ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews Charles Darwin’s important assessment of the “social instincts” within humans. It addresses the related topics of so-called social Darwinism; Darwin’s focus on the connection of cooperation and ethics; the non-idealistic materialism with which he supported his theories; and his assessment of two additional topics of importance to public relations: Reputation and reciprocity. Darwin and Peter Kropotkin both described the evolution of such tension and the consequent need to discover and justify an ideal equilibrium. Darwin’s attribution of relationship-oriented ethics to natural selection and the social instinct helps remove such values and principles from the realm of the normative and utopian. In philosophical materialism, “the sole reality is matter and everything is a manifestation of its activity”; in materialism, “there are no nonmaterial entities such as spirits, ghosts, demons, angels. Darwin’s scientific explanation for the social instinct and cooperation, thus, consciously and deliberately shuns any form of idealism.
