242 Catherine Wilson
knowing all that we moderns know to reject the latter Principle on the grounds
that it represents an ignoble and unworthy ideal, though many notable moral
philosophers of the past would most certainly have rejected it on precisely those
grounds. But might one insist that the Basic Normative Principle is untenable
in light of the Is-to-Ought-Principle, because it is just too hard, given the sorts
of creatures we are, to prevent well-being from tracking sex, race, etc.? Moral
rigorists have in turn rejected the Is-to-Ought-Principle, but their reasons for
doing so outright seem exceedingly specious. One might instead adopt the more
cautious position that we do not know whether the Basic Normative Principle
ought to be upheld at the costs it would impose because we do not know how
hard it would be for everyone — not just members of better off groups — to bring
about or live in world in which well-being was uncorrelated with sex and race.
We should therefore accept this principle for the moment as representing a valid
ethical ideal — one that we do not know we can reach, but one that we have no
particular reason to think we cannot reach.
In conclusion, the theory of evolution furnishes a kind of heuristic for the under-
standing and evaluation of institutions and practices, though it cannot evaluate
them as directly as some of its proponents assume. The major contribution of
biologists and evolutionary psychologists to the field of ethics consists in demys-
tifying many morally problematic features of human life, such as the striving for
status and conquest, belligerence, sexual subordination, and intra-familial conflict.
These phenomena were in ancient times conceived in politico–religious terms as
involving values, in epistemological and moral terms as involving conflicts between
people who were right or superior, and those who were wrong or inferior. They
were the interventions of rivalrous and emotional deities beyond human control
who caused not only storms and earthquakes but war and civil and family distur-
bances. General systems of the world, like those of Plato and Aristotle, developed
the notion that, throughout the cosmos, higher entities rule lower entities, that
active is superior to passive, and that the goodness of a thing is related to its
fulfillment of its intended function.
The new naturalism is accordingly distinct from Aristotelian naturalism. With
demystification, opportunities arise for human rationality and sympathy and a
sense of fair play to be applied to a wider range of phenomena than were historically
seen as eligible. The notion of empire, much discussed in the earliest Darwinian
literature, furnishes an example. Empires are phenomena that recur repeatedly in
human history, and, while some features of their replication are obviously memetic
— since imperialists assiduously study and imitate the actions of their imperialist
predecessors — empires would presumably arise spontaneously even if imperialists
did not know of one another’s existence. In this respect, they can be considered
as features of the extended human phenotype, as habitats of a partially symbolic
but partially concrete sort built by organisms of a particular species that they
like to inhabit. The propensities of humans appear however to depend in turn
on political conditions. Remarkably, while humans exhibit a strong bias towards
egalitarianism, conflict resolution and sharing in small groups where individuals