Abstract
This chapter investigates the place of value in nature, focusing especially on evolutionary accounts of moral values. Most modern conceptions of morality are strongly influenced by the kind of historical and genealogical approach that emerged in the 19th century. Among the main representatives of this approach is Charles Darwin, who in his Descent of Man presents morality as a product of man’s struggle for survival. Another influential deflationary account of morality is Mill’s utilitarianism, for which the deliverances of conscience are merely psychological events or subjective feelings. Mill portrays normativity as a kind of painful feeling, linked to the violation of duty, which works within the subject as an internal sanction. But a sanction of this kind is just a causal motivator that carries no real moral justificatory force. Such views lead eventually to the radical position of Nietzsche as presented in his The Genealogy of Morals: once we realize that ethics has a genealogy, that is, that it is the product of a contingent history, we can transcend this history and the authoritative power of conscience. However, arguments of this kind are hard to reconcile with intrinsic features of morality such as the objective, universal, necessary and normative character of moral values. This chapter explores to what extent contingency jeopardizes naturalistic accounts of morality and other contemporary views that seek to reconcile the features of morality with those of the natural world.
This paper was presented as the opening address at the XLVIII Reuniones Filosóficas Conference on Biologia y Sujectividad, University of Navarra, Spain, April 2011, and I am grateful to participants at the Conference for helpful discussion of the arguments. At various points the paper draws on material which I have developed in previous works, details of which are footnoted below.
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Notes
- 1.
‘… actions are regarded by savages … as good or bad, solely as they obviously affect the welfare of the tribe … The conclusion agrees well with the belief that the so-called moral sense is aboriginally derived from the social instincts…’ Darwin [1871; 2nd. 1879] (2004), Ch. 4, p. 143.
- 2.
‘A tribe including many members who … were always ready to aid one another, and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over most other tribes; and this would be natural selection . At all times through the world tribes have supplanted other tribes; and as morality is one important element in their success, the standard of morality and the number of well-endowed men will thus everywhere tend to rise and increase.’ Darwin [1871; 2nd. 1879] (2004) Ch. 5, pp. 157–58. Modern evolutionary theorists would see this apparent endorsement of group selection as problematic, but, with the aid of genetic theory, could easily adjust the story, rewriting in terms of the advantages of prevalence within a given population of an individual gene or genes linked to altruistic behaviour.
- 3.
Darwin [1871; 2nd. 1879] (2004), Ch. 4, p. 151.
- 4.
There are of course important differences between ‘right’ and ‘good’, but I shall not be exploring them in this paper, since they do not affect the main thrust of my argument.
- 5.
For more on this and the other aspects of moral value discussed here, see Cottingham 2009, Ch. 2 and 2005, Ch. 3.
- 6.
Imagine a magnificent balloon floating in the air. If it is deflated it falls to the earth, no longer an object of wonder and admiration. So by calling an account of morality ‘deflationary’, I mean that its effect is to take away the sense of moral values as having a exalted power or authority, and present them instead as something much more ordinary and down to earth.
- 7.
Butler [1726] (1990) and also in Raphael 1969. For more on the philosophical issues arising from the notion of conscience , see Cottingham 2013.
- 8.
‘[A] truthful historical account is likely to reveal a radical contingency in our current ethical conceptions. Not only might they have been different from what they are, but also the historical changes that brought them about are not obviously related to them in a way that vindicates them against possible rivals.’ Williams 2002, Ch. 2, p. 20.
- 9.
‘Fortunately I have learnt to separate theology from morality and ceased looking for the origin of [good and] evil behind the world. Some schooling in history and philology, together with an innate sense of discrimination with respect to questions of psychology, quickly transformed my problem into another one: under what conditions did man invent the value -judgements good and evil? And what value do they themselves possess?’ Nietzsche [1887], Preface, §3.
- 10.
See Nietzsche [1886], §37.
- 11.
The final two sections of this paper draw on material from my articles: 2012, pp. 233–254; 2008, Ch. 2, pp. 25–43.
- 12.
See Russ Shafer-Landau 2003, pp. 46, 48: moral standards ‘just are correct’; they are ‘a brute fact about the way the world works’. For the comparison with physics, see ‘Ethics as Philosophy: A Defense of Ethical Non-naturalism’, in Shafer Landau (ed.) Ethical Theory, Ch. 8.
- 13.
The so-called ‘redundancy’ strategy, of construing truth and reality claims as merely emphatic asseverations of the propositions they refer to – so that ‘x is true/really true/part of reality’ is merely a strong way of asserting x – is of course not available to the non-naturalist, on pain of retreating from the very normative realism that he is supposed to be propounding.
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Cottingham, J. (2016). Ethics and Normativity. In: García-Valdecasas, M., Murillo, J., Barrett, N. (eds) Biology and Subjectivity. Historical-Analytical Studies on Nature, Mind and Action, vol 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30502-8_11
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