220 Catherine Wilson
of the self as an agent capable of performing noble and selfish actions, and since
nonhuman social animals do not engage in moral education, or seek moral progress.
Only human beings construct representations of themselves as actors in the world
and posit such abstract entities as rights, responsibilities, and legitimate interests
that nonhuman animals cannot possess. Human beings are the only creatures to
advance moral theories and to enter into contests and competitions regarding their
truth, and their prehuman evolutionary history is thought to shed little or no light
on these intellectual and political activities.
The kinship of man and animal, the evolution of higher forms from lower, and
the relation of morality to sentiment and instinct was first discussed in the 18th
century, with Immanuel Kant taking a decidedly critical position with respect
both to evolutionary thought and to what he considered the impure influence of
natural history, anthropology, and psychology on ethics. The lingering influence
of Kant’s critique of naturalism and his insistence that moral theory requires ref-
erence to supersensible concepts such as the noumenal will has been marked down
to the present day. None of arguments above seems, however, decisive against the
very possibility of Evolutionary Ethics. While no claim about the behaviour of
members of other species permits any inference regarding our own, the usefulness
of a comparison class depends upon the terms of the question being addressed.
Neither individuality nor the differences between groups implies the impossibility
of a study of human nature, understood as a study of the characteristics that
we share with other species and the characteristics that are differentiating. Ide-
ological extrapolations, while common enough to be worrisome, do not preclude
the possibility of nonideological extrapolations of the same or different data. And
while moral theory can be regarded as necessarily having reference only to human
actions, this does not imply that general information that is not bound by the hu-
man context is of no use in articulating moral theory. The study of proto-morality,
as it might be called, in non-linguistic creatures without conscious moral concerns
reveals the platform for morality, the psychological receptivities and dispositions
without which it is impossible to imagine the formation of explicit moral codes.
Towards the middle of the 19thcentury, Darwin came to believe that the theory
of natural selection had reconciled the moral sense of the ethical intuitionists of his
day with utilitarianism [Barrett, 1987, 609]. Darwin speculated that “any animal
whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, the parental and filial affec-
tions being here included, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience,
as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well, or nearly as well developed,
as in man” [Darwin, 1990, 83]. He regarded human character traits as shaped by
agonistic interaction between tribes, with the moral virtues of courage, sympathy
and faithfulness offering a competitive advantage [ibid., 110]. He did not how-
ever consider tribal warfare a permanent condition of the species and he regarded
slavery with repugnance. Darwin was impressed by “numerous points of mental
similarity” and “the close similarity between the men of all races in tastes, dis-
positions, and habits” [Darwin, 1990, 153f.] He was nevertheless conflicted about
the over-protection of the weak, and fell back on the view that they tended to