Moral Darwinism: Ethical Evidence for the Descent of Man

R O B E R T T. P E N N O C K

Department of Philosophy University of Texas Austin, Texas 78712-1180 U.S.A.

ABSTRACT: Could an ethical theory ever play a substantial evidential role in a scientific argument for an empirical hypothesis? In The Descent of Man, Darwin includes an extended discussion of the nature of human morality, and the ethical theory which he sketches is not simply developed as an interesting ramification of his theory of evolution, but is used as a key part of his evidence for human descent from animal ancestors. Darwin must rebut the argument that, because of our moral nature, humans are essentially different in kind from other animals and so had to have had a different origin. I trace his causal story of how the moral sense could develop out of social instincts by evolutionary mechanisms of group selection, and show that the form of Utilitarianism he proposes involves a radical reduction of the standard of value to the concept of biological fitness. I argue that this causal analysis, although a weakness from a normative standpoint, is a strength when judged for its intended purpose as part of an evidential argument to confirm the hypothesis of human descent.

Key Words: Charles Darwin, Confirmation, Descent of Man, evidence, evolutionary ethics, human evolution, Moral Darwinism

The idea that biological theory may be relevant to an understanding of ethics is taken seriously in at least some quarters, but could the converse ever hold? Of course, ethics m a y guide the behavior of scientists as moral agents, but it seems prima facie implausible that an ethical theory could ever have any legitimate beating on the empirical aspects of a specific scientific problem. D a r w i n ' s entry into the field of moral speculation in parts of The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex 1 provides an interesting case study o f this issue, for it appears to be a potential counter example to such a judgment. Value considerations of a general sort have entered scientific discourse in the form of aesthetics, or metaphysics, or political ideology, but this Darwinian case seems to be a unique instance where an ethical theory is used as part of a scientific argument, and used in a scientifically substantial way - that is, it is meant to be seen as part of an evidential argument that will help establish a conclusion regarding empirical facts about the natural world.

Biology and Philosophy 10: 287-307, 1995. 1995 KluwerAcademicPublishers. Printedin the Netherlands.

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It is a bit misleading to call what Darwin gives us in the Descent an "ethical theory," for what we get in the chapters that include material on the moral sense is more like a sketch of an ethical theory, and it will require some reconstruction to see how the elements fit together. One aim of this paper is to piece those elements into a whole and to show how the view that emerges is one that deserves the name "Moral Darwinism," with all that that phrase implies. Darwin analyzed morality in a thoroughly biological manner, and his view is surprisingly reductionist and radical even by today's standards. But the main goal of the paper is to elucidate the evidential work that this ethical theory was supposed to do. Darwin's discussion of the philosophical nature of morality does not simply illustrate an interesting ramification of the theory of descent with modification, but, rather, functions as part of the argument for the theory, specifically for its ability to handle the problem of the origin of Homo sapiens. I lay out my interpretation of Darwin's scientific problem in section two, and describe the ethical theory and how it functions evidentially as part of his solution in section three. In section four I evaluate Darwin's comparison of his theory to Utilitarian and Kantian theories, and in section five I review and evaluate the theory in its intended role as part of an evidential argument for the descent of human beings from animal ancestors.

II When Darwin presented his theory of natural selection and descent with modification in The Origin of Species, he had said only then that "light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history." (Darwin 1964 (1859), p. 488) But Darwin kept everyone in the dark until 1871, twelve years after the Origin, when he at last published the Descent, putting into print his views on how humans fit into the evolutionary picture. He aimed to show that we had evolved from lower animal forms by the same processes that had shaped and continue to shape the rest of nature's creatures. But, one might ask, had not the argument for evolution already been made in the Origin? If anything remained to be done, surely it was only to make a case for a particular pathway of descent. Darwin does suggest a genealogy, but contrary to expectations, Darwin's major objective in the Descent is not to show how we descended, but rather that we descended from lower forms. That this would remain an issue seems odd to us because we take the conclusion to be implicit in the Origin where Darwin set out the process of natural selection and showed how modification of species could produce new species. He presented the schema in a fully generalized form, so there should be no need to repeat the argument for each individual species; we do not require supplemental independent arguments to conclude that ladybugs and wildebeests evolved. So why did Darwin go to such pains to show separately that the species Homo sapiens also evolved? From our contemporary point of view it is easy to fail to appreciate what was for Darwin, if no longer for us, a significant dif-

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ficulty for the case of human evolution. Darwin wrote in the introduction to the
Descent that he was going to consider, "whether man, like every other species, is

descended from some pre-existing form." (Darwin 1989 (1877), p. 2) The phrase "like every other species" signals the source of the problem. One could not take for granted, after all, that humans truly are like every other species. Before he could get the argument about human descent off the ground, before he could apply all the evidence adduced in the Origin, Darwin had to show that to be the case, for in the mid-nineteenth century it was the common assumption that humans were an obvious and significant anomaly in the natural world. This is not to say that people thought themselves not to be animals, but that they considered themselves to be very special animals - animals with a difference. When Linnaeus put together his revolutionary taxonomy of the plant and animal kingdoms in 1735, he placed humans among the primates, in the genus Homo, but he gave no species designation and no identifying characteristics, only the Delphic injunction Nosce te ipsum - Know thyself! (Linnaeus 1907 (1735)). Philosophers and theologians in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries frequently discussed the question of whether animals had souls, with much of the discussion taking for granted the dualistic position that Descartes had put forth which held that animals were just machines and lacked the exclusively human mind. Even those who departed from the Cartesian view and allowed that animals might have a lesser degree of soul would then go on to debate what other faculty it might be that made humans distinct. The influence of Christianity, which held a "rigid dichotomy between men and animals" (Oldroyd 1980, p. 2) no doubt accounts in large part for this stubborn assumption. Oldroyd cites passages to this effect from Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, among others, concluding that "we have ample evidence of the long preDarwinian tradition that saw man and animals as essentially distinct." (Oldroyd 1980, p. 4) The view was still prevalent when Darwin was writing. During the latter half of the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth, natural philosophers did not hesitate to mix science and religion, referring to each in support of the other; for example, William Paley and others frequently cited the wonderful complexity and adaptedness of natural organisms as the basis of often elaborate arguments from design for the existence of a benevolent Creator. The desire to learn something of God's plan as revealed in the construction of the world explicitly motivated the work of many investigators - Linnaeus and Cuvier to name just two - and the clergyman-naturalist was a common figure in scientific circles. 2 Charles Lyell, whose gradualist geological theory was instrumental in shaping Darwin's picture of the world, and who did not hesitate to reject received Christian doctrine when it contradicted his observations, agreed completely with the notion that humans were morally and intellectually unique (Lyell 1990 (1830), pp. 153-6) and it is fairly clear that he concludes they had to have been of miraculous origin) Even if one were to ignore the dubious inference to miraculous origin, the presumption that humans, because of their special faculties, are of an essentially different kind than the lower animals effectively blocks application to the human case of the arguments offered for

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evolution in the Origin. Humans do seem different from other animals in many ways, such as in the higher functions of reason, language, appreciation of beauty, and, especially, the moral sense. If Darwin could not account for these apparently clear disanalogies then his theory could be taken to be inapplicable to the human case. Such was the conclusion drawn by Alfred Russell Wallace, for example, who had arrived at the theory of natural selection independently and who was in other ways more Darwinian than Darwin. Wallace thought that the evolutionary mechanisms that shaped the rest of the biological world could not explain some characteristic human features such as hairlessness and, especially, our intellectual and moral nature (Kottler 1974, pp. 150-51). Wallace is a somewhat unusual case to be sure, for he did not doubt that humans were animals nor that they had descended from lower forms, but thought that the non-teleological action of natural selection had been replaced at a crucial point in human evolution by direct goal-oriented guidance of higher spiritual beings. There is no need here to discuss Wallace's interest in spiritualism, which may have motivated his odd view; the significant point is that someone who was an expert in the field and who had as much a personal stake in the theory of natural selection as Darwin himself, accepted that there were significant differences in kind between humans and the lower animals that seemed to be unaccountable on the theory of evolution. To take another example, St. George Mivart, who agreed with Darwin on the physical similarities between humans and lower animals, thought that our mental powers were of a type not to be found in the lower animals. Furthermore, he claimed, a difference in kind implied a difference in origin. (Mivart 1889, p. 5) This was exactly the inference that Darwin had to avoid. Before he could talk about how humans evolved (i.e., their pathway of descent) he had to show that they evolved, and to do that he had to show that humans were not different in an essential way from the lower animals. For that reason, I think it is appropriate to conclude that the key argument in the Descent is an argument for class inclusion - that is, for placing humans unambiguously in the class of animals so that Darwin's theory could be seen to apply. To make his case for the descent of man, Darwin had to show that the apparent uniqueness of human intellectual and moral faculties was just that - apparent only. He had to show that Homo sapiens was just another species. We should note that scientists had long recognized the physical similarities between humans and the lower animals; that the skeletal structure, for example, of humans was straightforwardly homologous with that of monkeys, bats and seals was not a bone of contention. Nor was there controversy about the other common homologous structures that Darwin adduced in the opening chapters of the Descent, such as muscles, blood-vessels, internal viscera, and even the brain and its folds and fissures (Darwin 1989 (1877) p. 6). The similarities in embryological development were widely known among scientists, as were the rudimentary organs found in humans. Everyone could admit that humans were animal-like; such physical commonalities themselves were not disputed, just their interpretation in fight of the dissimilarities. Darwin put forward these facts

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and others as his positive evidence for the descent of man from animal ancestors. Having already established the theory of descent with modification in the Origin, to make his argument for human descent Darwin adduces just those sorts of facts that are required and expected by the causal mechanisms of the theory. He notes that humans exhibit individual variation, that the variation is inherited and that it is governed by the same general laws as in animals. The human races are cited as examples of incipient species, and their geographical distribution is shown to follow a pattern similar to that of animals. Also, Darwin points out that humans and some other animals can transmit to one another common diseases, and that many of the same parasites infest them (Darwin 1989 (1877), pp. 7-8). But other naturalists chose to interpret such patterns as indicating that God had created species according to the "ideal plans" of a few general "kinds." Darwin called this alternative hypothesis "no scientific explanation" (Darwin 1989 (1877), p. 24), but the reasoning behind it is clear, as Mivart pointed out; if one believes that two things are completely different in kind, then the hypothesis of gradual evolution of one into the other is ruled out. (The qualifier "completely" is critical here, for Mivart's argument relies on a notion of kinds that is much stronger than our ordinary one (Mivart 1889, p. 5 & 13). For his argument to work, the difference must be like that between the troublesome philosophical dualities, such as being and non-being, mind and body, or contingent being and necessary being, rather than the more ordinary differences of kind such as between sofas and chairs, child and adult, or winter and spring.) The idea of the independent creation of variations on a theme, on the other hand, fits nicely with Christian beliefs founded in the book of Genesis, and such religious considerations, as previously noted, were still a powerful force at this time. So even though observed physical similarities that correspond to the expectations of the theory of evolution are powerful positive evidence for Darwin's conclusion, they may be thought unavailing unless the purported anomalies can be dealt with so that the theory will apply to humans "like every other species." It is for this reason that the question of human descent turns on the status of our intellectual and moral faculties, and eventually on a theory of ethics. Before looking in detail at Darwin's arguments regarding morality and the moral sense, it will be instructive to examine his general method for dealing with the purported disanalogies. Darwin acknowledged the force of the difficulties and suggested his answer to them in the following passage: If no organic being excepting man had possessed any mental power, or if his powers had been of a wholly different nature from those of the lower animals, then we should never have been able to convince ourselves that our high faculties had been gradually developed. But it can be shown that there is no fundamental difference of this kind. (Darwin 1989 (1877), p. 65) Clearly, Darwin is anticipating here the problem of the strong notion of kinds that would worry Mivart and others. If the differences are "of a wholly different nature" then an evolutionary story is in trouble. The difficulty would disappear if one could show that these were not "fundamental difference[s]," but that they

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graded into one another in gradual increments. Darwin's general strategy, therefore, is to argue that apparent differences in kind are actually just differences in degree. He shows, for example, that among humans a given trait varies greatly in degree from individual to individual and from culture to culture, and argues that this shows the possibility of traits arising one from another; there is a great difference between people who use few abstract terms and geniuses like Newton but "differences of this kind.., are connected by the finest gradations. Therefore it is possible that they might pass and be developed into each other" (Darwin 1989 (1877), p. 66). Most often he will then adduce evidence to show that animals possess these traits in a rudimentary but still recognizable form, especially when compared to the lowest human forms, but occasionally he will show how some human traits may be reducible to traits that animals have. We get an explicit statement of what Darwin is doing in the following passage, which follows his analysis of many of the purported differences between humans and other animals: The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind. We have seen that the senses and intuitions, the various emotions and faculties, such as love, memory, attention, curiosity, imitation, reason, &c., of which man boasts, may be found in an incipient, or even sometimes in a welldeveloped condition, in the lower animals. They are also capable of some inherited improvement. . . . At what age does the new-born infant possess the power of abstraction, or become self-conscious, and reflect on its own existence? We cannot answer; nor can we answer in regard to the ascending organic scale. (Darwin 1989 (1877), p. 125-6) Darwin's discussion of the development of language (Darwin 1989 (1877), pp. 84-91) will serve as a quick, concrete example of his approach. He cites instances of communication among animals in their use of inarticulate cries, and notes that humans make use of the same sorts of cries, gestures and facial expressions when expressing simple feelings. (Darwin made a detailed examination of this topic which he published as The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals in 1872, between the first and second editions of the Descent.) An ability to understand articulate sounds is not unique to humans; dogs can understand many sentences in a manner similar to infants. Nor is an ability to utter articulate sounds unique, for parrots also can do this, even in appropriate ways within given contexts. (Darwin is working within a Humean framework of association of ideas, and he takes the fact that animals can connect definite sounds with definite ideas as an indication that their mental processes might work the same way.) He notes that philologists agree that language developed slowly and unconsciously by many steps, and goes on to give a speculative "Darwinian history," to use Philip Kitcher's notion (1985, pp. 132-3), of how language and the vocal apparatus might have evolved through natural selection. We might smile at the nalvet6 of some of Darwin's particular examples, or cringe at his chauvinistic assessments, for example, of appreciation of beauty, 4 but to undercut the claim of radical difference in kind, his general approach is right on target. How does he apply it to the problem of human morality?

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Darwin devotes a full chapter, together with sections of others, in the Descent to an extended discussion of the moral sense. He acknowledges immediately that we cannot properly attribute morality to the lower animals, so, although he follows the general strategy outlined above, the tactic of showing rudimentary counterparts to the human trait in the animal kingdom is not open to him. Instead he must use a reductionist approach that, when spun out, forms the basis of what could have become a full-blown ethical theory. The kernel of the position is put forward in the bold hypothesis: ...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 (Darwin 1989 (1877), p. 98). The moral sense is thus an emergent property based upon social instincts and expressed once a threshold level of intelligence is reached. But there is a complicated story behind this pithy formulation and we need to understand its details before we can appreciate the moral implications of Darwin's claim. By "social instincts" Darwin means those instincts that lead animals to take "pleasure" in each other's company and to feel some bond of "sympathy" with one another. Animals which herd or flock or which associate in troops or groups, as well as the social insects, exhibit these traits. Consistent with his strategy, Darwin means by "pleasure" and "sympathy" what we normally mean by these words when we apply them to humans, though in a lesser degree. Everyone would admit that dogs can feel pleasure, but Darwin goes further and says that it is possible that even ants feel a kind of low-grade pleasure. In his typical fashion, Darwin provides dozens of examples to show that sympathy exists and how it functions among animals in like manner as it does among ourselves. Instincts, according to Darwin, are "inherited habit[s]" (1989 (1877), p. 75) and have a "fixed and untaught character" (1989 (1877), p. 67). Most important, they can develop by means of the basic evolutionary mechanisms. He writes that the development of social instincts, ... may be attributed in part to habit, but chiefly to natural selection. With those animals that were benefited by living in close association, the individuals which took the greatest pleasure in society would best escape various dangers, whilst those that cared least for their comrades, and lived solitary, would perish in greater numbers" (Darwin 1989 (1877), p. 105). Likewise, intelligence is a variable property and can undergo change in the processes of descent with modification. It is a more complex trait though, and Darwin has in mind some specific intellectual abilities, namely, memory, imagination and language, that are relevant for the development of the moral sense. The story of that development goes as follows. Animals endowed with the social instincts feel a certain commonality and sympathy with their fellows, that

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leads them to tend to perform various services for each other. 5 These may be definite services, such as mutual grooming, but may become, in the higher social animals, a wish to aid in general ways. (What Darwin is describing is very like reciprocal altruism. Darwin comes remarkably close to this sociobiological view, though, naturally, he has no inkling of the genetic factors, for he observes that sympathy and the desire to aid do not extend indiscriminately, but only to those individuals of the same association.) The social instincts, though less powerful in the short run, are more vivid and enduring than other instincts like that of hunger. Increased intelligence improves memory and imagination, bringing images of past actions and motives constantly to mind, and with them the "dissatisfaction" or even "misery" associated with unsatisfied instincts. These feelings will become the voice of conscience. The idea that the conscience is an outgrowth of instincts and intelligence seems to have first occurred to Darwin on October 3, 1838, as noted on the second page of his "N" Notebook, and he immediately recognized it as a "capital view" (Barrett 1974, pp. 69-70). Care must be taken of the distinction between conscience and the moral sense. The moral sense "tells us what to do", while conscience "reproves us if we disobey [the moral sense]" (Darwin 1989 (1877), p. 116). This is the difference between moral prescriptions and the motivation to follow those prescriptions, but Darwin is not always precise about this distinction, and sometimes seems to say that the moral sense is also a motive. Intelligence also brings with it the development of sophisticated language that allows communication of needs and desires and of approval or disapproval when they are or are not met. Since the social instincts cause the approbation of fellows to be highly valued, and because reason and foresight now allow the weighing of the consequences of possible courses of action, the organism is able to conclude that it should not, and indeed ought not, be swayed even by strong desire for transitory pleasure or against transitory pain from choosing that action demanded by instinctive sympathy. This feeling of the "ought" is the moral imperative. Sympathy is thus the "foundation-stone" (Darwin 1989 (1877), p. 100) not only of the social instincts but also of morality. It is because of instinctive sympathy that we feel another's pleasures and pains as our own and are thus are led to feel the moral imperative to try to enhance the former and relieve the latter. With the addition of reason to guide and refine our choices and behaviors, it is easy to see how we might eventually express this imperative as a rule that would be phrased in familiar terms; Darwin writes, with apparently complete confidence, ...the social instincts ... with the aid of active intellectual powers and the effects of habit, naturally lead to the golden rule, "As ye would that men should do to you, do ye to them likewise"; and this lies at the foundation of morality. (Darwin 1989 (1877), p. 126) The beast is become moral. It seems clear that Darwin thought that drawing the link to the Golden Rule was the most effective means of showing that what we believe to be the essence

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of morality could indeed have arisen from animal instincts. But he went further and worked to show that his construal was compatible with not only the Golden Rule, but also the best ethical theories of his day - those of Immanual Kant and John Stuart Mill. If we must give Darwin a ready-made ethical label then it is certainly "Utilitarian." He endorsed Mill's Greatest Happiness Principle, which states that "actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness; wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness," (Mill 1957, p. 10) with happiness cashed out as pleasure and absence of pain. But he sought to improve upon the theory, offering an amended version that would better answer the Intuitionists that Mill was challenging. According to Mill, the moral faculty is "not innate, but acquired," (1957, p. 39) but Darwin, naturally enough, thought this should be corrected given his account of its development from the social instincts. 6 Furthermore, the Greatest Happiness Principle should not be seen as a motive, but rather as a standard of conduct. 7 Finally, and this is the crucial move, Darwin suggests a change in the Utilitarian principle so that the aim is not the greatest happiness but rather the greatest general good, understood in a special sense. It is on this point that we see at last what is truly Darwinian in this conception of morality, for Darwin has a full-blooded and uncompromising biological notion of what constitutes general good. To appreciate the full force of this conception, it is worth quoting his definition directly: The term, general good, may be defined as 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. (Darwin 1989 (1877), p. 121)8 Thus, the moral standard is not to be happiness but rather reproductive success, or, in biological terminology, reproductive fitness. 9 Make the replacement in Mill's formula quoted above and we now get "actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote reproductive fitness; wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of reproductive fitness." So, instead of acting to maximize the amount of pleasure, on Darwin's formulation one should act to maximize the number of vigorous offspring. 10 Other commentators of Darwin's discussion of morality have overlooked this reductive redefinition of "general good" which links the utilitarian standard of morality to reproductive fitness. Murphy (1982, p. 86) passes over this significant definition almost without comment. Richards mentions that the definition is couched "according to the criteria endorsed by natural selection" (1987, p. 218), but fails to make the connection to the concept of fitness, or to draw out the radical implications of coupling morality to it. One significant corollary of Darwin's view is a special kind of ethical relativism; although the over-arching principle of utility presumably is absolute, and though within a given social system certain actions would be contrary to the particular set of norms that it had developed evolutionarily, whether any given action is moral or immoral is necessarily relative to the relevant pathway of descent. This result did not disturb Darwin; indeed, he seemed quite pleased with it, since he thought

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it strengthened his theory by increasing its explanatory power. Different cultures have different ethical norms and a moral absolutist either has to try to explain away this fact or else concede that the vast majority of people are immoral; on Darwin's theory such differences are to be expected. That different races should have different moral codes, wrote Darwin in his notebooks, is "no more wonderful than dogs should have different instincts" (Darwin. "M" Notebook pp. 75-6. In (Barrett 1974, p. 19). This point will be important in assessing Darwin's model of human evolution in comparison to rival models. We find further evidence that this relativistic biological interpretation accurately represents Darwin's view in the following thought experiment taken from the Descent, which also serves to highlight the truly radical nature of Darwin's program. If men were reared under precisely the same conditions as hive-bees, there can hardly be a doubt that our unmarried females would, like the worker-bees, think it a sacred duty to kill their brothers, and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters; and no one would think of interfering. Nevertheless, the bee, or any other social animal, would gain in our supposed case some feeling of fight or wrong, or a conscience. For each individual would have an inward sense of possessing certain stronger or more enduring instincts, and other less strong or enduring; so that there would often be a struggle as to which impulse should be followed and satisfaction, dissatisfaction, or even misery would be felt, as past impressions were compared during their incessant passage through the mind. In this case an inward monitor would tell the animal that it would have been better to have followed the one impulse rather than the other. The one course ought to have been followed, and the other not; the one would have been fight and the other wrong... (Darwin 1989 (1877), pp. 99-100). To adapt a well-known phrase, the picture that emerges is one of morality red in tooth and claw. To tell the evolutionary story, then, of the development of particular systems of norms would be like telling the story of how any species achieves a niche in the world. One could describe the process in terms of individual selection, but for the development of the moral sense Darwin makes use of a process of group selection, so let us tell the story in those terms. A given association of organisms, by virtue of its social instincts working in a given setting, develops a set of mutually beneficial behaviors. As an example, Darwin reports a case of the rescue of a young monkey being attacked by an eagle. It cried loudly for assistance, "upon which the other members of the troop, with much uproar, rushed to the rescue, surrounded the eagle, and pulled out so many feathers, that he no longer thought of his prey, but only how to escape" (Darwin 1989 (1877), p. 101-2). Groups of animals with such behavioral traits will fare better under adverse conditions and thus will stand a better chance of having more offspring survive than those which do not. Remember, as well, that Darwin saw "not the least inherent improbability" in the idea that this sort of "virtuous tendenc[y]" was inheritable (Darwin 1989 (1877), p. 123). So thus, in competition with the elements and with one another, the groups produce more or fewer offspring that survive and inherit those behaviors. If organisms with such qualities were then to reach the threshold level of intelligence, becoming moral beings, they would

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believe to be moral whatever peculiar set of norms had allowed them to achieve their reproductive success. One cannot help but admire Darwin's daring in proposing such a conception of morality, and giving it the name "Moral Darwinism" seems completely fitting.

IV But now we need to ask whether this is a satisfactory ethical theory and whether it captures what we mean when we say that humans are moral beings. The answer to both of those questions is almost certainly negative. Darwin's theory, brilliantly stimulating though it may be, is wanting in several important respects. We noted that though Darwin is certainly a Utilitarian, his is a Utilitarianism with a twist. As such, it is subject to the same sort of problems that face any Utilitarian theory, as well as additional ones pertaining to the emendations Darwin made. But before discussing these problems in detail, let us briefly consider the other ethical theory whose name Darwin calls upon - that of Immanual Kant. What does Darwin say about Kant? An organism that had scaled the moral heights in the way described, Darwin wrote, "might then declare... I am the supreme judge of my own conduct, and in the words of Kant, I will not in my own person violate the dignity of humanity" (Darwin 1989 (1877), p. t10). Darwin's expression may be melodramatic, but he apparently did expect the reader to take the connection seriously. He seemed to think that his biological reduction of morality not only meshed with the Kantian notion, but even provided an answer to the question of the origin of the all-important concept in the Kantian ethical system, that "wondrous thought" duty. This is the passage that asks that question, which Darwin quotes from Kant' s Metaphysics of Morals: Duty! Wondrous thought, that workest neither by fond insinuation, flattery, nor by any threat, but merely by holding up thy naked law in the soul, and so extorting for thyself always reverence, if not always obedience; before whom all appetites are dumb, however secretly they rebel; whence thy original? (Darwin quoting Kant at (Darwin 1989 (1877), p. 97)) We may find the answer to that query, Darwin offered, in the social instincts. Add to these group feelings a sufficient degree of intelligence and one gets moral beings with a sense of duty shaped by the natural circumstances and manner in which the organisms had evolved. Wrote Darwin, "[t]he imperious word ought seems merely to imply the consciousness of the existence of a rule of conduct, however it may have originated" (Darwin 1989 (1877), p. 116). There is not necessarily just one right rule of conduct since different evolutionary pathways will have led to different strategies for maximizing fitness. It is difficult to know what to make of such statements, for they are Kantian in only the most tenuous fashion. Except for agreeing that morality requires a prerequisite level of rationality, and on the importance of the consciousness of

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duty, Darwin's and Kant's analyses of morality do not jibe at all, and Kant himself would have been appalled to find his name linked with such a view as Darwin' s. For Kant, our knowledge of duty, that is, of moral law, provided the key link in a transcendental argument for free will, the necessity of God's existence and immortality, and it would have failed to serve this function if reinterpreted in Darwin's naturalized fashion. Furthermore, Darwin's causal explanation of moral behavior as being rooted in social instincts is quite at odds with Kant's view that moral feelings are "produced solely by reason." According to Kant, behavior motivated by a "heteronomous" mixture of reason and sentiment, as in the manner described by Darwin, is decidedly not moral. So, Darwin can't ride on Kant's coattails. But could his theory stand on its own merits? Jeffrie Murphy, in his Evolution, Morality, and the Meaning of Life, offers a critique of Darwin's theory as though it were one of "an anonymous scholar whose article one has been assigned to referee for possible publication in a contemporary journal" and concludes that, "the case for acceptance 'as is' will be doubtful" (1982, p. 79). He argues that Darwin's concept of morality is too limited in that it makes no provision for what we take to be an important part of ethics, namely justice, or, as he puts it, the "defense of the individual against the claims of the group" (1982, p. 86-7). This is certainly a problem, but, contrary to Murphy, who attributes it to Darwin's evolutionary morality, I tend to think that it is a problem for Darwin's theory simply because it is a problem for any utilitarian theory and not because of some peculiarity of his. If so, then Darwin's view may avail itself of standard utilitarian defenses, which may yet prove worthy. Nevertheless, I think we can agree with Murphy's conclusion that, considered on its merits as an ethical theory, Moral Darwinism contains significant flaws. One way of testing an ethical theory, insofar as such things are testable, is to look at its consequences and see how they compare with our strong moral intuitions. The now-classic illustration of the healthy patient, in the hospital for a routine check-up, being cut up to provide needed body parts for five dying patients down the hall is commonly accepted as a telling counter-example against simple utilitarian ethical systems. Darwin's hive-bee thought-experiment, seen in this light, is a powerful argument against his theory. Though we can conceive of circumstances in which it might be judged ethically justifiable to kill another person, we rebel at the notion that, even if we were evolved from hive-bees, a mother ought to kill her fertile daughters. Could we ever countenance as a general moral rule that a sister should murder her brothers? If Darwin's theory entails such conclusions, and there is little doubt that it does, then the theory looks primafacie unacceptable. Murphy grants the relativism of the hive-bee example with a passing reference to H. L. A. Hart's idea that the moral notions of harm and even the commandment not to kill would be "quite different from what they now are" were we born, say, with hard exoskeletons (Murphy 1982, p. 85). This is certainly the right sort of tack to take to try to defend Darwin on this issue, but it would require a thoroughly developed argument to make us give up the strong moral intuitions we have regarding the

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injustice of such killing. Neither Murphy nor Darwin attempts such an argument. Next, we would want to ask whether Darwin can avoid committing the socalled Naturalistic Fallacy, which involves trying to derive an "ought" from an "is." Murphy thinks that Darwin does avoid it; he claims that Darwin "makes no attempt to derive or rationally prove [substantive moral principles] from the facts of biology" (1982, p. 63). This is true only if we take this in the strictest sense, because, as we have seen, Darwin does give us a substantive moral principle in his claim that the norms that result from a particular evolutionary pathway are moral, and when he equates general good with reproductive fitness and puts this into Mill's principle of utility. As an example of how Darwin may have thought that this conception could lead to a particular moral rule, consider his conclusion about the immorality of "abnormal" sexual practices such as homosexuality. Darwin had been struck by this stricture when he was first mulling over his theory, and wrote in his early notebooks that it must arise "because instincts to women is not followed" (Darwin, N Notebook p. 99 in (Barrett 1974, p. 88)). Furthermore, surely the hive-bee prescriptions count as at least speculative derivations from the facts of biology. Some philosophers have attempted to show that all such derivations need not be fallacious, but Darwin has not given us an argument to show why his would deserve an exemptionJ 2 Furthermore, Darwin ignores the difficulty of reconciling his model of biological determination of moral sense and conscience with the notion of free will, which philosophers almost universally accept as a logically necessary condition for any robust notion of moral action. (We must say "almost" in order to recognize the Compatibilist position, but except for this camp it is standardly taken as a logical rule that "ought" implies "can".) In his notebooks he opined "free will & chance are synonymous. Shake ten thousand grains of sand together & one will be uppermost, so in thoughts, one will rise according to law" (Darwin, M Notebook p. 31 in (Barrett 1974, p. 11)). Darwin does not express this probabilistic determinism quite as explicitly in the Descent, but it is an obvious corollary of the developmental story he gives there, and it would require considerable work to show why this aspect of the theory does not undermine Darwin's claim that his view is consistent with common ethical views. As an alternative, one could interpret Darwin's view here as being indeterministic, but to say that actions are the result of mere chance in that sense would undermine morality in a way that is equally at odds with the common view of moral choice. This last point relates to a more general and even more significant problem whether one can make the transition from the causal account of the development of the moral sense to a normative ethics, whether it be the Golden Rule or the Utilitarian normative standard with reproductive fitness in the key position. A significant theoretical gap exists between showing why we feel we ought to do X and showing why we ought to do X, and, at most, Darwin has shown only the former. We already mentioned Darwin's distinction between moral sense and conscience, and his suggestion that we regard the utilitarian principle as a standard than as a motive, so he obviously knew that there is a difference, but

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either he did not recognize the problem of making the transition or he did not know how to go about tackling it. In any case, Darwin provides no meta-ethical story to justify the connection he makes. This does no more than suggest some possible criticisms of Darwin's view of morality; there are, of course, counter-arguments that could be offered, and debate could profitably continue for some time. Nevertheless, we need not pursue this line any further here for two reasons. First, to do so would require that we go well beyond what we have in the text as to the direction Darwin's responses would lead. For example, adopting an Emotivist meta-ethical view (holding that moral judgments are not statements that could be true or false, but rather are simply expressions of emotion) might very well solve many of the problems, but would Darwin have accepted it? Such possibilities have independent interest and it is a fruitful and worthwhile exercise to take Darwin's protoethical theory and evaluate possible elaborations of it as Murphy, Richards and others have done. But if our interest is Darwin's own theory, then it is not proper to evaluate it, h la Murphy, as though it were an article submitted to a contemporary journal of ethics, for to do so would be to judge it for a task quite different from its intended application. This is the second, and more important, reason that we do not have to seek a full elaboration. Darwin did not need to go any further than he went. The theory, flimsy as it may be, is perfectly adequate for the purpose for which Darwin required it in his argument for human descent. Seen as a reply to an evidential challenge, Moral Darwinism turns out to be a sophisticated scientific argument instead of a fascinating but somewhat naive ethical theory.

V Even if it were to falter in the ethical arena, Darwin's story of the development of the moral sense would not necessarily fail in its scientific task because the considerations that relate to questions of empirical evidence are quite different from those we have just seen need to be taken into account to defend a normative theory of ethics. Indeed, as will become clear, what may be a weakness in the latter may be a strength in the former. To confirm an empirical hypothesis one must adduce facts that are evidentially relevant - they must be related to the hypothesis in the appropriate way so as to provide positive support. Additionally, one must evaluate the degree of evidential support in comparison to alternative hypotheses. Let us consider these in turn. Confirmation theorists continue to investigate the question of what determines evidential relevance - for example, is it a special sort of logical relation between theory statements and evidence statements? is it a probabilistic relation? or a kind of explanatory relation? - but this is not the place to continue the theoretical debate. I have proposed that evidential relevance is best explicated in terms of causal relations, which can license confirmatory and explanatory inferences (Pennock 1991), and, although Darwin's argument probably could be "rationally

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reconstructed" to fit the familiar models of confirmation such as HypotheticoDeductivism or Bayesianism, I think the causal approach provides the most natural reading of Darwin's own evidential arguments. Doren Recker (Recker 1987) has argued that Darwin's Origin of Species is better understood as an extended causal argument than as it has been interpreted in terms of other confirmation theories. Though I disagree with aspects of Recker's approach (Pennock 1991, p. 231-4), I think the general line is correct, and hold that the Descent follows the same evidential pattern. Darwin does not typically offer deductive or probabilistic links to establish the relevance of his data, but rather, as we have seen, gives an argument in which all the steps explicitly make links from the causal assumptions of his model and facts about the world to the observed effects that are the data. His sketch of a reductionist moral theory, together with the causal story of how the moral sense could have arisen, gave one way to dissolve the apparent anomaly of human morality by connecting it and the natural world from both ends. He showed how the moral sense might have developed by degrees in a way commensurate with the causal mechanisms of evolutionary theory, and that those mechanisms could have produced a moral system that fit with, and perhaps even improved upon, the best philosophical understanding of morality. Put another way, Darwin showed how the causal mechanisms of evolutionary theory could explain human moral sense in exactly the same way they could explain the physical attributes of other animals. Notice that it is just on this point that the weakness of Darwin's ethical theory as a normative theory - that he fails to provide a transition from the causal to the normative - turns out to be a strength when viewed in its role as part of the evidential argument, for here we are required to stay at the causal level. For this purpose Darwin does not need to show why we ought to follow some moral theory in the strong normative sense, but only why we could believe we ought to do so. Thus, seen as part of the evidential argument, Darwin's reductionist strategy faces none of the questions that raise potential problems for it as a normative ethical theory. As a consequence of showing that human morality was not an inexplicable anomaly, Darwin's model allowed human beings to be placed unambiguously in the class of animals - in the same causal type - so that evolutionary theory and the many other lines of evidence for it that had previously been given in the Origin could be seen to apply to them. Homo sapiens is "like every other species" and so must have evolved in the same manner. This is the empirical conclusion that Darwin was after. I do not mean to suggest that no one could have legitimately differed with Darwin's story of the development of morality. It would beg the question to dismiss Darwin's argument by simply insisting that animals could not have even the elements from which morality could develop, but we must admit that Darwin only provided a sketch of a causal pathway and there remained plenty of room for doubt and disagreement. While the causal story establishes the relevance of the data to the hypothesis (i.e., of human morality as positive evidence for the theory of descent), the argument for human descent relies finally on assessing the relative degree of support given by the data, and this requires weighing of

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the merits of alternative hypotheses. This is the second stage of the evaluation of evidence. Human morality appeared as an apparently anomalous datum in an otherwise fairly clear pattern of data. The many physical homologies that Darwin cited between humans and the lower animals provide the hypothesis of same-class inclusion (and thereby the hypothesis of descent) with a relatively high degree of confirmation, and that such facts are of the sort that would causally follow from the evolutionary theory also lends confirmatory support. And now Darwin's ethical reduction shows that human morality is not an inexplicable anomaly, and that, to the contrary, it fits easily into the causal model, providing additional support for the hypothesis of human descent. How does this model of human evolution compare to the alternatives? The alternatives, of course, were something like Christian special creation, Lyell's miraculous origin, or Wallace's spirit guidance - in short, something supernatural. But, as Darwin had said, such an account is "no scientificexplanation." Supernatural agents may do what they will - they are, by definition, unconstrained by natural law - and as such they are of little or no value for explanation. For example, Christian special creationists looked at the pattern of physical homologies and concluded that God created animals according to "ideal plans" of a few general "kinds", but if the pattern had been different or if there had been no pattern at all they could equally happily have concluded that God just did it that way; because there are no limits on what might causally follow from God's will under any conditions whatsoever, all such "explanations" are ad hoc. Thus, one appeals to supernatural agency only when and because there is no other choice. Before Darwin there was no plausible natural option available, so all theories of human origins had to refer to some supernatural agent. But with an acceptable natural theory of biological evolution in place following the Origin, all Darwin needed was to show the possibility of dealing with the purported human anomalies within the regimen of the theory to make that theory comprehensive and thus a preferable, unified alternative to the supernatural theories. Mivart relied on the inference that difference in kind implied difference in origin to conclude that there must have been an independent act of creation of humans, but Darwin's ethical theory and causal story of its development showed that the assumption that human morality proved that humans were different in kind from other animals was not well-founded. Of course, one could cling to the hypothesis of independent origins even if two things are not completely different in kind, but it is no longer a reasonable conclusion once the evidence for sameclass inclusion is in place. As for spirit guidance, or divine creation, the principle of parsimony would tend to disfavor these models because they postulate unnecessary entities. Darwin does not make an explicit comparison, but to further differentiate the hypotheses with particular focus on the moral question, Darwin could have pointed to several features of human morality he had noted, such as the observed relativism of moral codes from culture to culture, the geographical distribution of such norms among populations which follows a global pattern similar to that which he noted in other aspects of biogeography, and the fact that norms are typically taken to extend only to one's

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own group, that would appear to be better explained by his model than by one that had humans all created by a supernatural being, especially as on the Christian model. Of course one may offer good evidence for a hypothesis and yet encounter resistance to its acceptance because of any number of social factors. Such factors, whether they be prejudices or misunderstandings, do not affect the confirmation itself, but certainly may affect its reception. During an earlier period, when scientists still took it "as Gospel" that God could and did work all manner of miracles in the world, Darwin's argument may have been ignored or dismissed as heresy. But Darwin made his argument during a period of transition - a period when traditional supernatural accounts of a variety of natural phenomena, usually based in one way or other on scripture, were being found wanting. Geologists, for instance, had long assumed the truth of the Biblical account of the Noachian deluge and made use of postulated floods to explain many gross geological features. Only just during Darwin's lifetime did scientists, including the devout clergyman-naturalists, finally admit that the Biblical account was incompatible with the observed phenomena. The Reverend Adam Sedgwick, for example, had been a partisan of the Noachian view and had referred to it as the explanation of the vast areas of diluvial gravel deposits found throughout the world. But empirical evidence, for example, regarding the distribution of these deposits, and methodological debate with Charles Lyell over the admissibility of preternatural causes in geology eventually forced him, and others, to give up this view. Sedgwick' s farewell address as president of the Geological Society reflects this important shift in attitude: Our errors [regarding diluvial gravel] were.., natural, and of the same kind which led many excellent observers of a former century to refer all the secondary formations of geology to the Noachian deluge. Having been myself a believer, and, to the best of my power, a propagator of what I now regard as a philosophic heresy, and having more than once been quoted for opinions I do not now maintain, I think it right, as one of my last acts before I quit this Chair, thus publicly to read my recantation. (Sedgwick 1831 p. 313) The change in attitude was still incomplete at that time, however, especially regarding the crucial issue Darwin would face - the place of humans in the scheme of things - for in this address Sedgwick held on to thinking of man as a striking singularity: "Considered as a mere question of physics, (and keeping all moral considerations entirely out of sight), the appearance of man is a geological phenomenon of vast importance.., breaking in upon any supposition of zoological continuity, and utterly unaccounted for by what we have any right to call the laws of nature" (Sedgwick 1831, p. 306). But Darwin's Origin would shortly provide the requisite lawful causal mechanisms to address Sedgwick's worry about laws of nature, and in the climate of change in scientific attitude Darwin's subsequent ethical evidence was able to overcome the moral problem as well. Though Mivart remained a hold-out and continued to press his original objection, in large measure Darwin's argument was effective in supporting the hypothesis of human evolution. A short twenty years after the publication of the

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Descent, Ernst Haeckel (1896) and Oscar Schmidt (1896) each wrote a book on

the doctrine of descent with particular emphasis on human evolution and neither felt that the problem of human morality was important enough to warrant more than brief mention in a paragraph or two. For his presidential address to the British Association in 1927, Sir Arthur Keith chose to review the evidence regarding human origins, and, on reflecting afterwards, he noted the striking difference in outlook between his audience and the audience of former president Richard Owen who sixty years earlier had discussed the same question in his presidential address. (Owen's address had taken place after Darwin's and Wallace's original papers put forward in outline the theory of descent with modification, but before the publication of the Origin.) Those assembled scientists, wrote Keith, believed that man had appeared on earth by a special act of creation. No longer. The difference in attitude was so palpable to Keith during his speech that he felt that he was boring his audience by even talking about the issue and cut short what he had prepared (Keith 1928, p. vi). The reaction in the popular press to Keith's address showed that the controversy about human origins was still very much alive in the public mind, but clearly the prevailing view in the scientific community was that this issue was settled. Thus we see that Darwin's ethical argument was a product of a transitional period. While at an earlier period it might have been judged unacceptable, at a later period it probably would be judged unnecessary. Today, though some of the more enthusiastic sociobiologists like Richard Dawkins (1976), Richard Alexander (1985) and others are still at work on a full-blooded Darwinian program, we are most likely to offer a story of morality as an emergent cultural property and do not see it as an "anomaly" that could block a biological account of descent. Moral Darwinism may still have a life ahead of it in its modern reincarnation in sociobiology, or in philosophical theories of evolutionary ethicists like Richards, but it no longer has a place as a necessary premise in the evidential argument for the descent of human beings.

NOTES * An earlier version of this paper was presented on April 4, 1987, at the Joint Atlantic Seminar for History of Biology (Harvard University), and on April 10, 1987, at the Midwest Junto for History of Science (Univ. of Northern Illinois) under the title "The Ethical Argument of Darwin's Descent of Man". I would like to th~qk James Lennox, Michael Ruse and J. F. Austin for helpful discussion and criticisms. 1 Unless indicated otherwise, all references to The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex [hereafter simply the Descent] are to the 1877 revised and augmented version of the 2nd edition, which had been published in 1874, three years after the first edition. Besides sharpening his presentation of the material on morality, Darwin made a few additions in this edition to reply to criticisms levied against the earlier editions. 2 Darwin himself came close to joining the ranks of this "profession"; after his failure in medical school he went, on the order of his father, to Christ's College, Cambridge into a program to prepare him for a gentlemen's career in the church. He found it a waste of time, however, and his extracurricular pursuits in the Plinian society and with Henslow,

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Sedgwick and others in the Cambridge scientific community dominated his attention and eventually led to his employment as naturalist on the Beagle without his having completed the degree. 3 (Ruse 1979, pp. 81-3) discusses Lyell's view. Ruse also describes similar religious views held by other contemporaries of Darwin (pp. 63-74). 4 To apply his strategy to the problem of our aesthetic sense, Darwin cites the tastes of "primitive" humans: "Judging from the hideous ornaments, and the equally hideous music admired by most savages, it might be urged that their aesthetic faculty was not so highly developed as in certain animals, for instance, as in birds." (Darwin 1989 (1877), p. 93). 5 Darwin quotes David Hume on this point, who wrote in the Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals: "... the happiness and misery of others are not spectacles altogether indifferent to us .... the view of the former.., communicates a secret joy; the appearance of the latter...throws a melancholy damp over the imagination." (Darwin quoting Hume at (Darwin 1989 (1877), p. 109) He also cites Adam Smith's and Bain's discussions of how such sympathy impels humans to come to the aid of others. (Darwin 1989 (1877), p. 106). We shall see how time and again Darwin calls to his aid the ethical work of important philosophers to buttress his position. 6 Darwin makes this point, in the most deferential manner, in an extended footnote on p. 98 of the Descent. There is a certain amount of play in the use of the terms "moral faculty" and "social feelings", so we may wonder whether Mill and Darwin are talking about exactly the same thing, but Darwin, at least, thought they were. 7 It is somewhat puzzling what Darwin meant by this suggestion, for clearly Mill does think of the Greatest Happiness Principle as a standard of morality (1957, p. 10). 8 Admittedly, in context Darwin does sound a little tentative, saying that replacing the old definition with his new one "would be advisable, if found practicable" (Darwin 1989 (1877), 121), but this is consistent with the modest tone that he takes throughout: He also says that it would "perhaps require some limitation on account of political ethics" (Darwin 1989 (1877), p. 121), but this minor qualification hardly takes away from the" clarity of the definition, especially when it is compared to the somewhat confusing way it appeared in the first (1871) edition; Darwin had obviously given some thought to this passage and adjusted the wording to make his meaning clearer. 9 The contemporary concept of fitness is complex - the term may be applied, for instance, to individuals or to types, and in an absolute or relative sense - and biologists define it slightly differently depending upon their stands on related evolutionary concepts. One will judge Darwin's definition of "general good" approximately similar to the concept depending upon which definition one takes. One must take care not to formulate the concept so that it becomes tautaulogous; Gould's article "Darwin's Untimely Burial" in (Gould 1977, pp. 39--45) addresses this issue. For more detailed analyses of some of the complexities in the concept, see (Brandon 1978), and (Mills and Beatty 1979). Put simply, though, the idea is that orgnaisms that are "fit" are well adapted to their particular environment ("the conditions to which they are subjected") and thus can have healthy progeny ("the rearing of the greatest number of individuals in full vigour and health"), maximizing the survival of their genes, and this seems to be the notion that Darwin is getting at, though of course he had no notion of genes. m It does not appear likely that Darwin abandoned the original happiness criterion to try to avoid the trouble Mill got into trying to distinguish the pleasures of humans from the pleasures of the pig, for Darwin would have had no quarrel with the notion that their pleasures were of the same kind, and might very well have admitted it were better to be a happy pig than, say, a fool or a sad Socrates. 11 (Kant 1956, p. 79) Other key passages from Kant that Darwin's view contradicts are found on pages 48 and 84. 12 Richards attempts to save Darwin from the Naturalistic Fallacy in an extended discussion in which he gives his own modified version of Darwinian evolutionary ethics.

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