Annals of the History and Philosophy of Biology

Charles Darwin’s moral sense – on Darwin’s ethics of non-violence
diseased and the weak would lead to a deterioration of our social virtues, Darwin argues
that “we must therefore bear the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and
propagating their kind” (Darwin ebd.). Darwin’s hope is that they would obligate themselves
to voluntarily abstain from marrying and producing offspring.
Darwin’s observations of this kind concerning the disadvantages of civilization must
not be understood in the sense of a wholesale criticism of civilization, however. Darwin’s
position on civilization is actually quite ambivalent. As he contends, civilized life has its
advantages, bringing about an improvement in its members’ bodily constitution through
better nutrition and protection against live-threatening situations. Nevertheless, these
and similar passages invite misuse for ideological and political agendas. Although Darwin
does not derive any ethical demands from his theory, his remarks contain obvious value
judgments on what constitutes life quality and what is worthy of life. One preliminary
conclusion one might draw is that Darwin did not postulate exclusion by force of certain
individuals and groups of individuals. As Darwin argues, the mechanisms of selection
which were practiced at the beginning of man’s evolution in primitive societies must not
be applied any more, since they would dull our moral sense. Possible signs of degeneration
were for him the price we had to pay for morality, and ways for preventing it should
be found which did not involve the elimination of weak members of society.
In arguing in this way, Darwin plays off ethical arguments against the notion that the
evolutionary mechanism of the survival of the fittest should be made the gauge for human
action. Darwin’s moral and ethical value judgments are grounded in his faithfulness
towards certain traditions and his orientation towards concepts of philosophical ethics.
According to Darwin, moral and cultural progress has detached itself to a considerable
degree from the mechanism of natural selection under the conditions of civilization, now
being effected in other ways. Thus “great lawgivers, the founders of beneficent religions,
great philosophers and discoverers in science, aid the progress of mankind in a far higher
degree by their works than by leaving a numerous progeny.” (Darwin 1877, pg. 141). In
taking this view, Darwin touches upon the issue of how culturally relevant information is
passed on to future generations on the basis of linguistically mediated experience, which
occurs independent of heredity.
Darwin speculates that natural selection plays only a marginal role in the qualitative
increase of morality and the quantitative increase in the number of human beings who
engage in moral action, assessing its positive influence to be negligible in this sense. In
his eye, moral progress more likely occurs as a result of factors already described –
through social learning, reflection, experience and religion. Thus in the area of morality
as it exists under civilized conditions, Darwin seems to view natural selection as a
mechanism which acts negatively, but not as an instance which fulfills a constructive
function as a motor for moral progress.
In the first section of this article I pointed out that the struggle for existence as Darwin
sees it can take on the form of cooperation between individuals belonging to the
same or different species (the latter case constituting a form of symbiosis, for example).
In the second section I showed what great significance Darwin ascribed to man’s social
virtues. This aspect of Darwin’s ethics was already underscored by the contemporaneous
reception of his work and proved to serve as a foundation for the practical reconcilability
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