8 - Evolutionary Ethics in the Twentieth Century: Julian Sorell Huxley and George Gaylord Simpson

Summary

If Julian Huxley is the Herbert Spencer of twentieth-century Darwinism, George Gaylord Simpson may in some ways be considered its Thomas Henry Huxley.

Greene (1981, p. 168)

Philosophers usually think that evolutionary ethics – the attempt to locate and ground morality in our biological origins – met its Waterloo in the crucial year 1903. It was then that the English philosopher G. E. Moore published his devastating critique of the ideas of the prominent nineteenth-century evolutionary ethicist Herbert Spencer (1851, 1868, 1892). In a definitive manner, Moore's Principia Ethica (1903) showed that Spencer and all who thought like him were guilty of that gross conceptual mistake that Moore labeled the “naturalistic fallacy.” Before Moore, evolutionary ethics had flourished like the rank weed that it was. After Moore, evolutionary ethics lay smoldering on the bonfire of discarded ideas. And a good thing, too, thinks the philosopher, for there have been few excesses of nineteenth-century capitalism or twentieth-century militarism and fascism that have not had their biologyoriented partisans. Choose your vileness, and there has been someone prepared to defend it in the name of evolution.

Those whose inquiries have taken them beyond philosophical folklore will know that today there is little need to spend much time on that latter charge (Russett 1976; Kelley 1981; Ruse 1986, 1996; Richards 1987; Pittenger 1993; Crook 1994). For years, historians have been looking at the claims of the evolutionary ethicists – “social Darwinians” as they are often called – and it is clear that although some pretty dreadful things have been suggested and sometimes even perpetrated in the name of evolution, the picture is by no means uniformly black.