Leverhulme Lectures 2008
Professor Catherine Wilson
Life According to Nature
Drawing on recent literature in the field of Evolutionary Ethics, as well as on classical and early modern philosophical sources, including the Stoics, Kant, and Rousseau, the Lectures will explore a number of relationships – actual, hypothetical, and imaginary – between nature, culture, and morality. Some of the topics to be addressed include: the problem of 'naturalism' in ethical theory the Darwinian account of the origins of human morality specialisation and the origins of social inequality and evolutionary psychology and the problem of the family.
Lecture Dates
- Monday 18 February, 2008 Prospects and Problems for Evolutionary Ethics
- Monday 25 February, 2008 Naturalism and Moral Truth
- Monday 3 March, 2008 Specialisation and the Problem of Equality
- Monday 10 March, 2008 Domestic Life in Evolutionary Perspective
- Monday 17 March, 2008 The Golden Age
Revised text of these lectures is now available by clicking the titles of each lecture summarised below.
Monday 5.30pm February 18th
1. Prospects and Problems for Evolutionary Ethics
The Stoics' claim that the best life is life lived 'According to Nature' has an ancient history. Recently, it has appeared in the context of the 'new naturalism' of evolutionary ethics. In the eyes of most modern moral philosophers, however, biology and moral theory do not mix, and Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, however well-confirmed, is no more relevant to ethics than any other scientific text. Lecture 1 will discuss the reasoning behind this sceptical view and present a number of dismaying examples of ideologically-driven and pernicious references to human nature and evolutionary processes in Plato and Aristotle, as well as in some popular science texts. Might a favourable interpretation of the ancient ethical ideal be possible nevertheless? I will suggest some reasons for taking seriously the notion of a biologically informed humanism.
Monday 5.30pm February 25th
2. Naturalism and Moral Truth
The moral theory of the Ancients, as the previous lecture demonstrated, was firmly grounded in empirical assumptions, not simply about human beings and other animals, but about particular kinds and categories of human beings, and about their purposes and functions. Modern moral theory, beginning with Kant, is characterized by a rejection of this approach, adopting instead a generalized notion of humanity, and of persons as "ends in themselves" that grew out of Christian theology even while rejecting theological supernaturalism. Kant's prescriptive ethics extracted too much of nature from moral theory, while surreptitiously introducing some biases of his own. Nevertheless, his notion of a moral truth as analogous to a physical law of nature is sound. What is the status of these truths in a Darwinian world, and how are they discovered or established?
Monday 5.30pm March 3rd
3. Specialisation and the Problem of Equality
Much writing in popular Evolutionary Ethics is concerned with the origins of social and economic inequality. It is often posited that hierarchical social arrangements, hostility or indifference towards strangers, and the subjugation of females by males are patterns of primate behaviour that are resistant to extermination because they are imprinted in our human template. Lecture 3 argues to the contrary that social inequality and the deprivations it implies are the result of the segregation and specialisation that sustain what we (naturally) value in civilization, namely the plenitude of goods and experiences it offers. The problem of equality did not arise in the state of nature, but it is a moral problem and it is not intractable.
Monday 5.30pm March 10th
4. Domestic Life in Evolutionary Perspective
Some writers on human evolution have endeavoured to explain asymmetries in men's and women's occupations, roles, hopes and expectations by reference to specific anatomical and psychological adaptations that are alleged to have favoured survival and reproduction in the early adaptative environment. The resulting asymmetries are then deemed inevitable, irremediable, and even beneficial. In the popular literature, one reads of promiscuous, showoff, males bent on increasing their 'fitness,' by force or seduction, and of coy, reclusive female gatherers, bent on minimizing their reproductive risk. In light of present-day knowledge, what can be reasonably surmised about the reproductive strategies of early humans and do they help to explain these asymmetries? Does the ideal of Life According to Nature have any purchase in this dimension?
Monday 5.30pm March 17th.
5. The Golden Age
In Lecture 1, I described the naturalism of Plato and Aristotle as focused on human differences, and on the various functions and purposes they associated with them. A rival tradition, that of the ancient atomists, anticipating Darwin, regarded human beings as chance products of nature without purposes. The atomists regarded social institutions as contingent and as mostly, but not always, convenient for individuals. Although they considered civilization overwhelmingly superior to barbarism, they cited the discoveries of metallurgy and agriculture as responsible for a long list of bloody and pernicious effects. Lecture 5 will explore the notion of an archaic Golden Age of humanity, as depicted by Lucretius, Rousseau, and others, with an aim to uncovering some common features of the ideal of 'Life According to Nature'.
Print friendly booklet.