A Darwinian Left: Politics, Evolution, and Cooperation - Rilegato

Singer, Peter

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0300083238 ISBN 13: 9780300083231

Casa editrice: Yale Univ Pr, 2000

Riassunto

In this ground-breaking book, a renowned bioethicist argues that the political left must radically revise its outdated view of human nature. He shows how the insights of modern evolutionary theory, particularly on the evolution of cooperation, can help the left attain its social and political goals.

Singer explains why the left originally rejected Darwinian thought and why these reasons are no longer viable. He discusses how twentieth-century thinking has transformed our understanding of Darwinian evolution, showing that it is compatible with cooperation as well as competition, and that the left can draw on this modern understanding to foster cooperation for socially desirable ends. A Darwinian left, says Singer, would still be on the side of the weak, poor, and oppressed, but it would have a better understanding of what social and economic changes would really work to benefit them. It would also work toward a higher moral status for nonhuman animals and a less anthropocentric view of our dominance over nature.

Su questo libro

Informazioni sull?autore

Peter Singer is DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University. He is the author of numerous books, including Should the Baby Live? The Problem of Handicapped Infants and Individuals, Humans and Persons: Questions of Life and Death, both coauthored with Helga Kuhse.

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A DARWINIAN LEFT

POLITICS, EVOLUTION AND COOPERATION

By Peter Singer

Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1999 Peter Singer
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-300-08323-1

Contents

Foreword...................................................................
ix
Introduction...............................................................
3
1 Politics and Darwinism...................................................
10
2 Can the Left Accept a Darwinian View of Human Nature?....................
31
3 Competition or Cooperation?..............................................
44
4 From Cooperation to Altruism?............................................
54
5 A Darwinian Left for Today and Beyond....................................
60
Notes and References.......................................................

CHAPTER 1

Politics and Darwinism

The right-wing takeover

Two months after the publication of The Origin ofSpecies, Darwin wrote to Charles Lyell:

I have received in a Manchester newspaper rather agood squib, showing that I have proved might isright and therefore that Napoleon is right, andevery cheating tradesman is also right.

The writer of that review may have been the first tosuggest that Darwin's theory could be used as an ethicaljustification of the right of the strong to trample overthe weak. He was certainly not the last. Darwin himselfrejected the idea that any ethical implications could bedrawn from his work. Nevertheless, evolution became ahigh fashion item among late nineteenth- and earlytwentieth-century American capitalists. These ideas didnot all come from Darwin. Herbert Spencer, who wasmore than willing to draw ethical implications fromevolution, provided the defenders of laissez-faire capitalismwith intellectual foundations that they used tooppose state interference with market forces. AndrewCarnegie acknowledged that competition 'may be sometimeshard for the individual', but justified it on thegrounds that 'it is best for the race, because it insures thesurvival of the fittest in every department'. John D.Rockefeller Jr wrote:

The growth of a large business is merely a survivalof the fittest ... The American Beauty rose can beproduced in the splendor and fragrance which bringcheer to its beholder only by sacrificing the earlybuds which grow around it. This is not an eviltendency in business. It is merely the working outof a law of nature and a law of God.

The capitalists were battling in the US Supreme Courtto use the Fourteenth Amendment (which forbids anystate to deprive any person of life, liberty or property,without due process of law) to strike down governmentattempts to regulate industry. So often did the opponentsof regulation appeal to Spencer, that Mr Justice Holmesfelt compelled, in one judgment, to point out that 'theFourteenth Amendment does not enact Mr HerbertSpencer's Social Statics.'

Facts and values

Some versions of Social Darwinism commit the fallacyof deducing values from facts. Because the theory ofevolution is a scientific theory, and the gap betweenfacts and values remains as unbridgeable as it was whenDavid Hume first drew attention to it in 1739, wecannot conclude that the direction of evolution is'good'. Evolution carries no moral loading, it just happens.We are no more justified in helping it on its waythan we are in doing our best to slow it down or changeits direction. Nor can we, as the sociobiologist E. O.Wilson once claimed, use our knowledge of evolutionto discover 'ethical premises inherent in man's biologicalnature' or deduce universal human rights from the factthat we are mammals. In the centuries to come we maymake many discoveries about human nature. We maylearn what makes human beings happy or sad, whatleads them to develop their capacities for knowledge,wisdom, concern for others and a harmonious existencewith their fellow creatures; but ethical premises will notbe among these discoveries. Even an evolved disposition— like the disposition to repay favours one has received — cannotserve as the premise of an argument that tells us,without further ethical input, what we ought to do.There may be other evolved dispositions that we oughtto reject — for example, a disposition to join in groupacts of violence against people who are not members ofour own group. Einstein was right when he said: 'Aslong as we remain with the realm of science proper, wenever meet with a sentence of the type "Thou shalt notlie" ... Scientific statements of facts and relations ...cannot produce ethical directives.'

The fact—value distinction could provide a short wayof answering the question: can there be a Darwinianleft? The answer would then be: since to be of the leftis to hold certain values, Darwin's theory has nothing todo with whether one is left or right. So there can be aDarwinian left as easily as there can be a Darwinianright.

But that is not the end of the discussion, because notall those who have appealed to Darwin's ideas to defenda political view have attempted to deduce values fromfacts. Some of them have instead used the theory ofevolution to argue that a particular course of action willhave the best consequences, where by 'best consequences'they appeal to some widely shared values, suchas greater happiness and prosperity for all, or surpassingthe greatest achievements of previous civilizations. It isnot too difficult to interpret the two quotations givenabove, from Carnegie and Rockefeller, in this manner.Carnegie can be read as suggesting that competition willmake most people better off, in the long run, andRockefeller's example of the sacrifice of small buds toproduce a more beautiful rose may be an appeal to anethic that sees overriding value in scaling the greatestpossible heights of human achievement. E. O. Wilson,too, mixes his reference to ethical premises inherent inour nature with the suggestion that, in his influentialbook A Theory of Justice, the American political philosopherJohn Rawls has not considered the "ultimateecological or genetic consequences of the rigorous prosecutionof its conclusions'. It is not clear what Wilsonmeans by this, but since Rawls advocates allowinginequalities only to the extent that they benefit theworst-off group in society, it at least looks as if Wilsonis suggesting that we need to consider the geneticimplications of assisting the worst-off to survive. ElsewhereWilson also argues that understanding the biologicaldifferences between men and women will makeus more aware of the price we have to pay for greaterequality between the sexes.

As these examples show, there are many differentways in which Darwinian thinking can be invoked inpolitical debate, and some are more defensible thanothers. We have already seen the following three:

• The idea that the direction of evolution itself is 'good'or 'right'.

This can be rejected without further discussion.

• The view that social policies may, by helping the 'lessfit' to survive, have deleterious genetic consequences.

This is, to put it charitably, highly speculative. Thefactual basis for such a claim is strongest in regard to theprovision of life-saving medical treatment to people withgenetically linked diseases that without treatment wouldkill their victims before they could reproduce. Thereare, no doubt, many more people with early-onsetdiabetes being born because of the discovery of insulinand at least some of those would not have been born ifthere were no public health service to provide insulin atless than its market cost. But no one would seriouslypropose withholding insulin from children with diabetesin order to avoid the genetic consequences of providinginsulin.

Moreover, there is a huge gap between these cases ofspecific medical treatments for genetically influenceddiseases, and the vague suggestions sometimes heardfrom the political right that providing financial supportto people who are unemployed will make it possible forthem to have children, and therefore lead to a greaterrepresentation of 'deleterious' genes in the population.Even if there were a genetic component to somethingas nebulous as unemployment, to say that these geneswere 'deleterious' would involve value judgments thatgo way beyond what the science alone can tell us.

• The assertion that an understanding of human naturein the light of evolutionary theory can help us toidentify the means by which we may achieve some ofour social and political goals, including various ideas ofequality, as well as assessing the possible costs andbenefits of doing so.

This needs to be taken seriously. It does not suggest thatany social policy is wrong because it is contrary toDarwinian thinking. Instead it leaves the ethical decisionup to us, merely offering to provide information relevantto that decision. While some absolutist moral theoriestell us that justice must be done even if the heavens fall,consequentialists like myself will always welcome informationabout the likely outcome of what we are proposingto do. The usefulness of the information will, ofcourse, vary in proportion to its reliability.

Here I shall also add a fourth way in which Darwinianthinking may be relevant to a political issue:

• The debunking or discrediting of politically influential,non-Darwinian, beliefs and ideas.

All pre-Darwinian political beliefs and ideas need to beexamined to see if they contain factual elements that areincompatible with Darwinian thinking. For example, SirRobert Filmer's doctrine of the divine right of kingsdepended on the idea that Adam was given authorityover his children, and that this authority was passeddown through the eldest line of his descendants, until,in seventeenth-century England, it reached the Houseof Stuart. Since the theory of evolution suggests thatthere never was an original Adam, nor a Garden ofEden, Darwin has given us a basis for rejecting this view.

This may seem superfluous because, as John Lockepointed out three hundred years ago, there are severalother grounds for dismissing Filmer's theory. But considera different, but related view: that God gave Adamdominion over 'the fish of the sea, and the fowl of theair, and everything that moved upon the Earth'. Thatbelief still seems to exercise some influence on ourattitudes to nonhuman animals, though it is as thoroughlyrefuted by the theory of evolution as is thedoctrine of the divine right of kings. Even more sophisticatedviews of the differences between humans andanimals are challenged by Darwinian thinking. Both inThe Descent of Man and in The Expression of the Emotionsin Man and Animals, Darwin showed in great detail thatthere is a continuum between humans and animals, notonly with respect to anatomy and physiology, but alsowith regard to their mental lives. Animals, he showed,are capable of love, memory, curiosity, reason andsympathy for each other. By knocking out the intellectualfoundations of the idea that we are a separatecreation from the animals, and utterly different in kind,Darwinian thinking provided the basis for a revolutionin our attitudes to nonhuman animals. Sadly that revolutiondid not occur, and despite some recent progress,it still has not occurred. Darwinian political thinkersshould be more inclined to recognise, and base policieson, the similarities we identify between humans andnonhuman animals.

If Darwinian thinking tells us that we have been tooready to assume a fundamental difference in kindbetween human beings and nonhuman animals, it couldalso tell us that we are too ready to assume that allhuman beings are the same in all important respects.While Darwinian thought has no impact on the prioritywe give to equality as a moral or political ideal, it givesus grounds for believing that since men and women playdifferent roles in reproduction, they may also differ intheir inclinations or temperaments, in ways that bestpromote the reproductive prospects of each sex. Sincewomen are limited in the number of children they canhave, they are likely to be selective in their choice ofmate. Men, on the other hand, are limited in thenumber of children they can have only by the numberof women they can have sex with. If achieving highstatus increases access to women, then we can expectmen to have a stronger drive for status than women.This means that we cannot use the fact that there is adisproportionately large number of men in high statuspositions in business or politics as a reason for concludingthat there has been discrimination against women. Forexample, the fact that there are fewer women chiefexecutives of major corporations than men may be dueto men being more willing to subordinate their personallives and other interests to their career goals, and biologicaldifferences between men and women may be afactor in that greater readiness to sacrifice everything forthe sake of getting to the top.

The diverse ways in which Darwinian thinking canconnect with ethics and politics mean that drawing adistinction between facts and values does not settle allthe issues about the nature of a Darwinian left. Whilethe core of the left is a set of values, there is also apenumbra of factual beliefs that have typically beenassociated with the left. We need to ask whether thesefactual beliefs are at odds with Darwinian thinking and,if they are, what the left would be like without them.

How the left got Darwin wrong

The left's understandable but unfortunate mistake inregard to Darwinian thinking has been to accept theassumptions of the right, starting with the idea that theDarwinian struggle for existence corresponds to thevision of nature suggested by Tennyson's memorable(and pre-Darwinian) phrase, 'nature red in tooth andclaw'. From this position it seemed only too clear that,if Darwinism applies to human social behaviour, then acompetitive marketplace is somehow justified, or shownto be 'natural', or inevitable.

We cannot blame the left for seeing the Darwinianstruggle for existence in these ruthless terms. Until the1960s evolutionary theorists themselves neglected therole that cooperation can play in improving an organism'sprospects of survival and reproductive success. JohnMaynard Smith has said that it was 'largely ignored' untilthe 1960s. So the fact that nineteenth-century Darwinismwas more congenial to the right than the left is due,at least in part, to the limitations of Darwinian thinkingin that period.

There was one great exception to the statement thatthe left accepted the 'nature red in tooth and claw' viewof the struggle for existence. The geographer, naturalistand anarcho-communist Peter Kropotkin argued in hisbook Mutual Aid that Darwinists (though not alwaysDarwin himself) had overlooked cooperation betweenanimals of the same species as a factor in evolution.Kropotkin thus anticipated this aspect of modern Darwinism.Nevertheless, he went astray in trying to explainexactly how mutual aid could work in evolution, sincehe did not see clearly that for a Darwinian there is aproblem in assuming that individuals behave altruisticallyfor the sake of a larger group. Worse, for fifty years afterKropotkin wrote Mutual Aid, many highly respectedevolutionary theorists made the same mistake. Kropotkindrew on his study of the importance of cooperationin animals and humans to argue that human beings arenaturally cooperative. The crime and violence we see inhuman societies, he argued, are the result of governmentsthat entrench inequality. Human beings do notneed governments and would cooperate more successfullywithout them. Though Kropotkin was widely read,his anarchist conclusions separated him from the mainstreamleft, including, of course, the Marxists.

Beginning with Marx himself, Marxists have generallybeen enthusiastic about Darwin's account of the originof species, as long as its implications for human beingsare confined to anatomy and physiology. Since thealternative to the theory of evolution was the Christianaccount of divine creation, Darwin's bold hypothesiswas seized on as a means of breaking the hold of 'theopium of the masses'. In 1862 Marx wrote to theGerman socialist Ferdinand Lassalle that:

Darwin's book is very important and serves me asa natural-scientific basis for the class struggle inhistory. One has to put up with the crude Englishmethod of development, of course. Despite alldeficiencies, not only is the death-blow dealt herefor the first time to 'teleology' in the sciences, butits rational meaning is empirically explained ...

Yet Marx, consistent with his materialist theory ofhistory, also thought that Darwin's work was itself theproduct of a bourgeois society:

It is remarkable how Darwin recognises amongbeasts and plants his English society with its divisionof labour, competition, opening-up of new markets,'inventions', and the Malthusian 'struggle forexistence'.

Friedrich Engels was particularly enthusiastic about Darwin.In his speech at Marx's graveside, Engels paidDarwin the supreme compliment of comparing Marx'sdiscovery of the law of human development with Darwin'sdiscovery of 'the law of development of organicnature'. He even wrote a posthumously published essayentitled 'The Part Played by Labour in the Transitionfrom Ape to Man', which attempts to blend Darwin andMarx. The essay reveals, however, that for all his enthusiasmEngels had not understood Darwin properly: sincehe believed that acquired characteristics could beinherited by future generations, his mode of evolution isLamarckian rather than Darwinian. Decades later,Engels' naive support for the inheritance of acquiredcharacteristics had tragic consequences when it was usedby Soviet Lamarckians to show that their stand wasconsistent with Marxism and dialectical materialism.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from A DARWINIAN LEFT by Peter Singer. Copyright © 1999 Peter Singer. Excerpted by permission of Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Yale Univ Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2000
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0300083238
• ISBN 13: 9780300083231
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 70
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile