204 Michael Bradie
The latter half of the 19thcentury saw a number of attempts to extend evolu-
tionary insights to a wide range of human activities including politics, commerce,
and social organization as well as morality (see e.g., [Spencer, 1966; Bagehot,
1956]). This attempt to read off social and moral norms from the ‘face’ of nature
was met with skepticism and stiff resistance from philosophical quarters. Henry
Sidgwick’sThe Method of Ethics, which first appeared in 1874, raised serious
doubts about the extent to which natural circumstances could be said to give rise
to moral norms [Sidgwick, 1964]. The philosophicalcoup de grasto deriving moral
norms from the products of natural selection or biological evolution was delivered
by G. E. Moore in 1905 who argued that systems such as Spencer’s that drew
moral consequences from natural facts suffered from a fatal flaw — commission of
the ‘naturalistic fallacy.’ This was a 20thcentury version of a warning from David
Hume in the 18thcentury about the legitimacy of deriving an “ought” from an “is”
that has come to serve as the cornerstone of what is called the “fact/value distinc-
tion.” Moore’s version deplored the attempt to define “good,” which Moore took
to be unanalyzable and indefinable, in terms of ‘natural’ properties such as ‘has
evolved’ or ‘is an adaptation’ [Moore, 1964]. This riposte, coupled with the rise
of totalitarianism in the 1920’s and 1930’s and its claims to legitimacy grounded
in appeals to Darwinian natural selection effectively muted attempts to ground
ethics in evolutionary theory until the publication of E. O. Wilson’sSociobiology
in 1975. There were, of course, some notable exceptions. Thus, Julian Huxley,
Thomas Huxley’s grandson, argued that his grandfather had been wrong –natural
selection and the emergence of ethics were not antithetical [Huxley and Huxley,
1947]. Human morality, he went on to argue, was on an evolutionary track that
led to a reshaping of the goals and ends of being human. The evolutionary destiny
of human beings, he argued, is “to be the agent of the evolutionary process on this
planet, the instrument for realizing new possibilities for its future” [Huxley, 1957].
The publication of E. O. Wilson’sSociobiologyre-opened the flood gates and
reinvigorated attempts to draw moral conclusions from the facts of evolution ap-
peared. The naturalistic fallacy still loomed large as a roadblock in the minds of
many. However, there has always been an underground of opposition to the alleged
implications of the naturalistic fallacy. Some have argued that it is no fallacy and
that values can be derived from facts under suitable derivational circumstances.
Others have argued that although it is a fallacy, an evolutionary ethics need not
commit it. Still others have challenged the very idea of the fact-value distinction
that gives purchase to the ‘fallacy’. Needless to say, the status of the fallacy and
its implications for an evolutionary account of moral norms and behavior are con-
troversial. It would be beyond the scope of this forum to sort all the ramifications
of the current debate. Suffice it to say that there is no received consensus that has
not been subject to severe critical examination.
Wilson’s aim inSociobiologywas to create a new ‘synthesis’ that incorporated
the social sciences under the wide umbrella of evolutionary biology. Reaction to
this attempt was, to put it mildly, mixed [Segerstrale, 2001; Caplan, 1978]. While
researchers were quite happy to explain non-human animal behavior in terms of