Darwin's Dangerous Idea - Evolution and the Meaning of Life

466 ON THE ORIGIN OF MORALITY
tion for the purpose of defense and reaction, and the results of successful
counteractions. [Second Essay, sec. 12, pp. 77-78. f
Considering that Nietzsche may never have read Darwin's own work, his
appreciation of its major directions is remarkable, but he rather spoiled his
record as a sound Darwinian by lapsing, on the same page, into skyhook
hunger, announcing his "fundamental opposition to the now prevalent instinct
and taste which would rather be reconciled even to the absolute
fortuitousness, even the mechanistic senselessness of all events than to the
theory that in all events a will to power is operating." Nietzsche's idea of a
will to power is one of the stranger incarnations of skyhook hunger, and,
fortunately, few find it attractive today. But, if we set that aside, the upshot
of Nietzsche's genealogy of morals is that we must be extremely careful not
to read into the history we extrapolate from nature any simplistic conclusions
about value:
The question: what is the value of this or that table of values and "morals"?
should be viewed from the most divers perspectives; for the problem
"value for what?" cannot be examined too subtly. Something, for example,
that possessed obvious value in relation to the longest possible survival of
a race (or to the enhancement of its power of adaptation to a particular
climate or to the preservation of the greatest number) would by no means
possess the same value if it were a question, for instance, of producing a
stronger type. The well-being of the majority and the well-being of the few
are opposite viewpoints of value: to consider the former a priori of higher
value may be left to the naivete of English biologists. [Nietzsche 1887, First
Essay, sec. 17.]
It is Spencer, clearly, not Darwin, whom Nietzsche is accusing of naivete
about value. Both Spencer and Ree thought they could see a straight, simple
path to altruism (Hoy 1986, p. 29). We can see Nietzsche's criticism of this
Panglossianism as a clear forerunner of George Williams' criticism of the
Panglossianism of naive group selectionism (see chapter 11). Spencer, in our
terms, was an egregiously greedy reductionist, trying to derive "ought" from
"is" in a single step. But doesn't this reveal the deeper problem with all
sociobiology? Haven't the philosophers shown us that you can never derive
"ought" from "is," no matter how many steps you take? Some have
4. It is interesting to note that Nietzsche also had a thoroughly sound and modern idea
about the relationship between complexity and any notion of global progress: "The
richest and most complex forms—for the expression 'higher type' means no more than
this—perish more easily: only the lowest preserve an apparent indestructibility"
(Nietzsche 1901, p. 684).
Sotne Varieties of Greedy Ethical Reductionism 467
argued that sociobiology, no matter how sophisticated it became, no matter
how many cranes it employed, could never bridge the gap between the "is"
of empirical scientific fact and the "ought" of ethics! (They say this with
impressive passion.) That is the conviction we must examine next.
3. SOME VARIETIES OF GREEDY ETHICAL REDUCTIONISM
One of the shibboleths of contemporary philosophy is that you can't derive
"ought" from "is." Attempting to do this is often called the naturalistic
fallacy, taking the term from G. E. Moore's classic, Principia Ethica ( 1903 ).
As the philosopher Bernard Williams points out (1983, p. 556 ), there really
are several issues here. Naturalism "consists in the attempt to lay down
certain fundamental aspects of the good life for man on the basis of considerations
of human nature." Naturalism wouldn't be refuted by the rather
obvious fact that you can't derive any simple "ought" statement from any
simple "is" statement. Consider: does it follow logically that I ought to give
you five dollars from the fact ( and suppose it is a fact) that I said I would
give you five dollars? Obviously not; any number of intervening excusing
conditions might be cited to block this inference. Even if we were to characterize
my saying as promising—an ethically loaded description—no simple
"ought" statement follows directly.
But reflections like this make scarcely a dent on naturalism as a theoretical
goal. Philosophers distinguish between finding the necessary and sufficient
conditions for various things, and the application of the distinction in this
case actually helps clarify the situation. It is one thing to deny that
collections of facts about the natural world are necessary to ground an
ethical conclusion, and quite another to deny that any collection of such facts
is sufficient. According to standard doctrine, if we stay firmly planted in the
realm of facts about the world as it is, we will never find any collection of
them, taken as axioms, from which any particular ethical conclusion can be
conclusively proven. You can't get there from here, any more than you can
get from any consistent set of axioms about arithmetic to all the true
statements of arithmetic.
Well, so what? We may bring out the force of this rhetorical question with
another one, rather more pointed: If "ought" cannot be derived from "is,"
just what can "ought" be derived from? Is ethics an entirely "autonomous"
field of inquiry? Does it float, untethered to facts from any other discipline
or tradition? Do our moral intuitions arise from some inexplicable ethics
module implanted in our brains (or our "hearts," to speak with tradition)?
that would be a dubious skyhook on which to hang our deepest convictions
about what is right and wrong. Colin McGinn notes:
A