The Temptations of Evolutionary Ethics

Front Cover
University of California Press, 11. okt 1994 - 224 pages
Evolutionary theory tells us about our biological past; can it also guide us to a moral future? Paul Farber's compelling book describes a century-old philosophical hope held by many biologists, anthropologists, psychologists, and social thinkers: that universal ethical and social imperatives are built into human nature and can be discovered through knowledge of evolutionary theory.

Farber describes three upsurges of enthusiasm for evolutionary ethics. The first came in the early years of mid-nineteenth century evolutionary theories; the second in the 1920s and '30s, in the years after the cultural catastrophe of World War I; and the third arrived with the recent grand claims of sociobiology to offer a sound biological basis for a theory of human culture.

Unlike many who have written on evolutionary ethics, Farber considers the responses made by philosophers over the years. He maintains that their devastating criticisms have been forgotten—thus the history of evolutionary ethics is essentially one of oft-repeated philosophical mistakes.

Historians, scientists, social scientists, and anyone concerned about the elusive basis of selflessness, altruism, and morality will welcome Farber's enlightening book.

From inside the book

Selected pages

Contents

Charles Darwin
10
Darwinian Ethics
22
Evolutionary Ethics Herbert Spencer
38
Darwinian Critics Thomas Henry Huxley and Alfred Russel Wallace
58
Early Reception and Evaluation of Evolutionary Ethics 18701890s
79
Evolutionary Baroque and Its Furies 18901920
96
Syntheses Modern and Otherwise 19181968
118
Evolutionary Ethics Since 1975 Dodo Phoenix or Firebird?
148
Recapitulation Lessons and Queries
168
Bibliography
177
Index
207
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

Popular passages

Page 61 - That man, I think, has had a liberal education who has been so trained in youth that his body is the ready servant of his will, and does with ease and pleasure all the work that, as a mechanism, it is capable of; whose intellect is a clear, cold, logic engine, with all its parts of equal strength, and in smooth working order; ready, like a steam engine, to be turned to any kind of work, and spin the gossamers as well as forge the anchors of the mind...
Page 63 - Cosmic evolution may teach us how the good and the evil tendencies of man may have come about ; but, in itself, it is incompetent to furnish any better reason why what we call good is preferable to what we call evil than we had before.
Page 50 - ... the ultimate man will be one whose private requirements coincide with public ones. He will be that manner of man who, in spontaneously fulfilling his own nature, incidentally performs the functions of a social unit ; and yet is only enabled so to fulfil his own nature by all others doing the like.
Page 15 - The following proposition seems to me in a high degree probable — namely, that any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, the parental and filial affections being here included, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well, or nearly as well developed, as in man.
Page 73 - The inference I would draw from this class of phenomena is, that a superior intelligence has guided the development of man in a definite direction, and for a special purpose, just as man guides the development of many animal and vegetable forms.
Page 59 - At the same time, no one is more strongly convinced than I am of the vastness of the gulf between civilized man and the brutes ; or is more certain that whether from them or not, he is assuredly not of them.
Page 64 - Let us understand, once for all, that the ethical progress of society depends, not on imitating the cosmic process, still less in running away from it, but in combating it.
Page 56 - I believe in the immortality of the soul, not in the sense in which I accept• the demonstrable truths of science, but as a supreme act of faith in the reasonableness of God's work.
Page 59 - Thus, whatever system of organs be studied, the comparison of their modifications in the ape series leads to one and the same result — that the structural differences which separate Man from the Gorilla and the Chimpanzee are not so great as those which separate the Gorilla from the lower apes.
Page 41 - has freedom to do all that he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other...

About the author (1994)

Paul Lawrence Farber is Distinguished Professor of the History of Science at Oregon State University, and author of books in both history of science and biology.

Bibliographic information