Evolution quotes

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1. What I find most striking, apart from the usual crystal clarity of Darwin’s writing, is his identification of an “innermost guide or conscience” with reason. That’s rather Kantian.

2. Actually, Bob, it is more like that Darwin was influenced by Bishop Butler’s sermons “Upon Human Nature.” But the passage seems to me badly conceived and much cruder in its conception of the relation of impulse and reason than Butler’s writings. Take the first sentence. Darwin thinks that the non-theist “can have for his rule of life . . . only to follow those impulses and instincts which are the strongest or which seem to him the best ones”; but why does he imagine that one who believes in “the existence of a personal God or of a future existence with retribution and reward” is any different in that respect? If the former is just a creature of impulses and instincts, then so is the latter: the only difference is that the latter has one impulse which the former lacks, namely a fear of divine retribution. The first sentence of the passage reads like something written by a theistic apologist.

3. And this sounded to me very much like Hume’s account of the virtues — we all encourage each other to behave in ways that we enjoy (good-natured altruism) and discourage obnoxious behavior (misanthropy and selfishness). `Reason’, on Hume’s view, is limited to the logistical task of figuring out how best, on the whole, to satisfy our various passions or desires. Darwin sounds more like Hume than Kant here.

4. Of course, compassion arising from empathy might be among the “impulses and instincts” that govern one’s acts, regardless of the communal or divine response.

5. I think Dan is quite right that Darwin’s view here is fairly Humean; that for Darwin conscience is not reason but a kind of social sentiment we can have given that we have reason is clear enough from the discussion of the moral sense in DoM. (Where he refers to David Hume and to Adam Smith approvingly.) It’s this that MKR is tracing when he suggests the influence of Butler: Darwin is a moral sense theorist, and moral sense theorists are one of the major kinds of Intuitionist (whose opponents in this period were the Utilitarians, and Darwin does indeed criticize Mill’s utilitarianism, although not at great length), and, largely due to Whewell, Butler’s Sermons were the classic often opposed by Intuitionists to the utilitarian counterpart, Paley’s Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy. It’s the Intuitionism that sounds like Butler. But Darwin’s own moral sense theory seems to derive largely from reading Scottish moral sense philosophy, not from Butler in particular. It’s not Humean in the narrow sense, but it’s very certainly a cousin in the same family.

   (Just how different it is from an Intuitionism that identifies conscience with reason can be seen by contrasting it with Whewell’s, which is Kantian in the same sense that Darwin’s is Humean.)

6. I hadn’t intended in my comment to suggest that Darwin was a follower of Kant, or even significantly influenced by him, and Butler might well be the source for his identification of reason and conscience. But I still think it striking that Darwin would give reason so prominent a place in his thoughts on moral psychology.

7. Brandon, thanks for shedding further light on the sources of Darwin’s thinking about morals. When you say “Scottish moral philosophy,” do you mean, say, Hutcheson and Smith, or some later figures? (I know Hutcheson was Irish-born, but he pursued his career mostly in Scotland.)

8. I don’t know if we have reason to think Darwin read Hutcheson, but yes; he very definitely read both Hume and Smith on the subject of moral sense and the moral sentiments. Of later Scottish philosophers the only one I know for sure that he read closely was Alexander Bain, although as a young man he knew Sir James Mackintosh personally (they were related by marriage and at least interacted occasionally). But, of course, Darwin was very well read, and so there are any number of moral authors he could have read but never had occasion to cite.

   1. According to Robert Richards in the Cambridge Companion to Darwin, D read Hume and James Mackintosh’s Dissertation on the Progress of Ethical Philosophy in 1838. Richards thinks he got his moral intuitionism from Mackintosh.

      1. Hah! Mackintosh! I had the hunch that it would be some now utterly obscure figure! For me the name “Mackintosh” is exquisitely fitting, as it is the name given, through a misunderstanding, by a reporter to an unidentified man in a raincoat (i.e., a mackintosh) in Ulysses.

         1. A copy of the third edition of Mackintosh’s Dissertation in online at archive.org. The introduction notes that Mackintosh is reprising the arguments of Butler.

      2. A better version is here, as it is the earlier edition, and readable in your web browser.

      3. Thanks, John; that’s helpful. It certainly would make a lot of sense for Mackintosh to be his entryway on the subject; and having gone and looked at Darwin’s notebooks, he definitely does have a fair number of notes on Mackintosh in 1838-1839. But most of what Darwin says later on in life seems to me to be closer to Adam Smith than Mackintosh, although, admittedly, I’m not so familiar with Mackintosh as would be required to be wholly sure of the comparison.

         The Butler reprised by Mackintosh seems pretty clearly the Butler anointed by moral sense theorists as an intuitionist predecessor; i.e., it consists chiefly of Butler’s anti-Hobbes arguments and some of his arguments about a distinct moral faculty. That is, it’s a very generic Butler. (One can see something of the selective interpretation in the treating of Butler at one point as one of the opponents of the rationalist theory of morals — which is not so clear in Butler himself, to say the least.)

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