Annals of the History and Philosophy of Biology

Charles Darwin’s moral sense – on Darwin’s ethics of non-violence
In defending this presupposition of a qualitative difference between man and other
living organisms, Darwin breaks with his gradualistic understanding of evolution, but
does not divorce man from his evolutionary past completely. Our evolutionary heritage
does not consist merely in social instincts which provide the “foundation-stone” for
morality; it also asserts itself in the battle between our virtues and our “lower”, often
stronger impulses, he argues. Francis Galton, who is cited by Darwin, explains the imperfection
of human nature, the discrepancy between our recognition of what moral
action is and our natural inclinations as a kind of faulty adaptation to our new life conditions
during the rapid rise from a ”Barbaric” state. In arguing in this way, he reinterprets
the notion of original sin by premising it on a theory of evolution (Galton 1865, pg. 327).
Operating on the assumption that animals, the apelike ancestors of man and primitive
man possess social instincts, Darwin reconstructs the putative process by which
man’s moral sense developed. He deems it improbable that the formation of social virtues
could be explained by the mechanism of selection. The mechanism which is called
upon to explain the origin of social instincts does not appear to be applicable when it
comes to the development of man’s moral sense. Darwin grounds his scepticism on the
fact that statistically speaking, individuals who possess the virtue of self-sacrifice, for
example, lose their lives at an early age more frequently than do egoistic members of the
species, thus failing to pass this disposition on to future generations. For this reason he
presupposed that individuals develop social virtues through experience of the necessity
of mutual assistance, reciprocal recognition and sanction, praise and blame, the pressure
of public opinion and religion, with the most reliable gauge for moral action ultimately
being provided by an individual’s own habitualized convictions controlled by reason. 7
But Darwin also explicitly points out the possibility of reducing social virtues to selfinterest
(Darwin 1877, pg. 125). In his concluding remarks he points to one aspect of the
emergence of social virtues for which, as he sees it, natural selection played a marginal
role in comparison to certain other factors. He writes:
“Important as the struggle for existence has been and even still is, yet as far as the highest part of
man’s nature is concerned there are other agencies more important. For the moral qualities are
advanced, either directly or indirectly, much more through the effects of habit, the reasoning
powers, instruction, religion, etc., than through Natural Selection; though to this latter agency may
be safely attributed the social instincts, which afforded the basis for the development of the moral
sense.” (Darwin 1877, pg.. 643)
Whereas Darwin holds an ambivalent position towards progress in terms of evolution,
he goes on the assumption that there is moral progress in cultural development, evaluating
this possibility optimistically. For him, moral progress consists in overcoming the
instinctive dispositions of primitive man and “savages”,– which limit benevolence and
social action to members of one’s own social community – and extending social behavior
to members of other races as well as to helpless, diseased and weak human beings and
ultimately also to animals. Darwin sees social action which limits sympathy to members
7 To explain social dispositions, Darwin turns to a Lamarckian model of explanation, namely the assumption
that individually acquired, habitualized traits were inherited. (Darwin 1977, pg. 137).
Annals of the History and Philosophy of Biology, Vol. 10 (2005)
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