The Ethical Primate: Humans, Freedom and Morality

204 Pages·1996·0.99 MB·English

by  Mary Midgley

THE ETHICAL PRIMATE
‘A highly interesting and wide-ranging book.’
Explorations in Knowledge
‘Commonsense philosophy of the highest order.’
Financial Times
‘Her analyses of freedom, fatalism, and reductivism are clear and
cogent.’
Stephen Clark, New Scientist
In her new book, Mary Midgley argues that the crude isolation of
mind and body in reductionist scientific theories still causes painful
confusion. Such theories ignore the importance of the higher human
faculties and do not leave any room for a realistic notion of the self.
This reductionism is in fact unscientific. There is not just one single
legitimate explanation. There are as many answers as there are
viewpoints from which questions arise – subjective and objective,
practical as well as theoretical.
Human morality arises out of human freedom: we are uniquely
free beings in that we are aware of our conflicts of motive. But those
conflicts and our capacity to resolve them are part of our natural
inheritance. What matters for our freedom is the recognition of our
genuine agency, our slight but nevertheless real power to grasp and
arbitrate our inner conflicts.
Mary Midgley is a moral philosopher with a special interest in
evolution and the relations between science, religion and everyday
life. Until her retirement in 1980 she was Senior Lecturer in Philosophy
at the University of Newcastle.
OTHER BOOKS BY MARY MIDGLEY

BEAST AND MAN
The Roots of Human Nature
HEART AND MIND
The Varieties of Human Moral Experience
ANIMALS AND WHY THEY MATTER
WOMEN’S CHOICES
Philosophical Problems Facing Feminism
(with Judith Hughes)
WICKEDNESS
A Philosophical Essay
EVOLUTION AS A RELIGION
WISDOM, INFORMATION AND WONDER
CAN’T WE MAKE MORAL JUDGEMENTS?
SCIENCE AS SALVATION
A Modern Myth and its Meaning
THE ETHICAL PRIMATE

Humans, Freedom and
Morality

Mary Midgley

London and New York
First published 1994
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis
e-Library, 2002.

Paperback edition 1996

© 1994 Mary Midgley

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of
Congress.

ISBN 0-415-13224-X (Print Edition)
ISBN 0-203-02984-4 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-21984-8 (Glassbook Format)
For Jane Goodall, who has made so many
things look possible

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ix
Part I The problem
1 INNER DIVISIONS 3
2 MISGUIDED DEBATES 13
Part II The reductive enterprise
3 GUIDING VISIONS 27
4 HOPES OF SIMPLICITY 43
5 CRUSADES, LEGITIMATE AND OTHERWISE 52
6 CONVERGENT EXPLANATIONS AND THEIR USES 63
7 TROUBLES OF THE LINEAR PATTERN 71
8 FATALISM AND PREDICTABILITY 80
Part III The sources and meaning of morals
9 AGENCY AND ETHICS 95
10 MODERN MYTHS 109
11 THE STRENGTH OF INDIVIDUALISM 121
12 THE RETREAT FROM THE NATURAL WORLD 128
13 HOW FAR DOES SOCIABILITY TAKE US? 136
14 THE USES OF SYMPATHY 141
vii
CONTENTS
Part IV What kind of freedom?
15 ON BEING TERRESTRIAL 157
16 WHAT KIND OF BEINGS ARE FREE? 169
17 MINDS RESIST STREAMLINING 177
Notes 185
Index 192
viii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book grew out of three earlier articles which still surface in it
from time to time, though they have been considerably submerged
by rewriting. I would like to thank those who formerly published
them for allowing them to reappear. For permission to re-work
‘Reductivism, fatalism and sociobiology’, which underlies a good deal
of Part II, I have to thank the editors and publishers of the Journal of
Applied Philosophy, where it appeared in vol. 1, no. 1, for 1984. Peter
Singer and Messrs Basil Blackwell have kindly allowed me to use
material from ‘The origins of ethics’, which formed a chapter in The
Companion to Ethics in 1991 – material that has been built into Part
III of this book. And I must thank the Cambridge University Press
for releasing ‘On being terrestrial’, an article which appeared in their
volume Objectivity and Cultural Divergence in 1984 and has here been
absorbed into Part IV.
ix