Organizing Evolutionary Ethics

Abstract

By the 1890s and early 1900s Germany had reached a state of ethical and moral crisis. Many factors contributed to the increasing sense of malaise and disorientation in the realm of morality. German (and European) intellectual life had become increasingly secularized during the nineteenth century, a process that Darwinism furthered. Though the anticlerical philosophers of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment had generally retained the fundamental tenets of Judeo-Christian ethics, many intellectuals of the nineteenth century no longer found traditional morality satisfying. Nietzsche’s rejection of Christian morality resonated with many young thinkers around the turn of the twentieth century. The rise of historicism in the nineteenth century brought many leading intellectuals in Europe to abandon moral certainty.¹ However, though many intellectuals pressed for significant reforms in morality, few wanted to abandon morality altogether. Rather they sought a secular replacement for Judeo-Christian ethics. Darwinism would play a prominent role in this search for a secular ethics and morality, especially among the scientific and medical elite.