evolution."^[50]

Like Huxley, Waddington held that ethics had been led down blind alleys by philosophers and theologians and that biologists, conscious of the evolutionary history of man, could set the discussion right. The main issues that he attacked were the familiar ones: the origin of moral obligation and the evaluation of ethical standards. His most complete explication of evolutionary ethics was published in 1960 in a book entitled The Ethical Animal. In it he elaborated on earlier writings and attempted to answer critics.

Waddington relied on psychology to explain the origin of our moral sense. He claimed that the human infant was born with an "innate capacity to acquire ethical beliefs but without any specific beliefs in particular."^[51] In 1960 when Waddington published The Ethical Animal, theories of infant development had ramified into a wide range of opinion. He acknowledged that the story was not as simple as he and Huxley had envisioned it to be in the 1940s. He nonetheless repeated his affirmation that the infant's interaction with its environment resulted in an "ethicizing creature," that is, one that was accepting of authority.

Waddington thought that the individual also acquired the ability to examine his own ethical beliefs in a rational manner, and this had important evolutionary consequences in deciding between alternative systems of belief. But what were the "supra-criteria of wisdom," as he phrased it? Waddington agreed with Huxley that the criterion of ethical good was that which furthered human evolution, but he attempted to avoid what he took to be Huxley's circular reasoning in attempting to establish the direction of progress. Instead he stressed that we needed to evaluate particular ethical beliefs against the background of evolutionary advance. The question was "how effective it is in mediating this empirically ascertained course of evolutionary change."^[52] Waddington used the

[50] C. H. Waddington, The Ethical Animal (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1960): 23.

[51] Ibid., 26.

[52] Ibid., 30.

analogy of evaluating the activity of eating. The newborn infant developed "into a creature that goes in for eating" in a manner that was parallel (even if more dependent on innate factors) to the infant's development into an "ethicizing being."^[53] Next the child developed specific food habits, analogous to the formation of specific ethical beliefs. To criticize those eating habits, Waddington directed us to inquire into the function of eating, which was the possible healthy growth of the body. Having determined the function of eating, one could then ask of a particular eating habit "how effective it is in bringing about healthy growth."^[54] If an individual asserted that he preferred abnormal growth, the nutritionist could tell him that to do so would be out of step with nature. The nutritionist was not imposing values but was revealing "biological wisdom" based on what was "immanent in nature." That is, there was an empirical grounding for the assertion. Extending this to ethics, one had to ask of a particular belief, did it contribute to human evolution? By human evolution, Waddington did not mean to imply a simplistic notion but rather "to refer to all the cultural changes which differentiate human life at the present day from that of our Stone Age ancestors. It includes spiritual and intellectual changes as well as those concerning materials and tools."^[55] To the criticism that his criterion was so broad as to be meaningless, Waddington replied, "No general ethical principle can be useful unless it is wide enough to be relevant to very many diverse aspects of life; and that implies that it cannot be precise enough to obviate the need for debate about particular moral issues."^[56]

That ethical principles must be broad no one would dispute. General principles cannot be expected to deal up directly solutions to particular moral questions. The "evolution of man," however, is so vague and potentially contains so many conflicting empirical examples that it is difficult to see how it, in itself, can be of any use as a criterion for ethical value. Nations have come and gone. War and peace have reigned. There are no guideposts along the way that say, "This is the right direction." The destruction of the Roman empire was of value to some of its neighboring tribes and had many profound effects on Western civilization; some positive,

[53] Ibid.

[54] Ibid.

[55] Ibid., 31.

[56] Ibid.

some negative. Was the event good? Waddington criticized Huxley for the circularity of his thought, but it is not clear that he avoided the same pitfall. Where Huxley claimed that emergent values were obvious, Waddington said they could be empirically discovered by reference to human progress. But for both, what ultimately mattered were their own values, which they read into the human drama and which remained philosophically unjustified.

Biologists on Evolutionary Ethics

Although Huxley and Waddington were the two most strident voices relating evolution to ethics, they were by no means the only ones in the interwar and postwar period. Indeed, many evolutionary biologists, or scientists who studied related subjects like genetics and ecology, expressed ideas on the relationship of evolution to moral and/or religious ideas. Most were critical of the attempt to develop an evolutionary ethics along the lines laid out by Huxley and Waddington, but certainly not all. Several biologists in the United States favored a naturalistic theory of ethics that was tied to their ideas on evolution. Animal ecologists at the University of Chicago, for example, based their ethical views on an alternative evolutionary perspective that emphasized the importance of cooperation over natural selection. Building on the cooperationist ideas of earlier writers like William Patten, the Chicago ecologists Warder Clyde Allee and Alfred Edwards Emerson spoke out for a social program and an ethical stance that they justified with their scientific writings on progressive animal evolution.^[57] Panels at American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) meetings and popular writings in the 1940s and 1950s also stressed a biological perspective on morality and moral questions.^[58] Although evolution was a critical concept in some of these views, the

[57] For an interesting discussion see Gregg Mitman, "From Population to Society: The Cooperative Metaphors of W. C. Allee and A. E. Emerson," Journal of the History of Biology 21, no. 2 (1988): 173-194, and his excellent book The State of Nature, which describe the development of animal ecology at the University of Chicago and demonstrate the way in which figures like Allee and Emerson read their social views into the natural world.

[58] A good example of this literature is Chauncey Leake and Patrick Romanell, Can We Agree? A Scientist and a Philosopher Argue about Ethics (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1950), which contains Leake's well-known article, "Ethicogenesis," published originally in the Scientific Monthly 60 (1945): 245-253.

ethical position presented was a naturalistic ethics that drew heavily on ethnology, psychology, and physiology and usually lacked the general picture of evolutionary progress that was so central to other biological interpretations of ethics. A well-known example of these naturalistic theories of ethics was Life and Morals (1948) by Samuel Jackson Holmes of the University of California. Holmes claimed that morals had a natural origin but, he said, Darwinian evolution "does not logically compel me to adopt any one standard of conduct rather than another."^[59] He accepted Edward Westermarck's relativity of ethics and advocated "human welfare" as the most acceptable standard by which to judge conduct.^[60]

There were, then, biologists who expressed a sympathy with those who sought to illuminate the human condition with insights from natural science. But overall, the goal was one that failed to attract a wide following. The major architects of the modern synthesis, with the exception of Julian Huxley, were skeptical of the alleged direct ethical implications of evolution. Theodosius Dobzhansky, who wrote extensively on his philosophical views in which evolution plays an important role, was highly critical of evolutionary ethics for not giving enough attention to the role of free choice. In his Page-Barbour Lectures at the University of Virginia (1954), he cautioned against accepting too simple a view of progress and then asked, "Suppose, however, that future studies of human biology and evolution tell us exactly what the direction of evolution in general, and of human biology in particular, has been. Just why should we take for granted that this direction, which we have not chosen, is good?"^[61] He emphasized this weakness in the basic foundations of any evolutionary ethics. "No theory of evolutionary ethics can be acceptable unless it gives a satisfactory explanation of just why the promotion of evolutionary development must be regarded as the summum bonum."^[62] Furthermore, in Dostoyevskian fashion, Dobzhansky insisted that man would not deny himself the right to question anything, "including the wisdom

[59] Samuel Jackson Holmes, Life and Morals (New York: Macmillan, 1948): 41.

[60] Edward Westermarck's Origin and Development of Moral Ideas (1906-1908) and his shorter Ethical Relativity (1932) were among the most widely cited books on ethical relativism at this time.

[61] These lectures were published as Theodosius Dobzhansky, The Biological Basis of Human Freedom (New York: Columbia University Press, 1956); see 129.

[62] Ibid., 128.

of his evolutionary direction."^[63] Following out this line of thought, he said that man was free to rebel, that even if the direction of evolution were demonstrated to be "good," "man is likely to prefer to be free rather than to be reasonable."^[64]

George Gaylord Simpson, another figure of central importance to the modern synthesis who published his ethical views, was outspoken in his criticism of Huxley's and Waddington's attempts to resuscitate evolutionary ethics. Simpson agreed that the moral sense had a natural, evolutionary origin; perhaps not exactly in the fashion that Huxley or Waddington favored but in some psychosocial manner. However, such an origin did not proscribe any specific ethical conclusions. "A rational, naturalistic system of ethics cannot be independent of evolution, but neither can it be derived from evolution."^[65] Like Dobzhansky, Simpson claimed that what makes ethical choice valid is man's freedom to make ethical choices among alternatives. The past evolution of man did not supply a guide, nor did any perceived direction in evolution. Simpson disagreed with Huxley on the nature of biological progress and instead stressed the opportunistic nature of evolution. Far from seeing a straight line from protozoa to man, Simpson believed "evolution is not invariably accompanied by progress, nor does it really seem to be characterized by progress as an essential feature. Progress has occurred within it but is not of its essence. Aside from the broad tendency for the expansion of life, which is also inconstant, there is no sense in which it can be said that evolution is progress."^[66] Although the fossil record revealed man to be "high," progress in the evolution of man was relative to him only. "It is not progress in a general or objective sense and does not warrant choice of the line of man's ancestry as the central line of evolution as a whole."^[67]

In his widely read book The Meaning of Evolution (1949), Simpson reviewed the various attempts to establish an evolutionary ethics from Darwin's day to the present. He criticized both the

[63] Ibid., 129.

[64] Ibid.

[65] Simpson, Biology and Man, 142.

[66] George Gaylord Simpson, The Meaning of Evolution: A Study of the History of Life and of Its Significance for Man (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1949): 261. This book was an expanded version of the Terry Lectures Simpson delivered at Yale in 1948.

[67] Ibid., 262.

tooth and claw ethic that Thomas Henry Huxley rejected and the more positive "life ethics" of writers like Spencer who defined ethical conduct in terms of those actions that promote life. Simpson claimed that the problem with attempts to derive an evolutionary ethic had to do partly with the quest for an absolute ethic, and he concluded that

the search for an absolute ethic, intuitive or naturalistic, has been a failure. Survival, harmony, increase of life, integration of organic or social aggregations, or other such suggested ethical standards are characteristics which may be present in varying degrees, or absent, in organic evolution but they are not really ethical principles independent and absolute. They become ethical principles only if man chooses to make them such. Man cannot evade the responsibility of the choice.^[68]

There was, then, no possibility in deriving an ethic from past evolutionary history. Instead, man had to choose to develop his capacities and make ethical decisions. From this position, similar to Dobzhansky's, Simpson drew closer to Huxley's and Waddington's. For he went on to state that human ethical standards must be relative to man's evolution. "Evolution has no purpose; man must supply this for himself. . . . But human choice as to what are the right ends must be based on human evolution."^[69] Simpson took these basically "good" goals of human conduct to be the promotion of knowledge, the recognition of personal responsibility, the recognition of the integrity and dignity of individuals, and the importance of promoting the fulfillment of individual capacities.^[70]

Although Simpson sought a naturalistic ethic, one that was linked to evolution, he was more aware than Huxley or Waddington of its relative nature. Citing Westermarck's anthropological arguments on the diversity of ethical beliefs and the Freudian revolution in our understanding of our intuitive sense of moral obligation, Simpson was keenly aware of the limits of his position. Nonetheless, he did conclude that "these relativistic ethics have, at least, the merit of being honestly derived from what seems to be demonstrably true and clear."^[71]

[68] Ibid., 310.

[69] Ibid., 311.

[70] Ibid., 315. For an interesting discussion of Simpson's emphasis on the individual in contrast to the group, see Mitman, "From Population to Society," 190-193.

[71] Ibid., 324.

Considering the diversity of the writings of Morgan, Machin, Huxley, Waddington, Holmes, and Simpson, one might ask, Is there an internal logic that leads those strongly committed to the theory of evolution to attempt an ethics informed by (if not derived from) evolution? Probably not. There have been striking counterexamples; Dobzhansky, to mention one. In addition, there were biologists committed to evolution who approached the topic of ethics from quite different perspectives. For example, Joseph Needham argued that life consisted of more than one irreducible form of experience and that in addition to scientific, there were also philosophical, historical, aesthetic, and religious dimensions to our life.^[72] His essays depict a highly individualistic, syncretistic world-view, which partakes of the Tao, Marxism, and Christianity as well as biochemistry and evolution.^[73]

But if there is no internal logic that leads from evolution to ethics, there certainly has been a strong invitation to construct an ethics from an evolutionary perspective. The theory of evolution, especially in its modern form, is a brilliant synthesis of biological knowledge and gives direction to much of the most interesting work on life. Since man is a product of evolution, it has been tempting to see if the theory that explained so much that formerly was unexplainable could provide some illumination on this intractable problem. Scientific theories often grow by extension. The field of ethics has been particularly attractive to scientists because in the secular atmosphere of the twentieth century, religion has not provided an accepted foundation for ethical belief. As we have seen, this has been a long-standing problem. Since the crisis of the 1870s, the situation has steadily deteriorated. Moral philosophy in the second half of the nineteenth century attempted to supply a new foundation, either through idealism or utilitarianism, but could not arrive at consensus. The proponents of evolutionary ethics can

[72] See Needham's autobiographical sketch written under a pseudonym, Henry Holorenshaw, "The Making of an Honorary Taoist," in Mikulás Teich and Robert Young, eds., Changing Perspectives in the History of Science: Essays in Honour of Joseph Needham (London: Heinemann, 1973): 5. Also see the seminal book by R. G. Collingwood, Speculum Mentis: Or the Map of Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1924).

[73] See Needham's three books of essays, The Sceptical Biologist (London: Chatto and Windus, 1929); The Great Amphibium: Four Lectures on the Position of Religion in a World Dominated by Science (London: Student Christian Movement Press, 1931); and Time: The Refreshing River, Essays and Addresses, 1932-1942 (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1943).

be seen as individuals who, dissatisfied with religious and philosophical treatments of ethics, attempted to supplant them and join the ranks of those who offered serious philosophical accounts. But their efforts were judged wanting by professional philosophers in both the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century. Did the climate in moral philosophy alter between G. E. Moore's publication of Principia Ethica and the elaboration of the modern synthesis? Even a cursory glance at the literature reveals that philosophers did not soften their antagonism to evolutionary ethics. But did moral philosophers formulate an acceptable alternative?

Evolutionary Ethics and Twentieth-Century Moral Philosophy

Twentieth-century Anglo-American philosophers have failed to come to any agreement on the foundations of ethics. G. E. Moore, who began a new approach to ethics early in the century, argued that the "good" was not definable. That is, one could not identify natural properties to characterize objects or actions that were good. Instead moral truths were known to us by direct intuition. Moore wrote in his Principia Ethica,

By far the most valuable things, which we know or can imagine, are certain states of consciousness, which may be roughly described as the pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects. No one, probably, who has asked himself the question, has ever doubted that personal affection and the appreciation of what is beautiful in Art or Nature, are good in themselves; nor, if we consider strictly what things are worth having purely for their own sakes, does it appear probable that any one will think that anything else has nearly so great a value as the things which are included under these two heads.^[74]

Personal affections and aesthetic enjoyment, consequently, were the ends by which we should judge actions. "Our 'duty,' therefore, can only be defined as that action, which will cause more good to exist in the Universe than any possible alternative. And what is 'right' or 'morally permissible' only differs from this, as what will not cause less good than any possible alternative."^[75]

Although Moore's philosophy impressed the Bloomsbury crowd

[74] Moore, Principia Ethica, 188-189.

[75] Ibid., 148.

and a significant number of philosophers, his ethics was contested by many. Among those who accepted the notion that moral truths were known by intuition, important philosophers like H. A. Prichard and W. D. Ross did not agree with Moore's contention that the moral value of an action should be judged by the end toward which it led but held instead that it was intrinsic to the action itself. Anglo-American logical positivists, who came to occupy an important niche in the discipline, however, rejected the notion of intuitive moral knowledge altogether. They did so because all knowledge, according to the logical positivists, had to be verified empirically. Intuitive notions were not considered in the realm of verifiable statements. A. J. Ayer, for example, dismissed the entire field of ethics because he held that moral discourse was beyond empirical verification. "We can now see why it is impossible to find a criterion for determining the validity of ethical judgments," he wrote after examining various ethical positions.

It is not because they have an "absolute" validity which is mysteriously independent of ordinary sense-experience, but because they have no objective validity whatsoever. If a sentence makes no statement at all, there is obviously no sense in asking whether what it says is true or false. And we have seen that sentences which simply express moral judgments do not say anything. They are pure expressions of feeling and as such do not come under the category of truth and falsehood. They are unverifiable for the same reason as a cry of pain or a word of command is unverifiable—because they do not express genuine propositions.^[76]

Indeed, for Ayer, ethics did not belong in the province of philosophy but was "a task for the psychologist."^[77] By that he meant that ethical statements were expressions of feeling, not statements that had a truth value.

Logical positivism had a major impact on Anglo-American philosophy and contributed to the notion that ethics had more to do with feeling than knowledge. Starting from this position and emphasizing the importance of language, Charles L. Stevenson elaborated a sophisticated and widely influential approach to the clarification of the concepts of ethical discourse and their use: the

[76] A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic (London: Victor Gollancz, 1936): 161.

[77] Ibid., 168.

"emotivist" theory. "Moral judgments are concerned with recommending something for approval or disapproval," he wrote.^[78]

After the Second World War philosophers in England and America continued to stress the study of language. Many were inspired by John Langshaw Austin, who established a tradition of ordinary language philosophy at Oxford which analyzed the meaning of everyday language. By focusing on how ethical terms are used, by clarifying what we mean by ethical judgments, or by dismissing the cognitive value of ethics altogether, followers of the analytical traditions in the Anglo-American philosophical community have all but abandoned attempts at the construction of a rational foundation for ethics.

And so it is understandable that alternative approaches to ethics would be explored in the first half of the twentieth century. Some of those searching for a new base for ethics looked to biology to supply what philosophy and religion have been unable or unwilling to construct. Because part of biology's domain dealt with human origins and with psychological phenomena, it was a reasonable quest. Unfortunately, biology did not prove to be fertile ground. How could it? As we have seen, a common assumption of writers on human evolution was that with the appearance of man a new phase of evolution came into being: human culture. The key to evolutionary ethics, therefore, was to be found in human cultural evolution, an area poorly understood by biology, if understood at all. For that reason, critics of evolutionary ethics argued that the origins and foundations of ethics were outside the domain of biology and rather belonged in the province of anthropology, history, philosophy, and social science. Attempts at speculative evolutionary philosophy with the aim of providing a basis for moral philosophy have produced little more than projections of value systems onto human evolution. Evolution may have proven useful in influencing conceptions of human nature, but in itself that knowledge was insufficient to generate an ethics.

[78] Charles L. Stevenson, Ethics and Language (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944): 13. Emotivist theory was just one of a number of positions that derive from the study of the language of ethical discourse. R. M. Hare developed an alternative called "prescriptivism" that has been widely discussed and extended. See William Donald Hudson, Modern Moral Philosophy, 2d ed. (London: Macmillan, 1983), and Douglas Seanor and N. Fotion, eds., Hare and Critics: Essays on "Moral Thinking" (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).

A review of evolutionary ethics since the First World War, then, shows that it had a second chance to die a natural death. But Phoenix-like, it reappeared in the 1970s. In part, the continued dissatisfaction with philosophy's inability to provide an agreed upon moral philosophy provided an incentive to continue to explore biological alternatives. But of greater importance was the dramatic development of sociobiology in the later part of the twentieth century, which led numerous writers to believe that science had achieved a breakthrough that would illuminate the secrets of human nature and open the possibility (finally) of constructing a valid evolutionary ethics.