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