A Handbook of Ethical Theory

by George Stuart Fullerton

132. EVOLUTION AND THE SCHOOLS OF THE MORALISTS.—Those who have suggested the norms discussed above, no one would think of as greatly influenced in their ethical teaching by the doctrine of evolution. Locke, Price, Butler and Sidgwick; Aristippus and Epicurus; Paley and Hobbes; Bentham and Mill; Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius; Janet, Green, and the rest, no one would be inclined to class simply as evolutionary moralists. Some of them never thought of evolution at all. How would it affect their standards of right and wrong were evolution expressly taken into account? Would the standards have to be abandoned? Or would the men, as broader men, merely have to revise some of their moral judgments?

(1) It might be supposed that the acceptance of evolutionary doctrine would bring into being a grave problem for the intuitionist, at least. If the body and mind of man are products of evolution, must we not admit as much of man's moral intuitions? Then why not admit that these may be replaced some day by other moral intuitions to be evolved in an unknown future?

He who reasons thus should bear in mind that Sidgwick, who by no means repudiated the doctrine of evolution, was an intuitionist, and placed his ultimate moral intuitions on a par with such mathematical intuitions as that two and two make four. If all intuitions are a product of evolution, Sidgwick might claim that the moral intuitions he accepts fare no worse than those elementary mathematical truths which we accept without question and without reflection. And he might maintain that an appeal to evolution need cast no greater doubt upon ultimate moral truth than upon mathematical. If intuitionism in all its forms is to be rejected, it seems as though it must be done upon some other ground than an appeal to evolution.

(2) As to the egoist. It is not easy to see how the appeal to evolution need disconcert him. Should he be so foolish as to maintain that egoism is always, in fact, necessary and unavoidable on the part of every living creature, he might easily be refuted by a reference to the actual life of the brutes, where altruism can be shown to play no insignificant role. But if he simply maintains that the only reasonable principle for a man to adopt is egoism, he may continue to do so. He makes the self and its satisfactions his end. How can it concern him to learn how the self came to be what it is, or what it will be in the distant future? He panders to the present self; he may assume that it will be reasonable to pander at the appropriate time to the self that is to be, whatever its nature.

(3) The utilitarian remains such whether he makes the greatest good of the greatest number to consist in pleasure or in some other end, such as self-preservation. Some utilitarians, who have been inclined to emphasize the good of man, rather than to extend even to the brutes the goods to be distributed, may be influenced to extend the sphere of duties, if they will listen to the evolutionist, who cannot well leave out of view humbler creatures. [Footnote: "Thus we shall not go wrong in attributing to the higher animals in their simple social life, not only the elementary feelings, the loves and hates, sympathies and jealousies which underlie all forms of society, but also in a rudimentary stage the intelligence which enables those feelings to direct the operations of the animal so as best to gratify them." HOBHOUSE, Ethics in Evolution, chapter i, Sec 4.]

He may broaden his sympathies. But this need not compel him to abandon his fundamental doctrine.

(4) A very similar conclusion may be drawn, when we consider the influence of an acceptance of the doctrine of evolution upon those who would turn to man's nature, to perfection, or to self-realization, as furnishing the norm of human conduct.

A Marcus Aurelius could, with little reference to evolution, accept man's nature, or Nature in the wider sense, as marking out for man the round of his duties. A modern Darwinian might fall back upon much the same standard, while clearly conscious of the fact that man's nature is not something unchangeable, and while inclined to view Nature in general with different eyes from those of the Roman Stoic. No sensible evolutionist would maintain that a creature of a given species should act in defiance of all the instincts of creatures of that type, merely on the ground that species may be involved in a process of progressive development.

Nor need the perfectionist abandon his perfectionism in view of any such consideration. He who measures perfection by the degree of activity exercised in action, may admit that the coming man will be more perfect than it is possible for any man to be now; but that need not prevent him from holding that it is man's present duty to aim at the only perfection possible to him, he being what he is. Similar reasoning will apply to any other conception of perfection likely to be adopted, consciously or unconsciously, by any adherent of the school in question.

As for the self-realizationist, a very little reflection seems sufficient to reveal that the maxim that it is man's duty to become all that it is in him to become is in no wise refuted by the claim that man may, in the indefinitely distant future, become much more than many people have supposed or now suppose.