Evolution and Normativity 203Wittgenstein whereas pragmatists and naturalists are liable to side with Dewey.
For my part, I am with Dewey in thinking that philosophers in general have not
taken Darwin seriously enough and they ought to do so. Evolutionary theory and
the facts of the evolutionary progress of human beings may not solve the big and
deep philosophical questions but it is sheer parochialism to think that evolutionary
considerations are entirely irrelevant to them.
In this paper I propose first to give an all too brief sketch of the major develop-
ments in evolutionary ethics and evolutionary epistemology. For a fuller treatment
see [Bradie, 1986; 1994a; 1994b]. The central questions in evolutionary ethics and
evolutionary epistemology have been addressed from a variety of perspectives. A
failure to distinguish between them only serves to muddy further already unclear
waters. In section 3, I shall propose and defend three distinctions that help to
sort out the key issues. Finally, in section 4, I address the crucial question of what
substantivecontributions, if any, can evolutionary considerations bring to bear on
the nature, the source and the force of epistemic and ethical norms.
2 THE SHADOW OF DARWINWhat can we learn about ethics or epistemology from the study of the evolution
of human beings? Charles Darwin, who started it all, argued that an evolution-
ary account of what he called the ‘moral sense’ could explain the general shape
of our capacity to make moral judgments [Darwin, 1981]. Following some leads
from a relative by marriage, the philosopher James Mackintosh, Darwin sketched
a plausible scenario to account for the development of the two poles of moral sen-
timent that serve to shape our moral judgments [Manier, 1978; Mackintosh, 1834].
The development of the proclivity for self-regarding or self interested motivation
is driven by the needs of the organism to preserve itself in order to reproduce.
The development of the proclivity for other-regarding motives or what we have
come to label “altruism,” is driven by evolutionary pressures generated by the
social nature of human beings [Bradie, 1994b]. Darwin was less sanguine about
the derivability of specific moral norms or values from the evolutionary history of
human development.
Thomas Huxley, Darwin’s ‘bulldog,’ famously argued that biological evolution
and the development of ethics were antithetical. Biological evolution was driven,
in his view, by competitive forces that were inimical to the development of values
(Huxley 1989). Ethics, on the other hand, was based on co-operation and mutual
aid. These qualities represented a triumph of human nature over the natural order
of things. Nature, in his view, was morally neutral. Huxley’s pessimistic vision
was challenged by the Russian anarchist, Prince Peter Kropotkin, who argued that
a proper reading of Darwinian theory represented natural selection as promoting
both co-operative and competitive impulses. The net result was that Kropotkin
saw the evolution of the moral sentiment of mutual aid as emerging from the
evolution of natural structures (Kropotkin, 1919, 1924).