Recent Tendencies in Ethics | Page 9

The theory of evolution, as put forward by Darwin, has established certain positions which have been regarded as of special significance for ethics.
In the first place, it is an assertion of the unity of life. And we must not limit the generality of this proposition. It is not merely a denial of the fixity of species, an assertion that there are no natural kinds so inseparable from one another that each must be the result of a distinct creative act. It is also an assertion that human life must be treated as a part in the larger whole of organic being, that the mind of man is continuous with animal perception, that moral activity is continuous with non-moral impulse. And the assertion of the unity of life is at the same time an assertion of the progress of life. What we call the higher forms are in all cases developments from simpler and lower forms.
Further, the method of this progress has been described. Herein indeed lay Darwin's most important achievement. He detected and demonstrated the operation of a factor hitherto unsuspected. This new factor to which he drew attention as the chief agent in organic development was called by him 'natural selection,' The name has a positive sound and suggests a process of active choice. But Darwin was fully aware that the process to which he gave this name was a negative and not a positive operation; and as such it was clearly recognised by him. The name was, no doubt, chosen simply to bring out the fact that the same kind of results as those which man produces by conscious and artificial selection may be arrived at without conscious purpose by the operation of merely natural forces. Instead of the 'fit' being directly chosen or encouraged, what happens is simply that the 'unfit' die out or are exterminated, so that room to live and means of life are left for the survivors.
What may be meant by this idea of 'fitness'--which meets us in the famous phrase that the 'survival of the fittest' in the struggle for life is the goal of evolution--is a question which brings us at once to the consideration of the ethical significance of the theory. For it seems to lay claim to give both an explanation of progress and an interpretation of what constitutes worth in conduct.

II.
ETHICS AND EVOLUTION.
There are two things which are not always kept distinct,--what may be called the 'evolution of ethics' and the 'ethics of evolution,' The former might more correctly be called the evolution of morality,--the account of the way in which moral customs, moral institutions, and moral ideas have been developed and have come to take their place in the life of mankind. Clearly these are all features of human life; and, if the theory of evolution applies to human life, we must expect it also to have some contribution to make to this portion of man's development,--to the growth of the customs, institutions, and ideas which enter into and make up his morality.
But by the 'ethics of evolution' is meant something more than the 'evolution of ethics' or development of morality. It signifies a theory which turns the facts of evolution to account in determining the value for man of different kinds of conduct and feeling and idea. When one speaks of the ethics of evolution one must be understood to mean that the evolution theory does something more than trace the history of things, that it gives us somehow or other a standard or criterion of moral worth or value. This additional point may be expressed by the technical distinction between origin and validity. Clearly there is a very great difference between showing how something has come to be what it is and assigning to it worth or validity for the guidance of life or thought It may be that the former enquiry has some bearing upon the latter; but only confusion will result if the two problems are not clearly distinguished at the outset,--as they very seldom are distinguished by writers on the theory of evolution in its application to ethics.
It may be said that the evolutionist writers on ethics seek to base an ethics of evolution upon the evolution of ethics, but that they are not always aware of the real nature and difficulties of their task. Sometimes they seem to think that in tracing the evolution of ethics they are also and at the same time determining and establishing a theory of the ethics of evolution. We must avoid this error, and keep the two problems distinct in our minds. Yet from the nature of the case it holds true that it is only through the facts which the theory of evolution establishes or can establish as to the development of morality that it