The Ethical Animal

C. H. Waddington

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317352129
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

First published in 1960, this book discusses the ethical implications of the view of man's nature and his place in the biological world. C. H. Waddington highlights issues of the time, such as social upheavals related to social mobility, and the changing nature of philosophical thinking in relation to the nature of good.

The author argues that man differs from all other animals in his ability for social teaching and learning and that this provides him with a second method of evolutionary advance, in addition to biology. He advances this through the idea that man has the capacity to entertain ethical ideas, which is an essential and necessary feature of this new mode of evolution. From here he draws the conclusion that a consideration of the broad trends of evolution provides a framework within which we can rationally discuss the relative merits of the various systems of ethical belief current in the world.

In presenting his argument, Waddington draws on research in biology, psychology, the social sciences, and philosophy. He concludes with a short consideration of some of the most important ethical problems facing mankind at the time of the book's publication.

CHAPTER 1
The Importance of Ethics

IN the last two centuries man has brought into being entirely new conditions for human life. Two of his age-long preoccupations—the harnessing of power and the conquest of disease—have quite suddenly passed over into a phase of enormously accelerated growth, which in effect has created a qualitatively new situation. If a Roman of the Empire could be transported some eighteen centuries forward in time he would have found himself in a society which he could without too great a difficulty have learned to comprehend. Horace would have felt himself reasonably at home as the guest of Horace Walpole, and Catullus would soon have learned his way about among the sedan chairs, the patched-up beauties and flaring torches of London streets at night. But if the time translation had lasted for another two centuries they would have found themselves in the position of bewildered children, their daily life dominated by the automobile, the telephone, the inexorable time-table of relationships with innumerable people who form inescapable links in ever-ramifying chains of administrative arrangements without which the simplest necessities of life, a draught of water (from a municipally-owned water supply), a visit to a friend (on a public bus service), the reading of a book (from a public library) cannot be carried on. For the common man, who had no privileged position but earned his living by his own labour, the change would have been even greater. The rural peasant or blacksmith of Roman times would find his modern counterpart, the urban industrial or clerical worker, as strange as a being of a different species.

The recent metamorphosis in the human condition has been extraordinarily rapid. Four lifetimes at most could cover the essential transition. Man’s adaptability is so great that we often fail to realize the magnitude of this change, which is so near to us that we can almost remember it as part of our own experience. From a more distant and future viewpoint, the discovery which Whitehead called ‘the invention of the method of invention’, and the revolutionary consequences of the first century or so of its application, will probably seem to have produced changes in the human condition comparable only to those brought about by the invention of urban community life in the Neolithic period.

Like the invention of urban civilization, the modern discoveries have been made and applied in relatively restricted parts of the world. They originated in western Europe, and spread from there very rapidly to the European-dominated parts of the world, such as North America and Australia. One of the most striking features of the technological advance has been an increase in speed of communication and transportation. It is therefore an essential and inescapable feature of the whole situation that it should spread with great rapidity over the world as a whole. The property of being indifferent to mere geographical distance, or complete master of it, is as much an intrinsic property of the new knowledge as fluidity is an intrinsic property of water. Once technological advance had reached a certain level in the regions of its origin, it was bound to sweep over the rest of the world like the flood waters of a river which has burst its banks. We saw it reach a few countries such as Russia and Japan in the early years of this century. In the few decades that remain before the century closes, it is inevitable that the fertilizing flood will cover the whole of the rest of the world’s surface, as the waters of the Nile spread over the parched soil of the Egyptian valley.

It has been difficult to describe this process without implying, as was done in the last sentence at least, that it is ‘a good thing’, and that the recent changes in the human condition can be considered as progress. In western Europe, where the whole process originated and has been going on longest, the word progress is now extremely unfashionable. Anyone who is bold enough to assert that it has occurred, or even that the word has a definite meaning, is likely to be dismissed as merely naive and unsophisticated. I hope to show that this accusation is unjustified. One can be quite sophisticated—I think quite sophisticated enough—and still believe in progress. At any rate, it must be recognized that the conventional response of modern western intellectuals to the idea of progress is an exceedingly provincial one. The hundreds of millions of people living in India and China have still an expectation of life at birth which is only about half of that of the western European. The major political force which is shaping man’s history in our time is the conviction of these people that to die at eighty after a healthy life using inanimate sources of power is, in some real and undeniable sense, better than to die at forty after a life of back-breaking labour, hunger and sickness. It is, in my opinion, merely a confession of intellectual inadequacy if the western intellectual finds himself forced to confess that he cannot see any way in which this belief can be rationally justified. Yet that is the position in which the official philosophy, of Great Britain at least, seems to be. The scientists and technologists who are actively engaged in the enormously complex co-operative effort by which the human condition is being changed usually find less difficulty in agreeing that the scientific revolution has value, but few have attempted to give a rational exposition of what the concept of value may mean and how values may be judged. This is what I shall try to do in this book.

The writing of these essays was provoked not only by the technological advance in the situation of human life but by another aspect of twentieth-century existence which again presents an inescapable challenge to the philosophical theory of ethics. In the ‘thirties we were brought face to face with the massive existence of evil as a major factor in human affairs. Human destructiveness and the desire to massacre one’s enemies are, of course, commonplaces of history. However, the Nazi’s use of scientific technology to carry out a policy of racial genocide, and the sophisticated utilization by new social movements, such as Nazism, Fascism and Communism, of torture and systematic falsehood as orthodox methods of political action, forced on nearly the whole world a profound reconsideration of the problem of ends and means.

Since then the problem of destructiveness has become even more urgent. The development of the A-bomb, its use at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the later development of the even more devastating H-bomb, have forced mankind to realize that enormously destructive acts are technically very easily possible. It might seem that the very magnitude of these effects is such that the ethical problem largely solves itself. It needs, one might think, no elaborate intellectual apparatus to persuade any sensible person that the H-bomb is a bad thing. But that is in fact by no means the end of the matter. Life so often consists of a choice between evils. It may require quite subtle thought to enable us to decide whether the use of an H-bomb is more or less evil than some other course of action open to us. Quite recently, for instance, in the summer of 1958, the newspapers have told us that the President of the United States was almost unable to conceive that any one of his countrymen could consider the possibility that it might be better to surrender to Russia than to carry out a full-scale atomic war with her. In the face of such an opinion one can hardly maintain that the recognition of the evil of atomic weapons is unqualified.

In the essays which I wrote in the ‘forties I was concerned mainly to discover what rational grounds could be found for rejecting the creeds which prescribed racial superiority and the complete subordination of means to ends. I made little attempt to deal with the cognate problem, which now appears to me of almost equal importance: the problem, namely, of why man has so often embraced systems which one might have thought he would have intuitively recognized to be evil. I shall discuss this problem rather more fully in Chapter 13.

The development of the atomic bomb has also dramatized another type of question, which has become a very actual one for ethical theory in this century. As is well known, the explosion of atomic weapons produces ionizing radiations which eventually become widespread over the whole earth. These radiations produce harmful effects, such as the development of cancers or the induction of harmful hereditary mutations. Something of an intellectual problem is posed by the fact that we cannot tell in which individuals these effects will be induced. The ethical problem can no longer be phrased in terms of personal relationships. The decision to explode the bombs, probably in a programme of weapon testing, has been taken by a super-personal machinery of government, and it may be quite impossible to indict any one individual as ultimately responsible. Even if such a person could be named, the harmful effects will occur in individuals whom he will certainly never meet, and who can in fact never be certainly identified. The gene mutations and cancers consequent on bomb fall-out all occur as an addition to an unavoidable background of such calamities, which are part of the natural of man.

Just how should we judge them ethically? Is it as evil for a state to order the explosion of a bomb, whose fall-out will ultimately, over several generations, cause the death of, say, a thousand people from harmful gene mutations, as it is for another state to order its police to shoot a thousand people personally in the back of the head? I do not think the answer is altogether obvious. Again, if ionizing radiation causes harmful gene mutations and cancers, it will do so equally if it is derived from what we consider natural sources instead of from human technical devices. The fall-out from bombs exploded in weapon testing up to date is estimated to have produced about a hundredth of the natural background radiation which a person is bound to accumulate over a period of thirty years. It is, then, equivalent to the dose of radiation which he will receive every four months of his life. If the average age at which the people in a population reproduce were to advance by as little as four months, this would therefore have the same hereditary effect on future generations as the programme of weapon testing. (Such an advance in the age of reproduction would not necessarily have the same effect on the induction of cancer as the weapon testing, which has brought into being a very potent and unnatural substance—strontium 90.) What then are we to conclude, either as to the responsibility of the individual to have children as early as possible and thus to run less risk of passing on mutated genes to his offspring, or of governments actually to encourage early marriage and reproduction?

The results of testing atomic weapons faces us with the most pressing example of a very general question which may be called the problem of the ethics of stochastic processes. We are learning now to understand many situations in which some action which we may take will influence the frequency of occurrence of some phenomenon without simultaneously determining the exact instance in which the effect will occur. If we increase the consumption of cigarettes there is every reason to believe that the incidence of lung cancer will rise, but we cannot say that John Smith of such-and-such an address will be killed by the disease. If we as a society put another million cars on to the road, or even if we ordain a new Bank Holiday to enable people to enjoy themselves over a long weekend in summer, we can calculate fairly precisely how many people will be killed as a direct consequence.¹

What is the ethical status of acts of this kind? The old utilitarian cliché, which related good to the greatest happiness of the greatest number, was never very perspicuous and it becomes no easier to see one’s way through the problems it poses now that the development of more refined statistical methods enables us to penetrate much further into the remote consequences of what might at first sight seem relatively neutral activities. But the problem is one of the most fundamental importance. The ends which, as his social activities convince us, twentieth-century man in the world as a whole finds overwhelmingly good are in the main attributes of stochastic processes. The most powerful forces operating in the world with which we have to grapple, intellectually and morally, are directed towards ends such as changes in the statistical indices of infant mortality or nutrition. For mankind as a whole in our time, the subtle modalities of inter-personal relationships are not the kernel of the matter. The idea of the good, as we see it forcing the pace of historical change around us, is not by any means only, or even most importantly, concerned with inter-individual reactions. It can hardly be expressed except in terms of statistical parameters.

The theory of ethics is, of course, a part of philosophy, and possibly many people will maintain that, in introducing an ethical discussion by the kind of considerations which have been mentioned in this chapter, I have merely betrayed a bias which must vitiate everything which comes later. I have shown, they might claim, that I shall merely be arguing a case which has been decided on other grounds before the intellectual argumentation starts. I should counter this charge by claiming that it stems from a misunderstanding of the relationship between the intellect and the surrounding circumstances of life. A philosopher cannot be, and I think should not aim at being, divorced from the conditions of human existence in the world of his time.

The human intellect is an instrument which has been produced during the course of evolution, primarily by the agency of natural selection, supplemented by the specifically human evolutionary processes which we shall discuss later. Like all other products of evolution, it has been moulded by the necessity to fit in with—or rather, to put it more actively, to cope with—the rest of the natural world. Its function is not to produce a God-like vision of the human situation seen from some stand-point above and outside the turmoil of actual life. The intellect is an instrument forged—perhaps by a rather rough and ready village blacksmith, let us confess—for the specific purpose of coming to terms with things. The situation with which we find ourselves confronted, a world of social-economic revolutions, of wars, of mass scale technology, is the basic raw material by which the intellect is challenged. To discuss subjects such as ethical theory without specific reference to such problems is to run away to an ivory tower.

Of course, the temptation to do this is very real, since the intellect is not really like the kind of tool which can be produced by a village blacksmith. Its overwhelming importance is just that it is an instrument for going beyond the immediate present. It is misused, or under-used, if it is only employed to provide a verbal justification for some conclusion which has been previously arrived at by non-intellectual means. This is the other pole of the situation, which one has to balance against the equally relevant fact that the intellect also remains under-used if it does not grapple with the major problems which its milieu offers. What is demanded of each generation is a theory of ethics which is neither a mere rationalization of prejudices, nor a philosophical discourse so abstract as to be irrelevant to the practical problems with which mankind is faced at that time.

One does not demand, of course, that an ethical theory should propound solutions to all the problems of its day. Theories, whether philosophic or scientific, are normally put forward by people who have an interest in the processes of thought. It is only rarely that the same individuals are equally at home in the practical world of politics, administration or experiment. What is demanded of an ethical theory is primarily that it should be relevant, and applicable to a world in which the crucial actions of a thousand million people are predicated on the belief that scientific technology is good. The intellect will have failed to carry out the functions for which evolution designed it if it issues merely in the conclusion that it can suggest no criteria by which one could hope to decide whether this belief has either meaning or validity. We must cudgel our brains to be able to do better than that. In forcing our reason to face the circumstances of its time, we need not of course place it in the position of becoming a mere servant of the situation. We must be prepared to find that a thousand million people might be wrong; but it is perhaps legitimate to feel that we should need extremely strong reasons for coming to such a conclusion. One should anticipate that, at least as a first step, we could discover some way of formulating the situation in rational terms which would allow that this great mass of the human population was talking some variety of sense, and had at any rate a great deal of justification for what it said. A priori one would expect that it would only be as a second step, if at all, that one could pass beyond this to show in what way the conclusion which they had arrived at was inadequate and could be improved on. Official philosophy, which so cleverly denies even meaning to the most powerful human convictions, is perhaps too ready to believe that it is several steps in advance of an understanding which the more sceptical may doubt whether it has ever attained.

One of the main arguments of this book is that philosophers have for the most part concerned themselves with an issue which is actually not the most important one which the ordinary man would wish to see debated. What we, as people with our lives to carry on, are seeking is some guidance by which we can direct our activities. By the time we begin to reflect rationally about such matters we find ourselves provided with a set of feelings of right and wrong, of obligation, of beliefs that we ought to do so and so and ought not to do something else. Many of these feelings have a common quality which we acknowledge by grouping them together under the common name ‘ethical’. They present themselves to us as guides to action. Philosophers have in general felt that their task was, in the first place, to clarify the nature of these ethical feelings; and some have gone further and tried to distil from them general principles which would both be guides to action and would still remain ethical in quality. I shall argue that the most sensible and convincing guides to action do not necessarily possess in their own right the ethical quality, though they may come to acquire it after they have been fully accepted as applicable to our behaviour.

We have learnt that systems of feeling to which it is difficult to deny the title of ethical may lead to actions which it is equally difficult to refrain from qualifying as evil; as, for instance, the mass murder of Jews by the Nazis, or some aspects of the subjection of means to ends by the Soviet and Chinese Communists. Again, in the field of the stochastic phenomena referred to earlier, human actions have consequences of a kind which seem to demand that the actions be the subject of ethical feelings, and yet we may find those feelings absent, unduly weak or contradictory. These and some other points bring us to the realization that what we are really looking for is a criterion which will enable us to criticize, modify and expand the ethical systems with which we find ourselves unreflectively provided. Now a criterion for judging an ethical system need not be, indeed perhaps it cannot be, itself an ethical system in the ordinary sense. One could perhaps use the word ‘ethical’ with a small ‘e’ to refer, as it does at present, to the feelings and beliefs in which we recognize that quality, and use the word ‘Ethical’ with a capital ‘E’ for the criterion which we must seek to develop, which would enable us to form rational judgments about the ethical with a little ‘e’. I think, however, that it is preferable to use a quite different word for the criterion, one which does not imply that it automatically shares in the particular quality which we recognize as ethical, and yet one which has a quality which we do not find it too difficult to acknowledge as good. Perhaps the word ‘wisdom’ is the most suitable that can be suggested.

In the essay which was written in the early ‘forties, the distinction between ethics and Ethics, or between ethics and wisdom, was not explicitly recognized, although...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Preface
• Table of Contents
• 1 The Importance of Ethics
• 2 Human Value and Biological Wisdom
• 3 Squaring the Vienna Circle
• 4 The Relevance of Developmental Facts
• 5 The ‘Naturalistic Fallacy’
• 6 The Concept of Function
• 7 The Possibility of Evolutionary Theory
• 8 The Shape of Biological Thought; or the Virtues of Vicious Circles
• 9 The Biological Evolutionary System
• 10 The Human Evolutionary System
• 11 The Course of Evolutionary Progress
• 12 The Evolution of the Socio-genetic System
• 13 Human Evolution and the Fall of Man
• 14 Freedom and Reason
• 15 Understanding and Believing
• 16 Biological Wisdom and the Problems of Today
• References
• Index