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A Biological Basis for Ethics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2022

R. W. Gerard
R. W. Gerard*
Affiliation:
University of Chicago
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Extract

The world is beginning to look askance at Science. Or, rather, not beginning but intensifying an attitude of suspicion if not of downright hostility. We scientists are, of course, partly to blame; for we have so loudly proclaimed our virtues as the creators of radios and airplanes that, now these instruments are being abused as agents of mass propaganda and mass destruction, we are the obvious targets for the rising wrath of men. This is serious, for science is inseparably a part of the society and culture in which it is embedded, and it does not suffice to deny impatiently ourguilt and shrug away our responsibility to our fellows.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 9 , Issue 1 , January 1942 , pp. 92 - 120
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1942

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References

1 That is, out of their hands as creative scientists. Many workers in scientific fields arc now accepting a share of the responsibility for this use in their role of citizens and teachers—witness the organization of the American Association of Scientific Workers dedicated to just such ends.

Jan Struther has put the argument as to responsibility charmingly and trenchantly in the thoughts of Mrs. Miniver: “International tempers might flame or cool; the turning kaleidoscope of time might throw mankind's little colored scraps of belief into new patterns, new ideologies; but the length of the vibrating column of air which, in a tube of a given calibre, would produce C natural—that was one of the fixed things. And it wasn't the fault of the scientists, was it, if the people for whom they made the pipes chose to play dangerous tunes?”

2 If one takes the Graeco-Christian “virtues” in more detail, science still seems “in tune”. The “natural” virtues of wisdom or prudence, fortitude, temperance, justice, patience, and humility, and the “Christian” virtues of faith, hope, and charity are pretty much all involved in the pursuit of science. Wisdom is sought, temperance (tolerance) is fostered, justice is demanded in handling evidence and patience in acquiring it, humility is engendered both by the immensity of knowledge and the greater immensity of ignorance, and faith in uniformity and reason is implicit in all scientific activity as is hope of human betterment. Finally, service to man is a continued consideration. It should also be pointed out that science is not oblivious to beauty; but I have developed this sufficiently elsewhere (Science, 1938).

3 Huxley, The Romanes Lecture, 1893.

“[Buddhism is] a system which knows no God in the western sense; which denies a soul to man; which counts the belief in immortality a blunder and the hope of it a sin; which refuses any efficacy to prayer and sacrifice; which bids men look to nothing but their own efforts for salvation; which, in its original purity, knew nothing of vows of obedience, abhorred intolerance, and never sought the aid of the secular arm; yet spread over a considerable moiety of the Old World with marvellous rapidity, and is still, with whatever base admixture of foreign superstitions, the dominant creed of a large fraction of mankind.” The gods of Buddhists are not universal or omnipotent but merely advanced and more perfect beings.

4 Tyndall, describing the progress of scientific knowledge in his Norwich Address, says, “There is no discovery so limited as not to illuminate something beyond itself. The force of intellectual penetration into this penumbral region which surrounds actual knowledge is not, as some seem to think, dependent upon method, but upon the genius of the investigator. There is, however, no genius so gifted as not to need control and verification.”

5 Huxley, Science and Morals.

“Tolerably early in life I discovered that one of the unpardonable sins, in the eyes of most people, is for a man to presume to go about unlabelled. The world regards such a person as the police do an unmuzzled dog, not under proper control. I could find no label that would suit me, so, in my desire to range myself and be respectable, I invented one; and, as the chief thing I was sure of was that I did not know a great many things that the -ists and the -ites about me professed to be familiar with, I called myself an Agnostic.”

6 We note the warning by Sedgewick and Wolf in discussing, in the Encyclopedia Britannica, Spencer's contribution to ethics. “… there are few more melancholy instances of failure in philosophy than the paucity of the actual results attained … in his application of the so-called laws of evolution to human conduct.”

7 Huxley, Prolegomena, 1894.

“I have termed this gradual strengthening of the social bond, which, though it arrests the struggle for existence inside society, up to a certain point improves the chances of society, as a corporate whole, in the cosmic struggle—the ethical process. I have endeavoured to show that, when the ethical process has advanced so far as to secure every member of the society in the possession of the means of existence, the struggle for existence, as between man and man, within that society is, ipso facto, at an end. And, as it is undeniable that the most highly civilized societies have substantially reached this position, it follows that, so far as they are concerned, the struggle for existence can play no important part within them. In other words, the kind of evolution which is brought about in the state of nature cannot take place.”

8 A word concerning the nature of analogy may, however, be helpful. Analogy, according to Webster's Unabridged, refers to the resemblances of attributes or relations of things, rather than of the things themselves, to one another. Reasoning by analogy is often a term of opprobrium, yet the whole attitude of modern science is just this. The “essences” of things are beyond its operational procedure, it compares their attributes and relations. True, the error is commonly made of assuming that, when certain similarities have been established, the case for full similarity has been made. But this is abuse, not use, of analogical reasoning. The body of scientific knowledge is, in fact, a huge set of analogies. None are perfect, for that implies identity of individuals—with which science is not concerned or which it is likely to deny. Some are very superficial and of little value to insight or generalization. Most have some value for understanding and many are valuable in high degree. The greater the number of items of similarity that can be identified between two phenomena (or between an existential entity and our conceptual model of it), and the more these are of a fundamental rather than a consequential or accidental nature, the more completely can we understand or “explain” one in terms of the other. On such criteria, the case for the organismic character of a society is strong indeed.

9 The evolution of social insects is also an outstanding example of cooperation for the group welfare; here, on a direct genetic basis. Huxley, in his Prolegomena, uses this case masterfully. “It is curious to reflect that a thoughtful drone (workers and queens would have no leisure for speculation) with a turn for ethical philosophy, must needs profess himself an intuitive moralist of the purest water. He would point out, with perfect justice, that the devotion of the workers to a life of ceaseless toil for a mere subsistence wage, cannot be accounted for either by enlightened selfishness, or by any other sort of utilitarian motives; since these bees begin to work, without experience or reflection, as they emerge from the cell in which they are hatched. Plainly, an eternal and immutable principle, innate in each bee, can alone account for the phenomena. On the other hand, the biologist, who traces out all the extant stages of gradation between solitary and hive bees, as clearly sees in the latter, simply the perfection of an automatic mechanism, hammered out by the blows of the struggle for existence upon the progeny of the former, during long ages of constant variation.”

10 The interesting question of the relation of aggressive and active impulses to masculinity and of altruistic and passive ones to femininity would lead us too far afield. The observations that a hen injected with male sex hormone moves towards the top of the “peck order” in a flock of hens, and in the reverse direction under the influence of female hormone, are relevant here.

11 In emphasizing the progressive integration of the state, I take for granted the accompanying differentiation of individuals and the dangers of excessive regimentation, as developed in the article previously referred to. The sort of state biology predicts is not one of the Procrustean type with all men fitted into like molds. It is only with advancing integration of the society that individual members of it are able to become highly specialized in one or another direction. Scientists, bankers, mechanics, virtuosos, can exist only in a developed social group, not in a primitive one; and no less does the very being of a complex epiorganism depend upon its possessing such differentiated units. The reintegration into the whole does imply increased group control or power over the individual, but there is no necessity that such power be overtly applied to individual thought, science, art, and religion. In fact, science, and all creativeness, implies freedom, and specialists must be permitted to function in their special competences. When hypotheses are prohibited, advance stops; and the epiorganism which so blocks its own evolutionary change must ultimately be supplanted by a different species which has not “frozen” at some low level.

This footnote should be unnecessary in the light of the argument in this and the preceding essays; but man's thinking today is so determined by specific unhappy totalitarian examples that it is difficult not to read their spurious and accidental attributes into the picture of progressive social integration.