ABSTRACT
IT is the thesis of this book that the framework within which one can carryon a rational discussion of different systems of ethics, and make comparisons of their various merits and demerits, is to be found in a consideration of animal and human evolution. Discussions in which the notions of evolution and ethics are brought together are frequently referred to by the general title 'evolutionary ethics'. It should be recognized that this is a portmanteau term covering a number of different varieties of theory. At the end of the last century Herbert Spencer and others advanced theories of a 'Social Darwinist' kind, involving such notions as the inevitablity of progress and the application of such slogans as the survival of the fittest or the struggle for existence to human social affairs. These theories have been so completely discredited that at this time little further needs to be said about them. 1
The more recent phase of evolutionary ethical thought beginning in the early 1940s also comprises a number of rather different methods of approach. At one extreme we have discussions framed in terms of extremely wide scope, which treat of evolution not only in the animal world but throughout the cosmos, and attempt to relate such broad concepts to man's religious and spiritual life. The pre-eminent example of this tendency in recent years is Teilhard de Chard in , but a rather similar approach can be found in the works of several biologists, such as Conklin, Holmes and Huxley. The opposite tendency, which of course is also found expressed to various extents in these authors, particularly in Julian Huxley, is the attempt to demonstrate, in a logically coherent argument, a real connection between evolutionary processes and man's ethical feelings. The present work
belongs definitely towards this end of the spectrum covered by the phrase 'evolutionary ethics' as did my earlier writings on the subject. Although the points I shall be making are certainly not without importance from a religious point of view, or viewed as factors in man's spiritual life, I shall not attempt to treat them in this manner, nor to venture into the field of inspirational writing of which Teilhard de Chard in and Huxley have provided us with such splendid examples. My purpose is rather the more pedestrian one of attending to the plumbing-attempting to forge somewhat stronger links in the chain of argument by which evolution and ethics are, it is suggested, connected with one another.
