EVOLUTIONARY ETHICS

Written in March 2012

 



 

Are God and Nature then at strife

That Nature lends such evil dreams?

                                                 Tennyson, In Memoriam

 

I have a problem with Evolution that has nothing to do with science.  I can accept that the Universe is 13+ billion years old (although the actual figure, if accurate, means nothing to me, and wouldn’t if it were 3 billion, or 23 billion: I find that remembering five years back or anticipating five years ahead are difficult enough as time spans).  I can see that Evolution might be the process used by God to develop life on this planet.  Lots of scientific discoveries presumably lie ahead of the human race that will alter our current understanding: as astronomy did in the past.   My problem with Evolution is that as a process it is cruel.

      Saying that, I realise that my problem, in this regard, is not with Evolution after all.  My problem is with the cruelty of Nature: for the problem of Nature’s carnivorous and other cruelty predated the Theory of Evolution, and will remain if macro Evolution should one day be proven false. 

     There are, I think, only three ways of dealing with this issue.  One is to say that God does not exist, and the apparent cruelty is only the inevitable result of random processes.  Why cry for justice when there can be none?  A second is to say that the apparent cruelty is necessary in ways that we are unable to understand.  “God moves in a mysterious way.”  The third is to say that the cruelty is actual, and that Nature has in some way been corrupted: a corruption that will be healed at the end of the present age.   (Christ wept at the tomb of Lazarus, and was angry at disease.  He did not say that death and disease were blessed if understood from the right point of view.)

     Be that as it may, for the present age Nature – whether random, evolved, created or corrupted – is at odds with Christianity.  Christianity, as a famous French book suggested, is ‘against Nature’.  It is ‘unnatural’ to welcome strangers, love your enemies, stay faithful to one spouse, cherish widows and orphans, respect the old, care for the sick and protect the weak.  If that morality were applied to a well-run farm, the farm would go to ruin.  Instead, you drown the runts of the litter, use your best stallion to breed from a range of mares and geld the others, sell old horses for dog food, kill off your chickens etc, etc.  To do otherwise is to go out of business. 

     Out in the wild, the victorious male lion will eat the cubs of his vanquished predecessor.  A herd will gore one of its wounded members to death: what Darwin called “almost the blackest fact in natural history”.

      For Darwin, especially in The Descent of Man, is very well aware of the implications of all this.  He knows – despite his hatred of human slavery – that some ants make slaves of other ants.  He sees that if the morality of the bee hive were translated into human terms then a mother would kill her fertile daughters, and sisters would kill their brothers. He knows that “evolved sympathy” is at war with “hard reason” and he does not know how to resolve the conflict.  He sees that strong human males should be allowed to breed from many women, and that the weak should be prevented from breeding at all.  He sees that the sickly should be killed off, and that the most primitive races should be exterminated.  He sees all this, and recoils in horror: not – or not only – because he himself was sickly, and so were most of his adored children, but because of the generosity of his mind (as he would have put it, his evolved sympathy).

     Darwin highlighted the problem, without finding a solution.  Nietzsche did: when reason is in conflict with sympathy, reason must win.  Hitler simply put this conclusion into practice.

 

Bertrand Russell said that Andrew Jackson could kill a man in a duel, but could not get the better of a banker.  I have every sympathy with Jackson.  In a duel, you have a target you can aim at; money is intangible.  Even if you could kill a banker, as everyone – except maybe another banker – longs to do, the financial problems will remain. 

     In much the same way, medicine has created ethical problems that were less acute for our ancestors, or simply did not exist in their modern form.  People sense that something is wrong; although the problem is as intangible for most as is the problem of money. 

     The British Abortion Act of the 60’s wanted to avoid the horrors of illegal backstreet operations.  It was ring fenced with safeguards: the physical and mental welfare of the mother, opinion of two doctors, last resort etc, etc. 

     But now, undercover filming by The Daily Telegraph has exposed different reasons for modern abortion: so that holiday plans are not disrupted, or because you already have a girl and don’t want a second one.  The prospect of Gendercide in Britain has apparently become a reality. 

    Hard on the heels of this exposure has been a medical paper arguing that whether you want the child or not is the issue, not how old it is.  A baby with abnormalities not detected in pre-natal screening – and therefore not aborted – should, logically, have its life terminated as easily after birth as before, because a new-born baby is not yet a person.

    As I understand it – and I make no pretence at being an expert – in the past severely deformed babies were sometimes quietly allowed to die: the steps were not taken to keep them alive if to do so would condemn them to a terrible quality of life.   But many who could accept this as humane will be uncomfortable with the new contention that a live baby is a non-person.  Establish that as a principle, and the next stage is the extermination of a normal baby: if you don’t want it.  We can argue that this is preposterous and monstrous: but back in 1967, so was the thought of British gendercide.

     In Holland there is euthanasia for the terminally ill, or those in unbearable pain.  In 2010 a Citizens’ Petition sought the right to die for over seventies tired of life, with appropriate medical assistance.  To date, this request has been rejected.  Very recently, however, mobile units have become legal: with trained staff who can visit your home and terminate your life if your doctor has refused to do so.  The legislation is too new for the results to have become apparent.

     The lives of terminally ill Dutch children can be ended with the permission of parents. For the moment, however, the decision to end your life if you are old rests with you.  How long before it becomes the decision of somebody else: because of the space you occupy, or because of what you cost the Dutch Health Service, or because your descendants could make better use of your money than you can?  We can argue, again, that this is preposterous and monstrous; and reply, again, that back in 1967, so was the thought of British gendercide. What nineteenth-century apostle of social evolution would have predicted the Nazi death camps?  If one does not want to be alarmist, neither should one underestimate the evil of which civilized humanity can be capable.

     There is a real agonized soul-searching going on just now, felt by the religious and the irreligious alike and whether the existence of an actual soul is believed in or not.. No one on either side is pretending that the issues are easy. As I said earlier, modern medicine is throwing up moral issues – cloning, stem cell research, a half-life for the elderly extended artificially at huge cost by innumerable tablets – that simply did not exist for our predecessors. 

     Nevertheless, the believer in a humanity made in the image of God – a God who has given you rules: commanding some things, and forbidding others – is in a somewhat different position from the believer that humans are simply evolved animals with evolved traits of sympathy.  Evolved sympathy can – and will – be overridden if it clashes with the need for survival.  The logic of the farmyard and the jungle are then in conflict with a civilization once shaped by Christian suppositions, but no longer. 

     What post-Christian civilization in Britain will look like once it has fully evolved is yet to be seen; but insofar as it draws on Nature for its ethic, then its conflict with Britain’s residual Christian minority seems inevitable.