Abstract

Erewhon demonstrates the absurdity of identifying biological fitness with moral goodness. This, in turn, reveals an essential fiction at the heart of our social organisation. Darwin offers a framework for understanding the function of this.

What is the relationship between biological fitness and moral goodness?

Shortly after Darwin’s Origin of Species was published in 1859, the ideology known as Social Darwinism - that of justifying one’s moral worth in terms of their standing in society - reared its head. In pre-Darwinian Victorian society, one’s social standing was believed to be determined by their moral worth, their esteem in the eyes of ‘God’. The king was the king because God wanted him to be, and the reason God wanted him to be king was because he was good. So in the moral framework, being the right man for the job amounted to being a good enough man. This view pervaded society: those prospering within it were doing so because they were good Christian folk, and the sick and the poor were so because they had not been good enough, were being tested for the next life, or were having the sins of their fathers revisited upon them. The moral framework was both explanatory and justificatory: it explained why people occupied certain positions in society, and justified that occupation in self-consistent terms.

Imagine the confusion of the people, then, when an alternative and empirically well-supported framework to the moral one offered its explanation of the social order. Darwin’s ‘Survival of the Fittest’ suggested that one’s fitness (defined in terms of expected number of offspring), rather than one’s moral worth, was the central determinant of one’s success in society. Darwin describes the conditions of natural selection (which leads to ‘survival of the fittest’), as ‘a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms.’ Darwin saw all life as the product of competition over resources, wherein the lifeforms most able to secure those resources would reproduce more widely than those less able, leading to a change in the traits of the population over time. On this model, it is one’s ability to secure resources that guarantees one’s place in society, rather than the now empirically dubious characteristic of being a ‘good’ person. If people were doing well just because they were ‘fit’, then how did they know they were good people? Moreover, if all a person was could be explained as the product of a blind, grinding process of trial-and-error, then how was it fair that people at the bottom of society were suffering, if not because they expected a future reward, or deserved their current punishment? ‘Wherefore should a man be so richly rewarded for having been son to a millionaire’, asks Samuel Butler, ‘were it not clearly provable that the common welfare is thus better furthered?’

So people had been labouring under the assumption that one’s moral worth meant something in the real world, in terms of their being able to lead a successful life, and so were understandably resistant to abandoning this idea altogether. Moral goodness, as far as humans are concerned, seems to be justificatory as well as explanatory: it offers a causal history of why someone has got to the position they’ve arrived at, in terms of the ethical consequences of their decisions, and this linking of character and consequence allowed people to feel justified occupying the social niche that they do. Faced with the prospect that one’s position in society was sheer dumb luck, the product of some blind natural mechanism sorting the strong from the weak, people were understandably concerned about their new moral status: if they were successful, but not good, then should they not have cause to doubt themselves? Of course they should: but this is not what happened. Rather, we were struck with ‘Social Darwinism’: the idea that fitness and goodness were identical.

Erewhon

It is this identification which Samuel Butler satirises in Erewhon (1872). Butler imagines a Victorian society turned on its head, wherein mental and moral ailments (like dejection or embezzlement) are treated with the utmost sympathy and understanding, whilst physical illnesses like consumption or flu are treated as reprehensible, shameful personal failings that must be punished to the fullest extent of the law. The point of the inversion is simple: by showing the hypocrisy of treating the two different forms of malady in different ways, Butler shows the artifice we employ in treating ‘moral maladies’ as if they issue from personal responsibility. Butler’s mission is to show the hypocrisy and folly involved in treating people as responsible for their moral failings. He makes this point most persuasively in Chapter 11, when a young man made destitute and sick by his uncle’s exploitation of his estate is sentenced to a life’s imprisonment for his troubles. The judge sentences the young man thus:

‘You may say that it is not your fault. The answer is ready enough at hand, and it amounts to this - that if you had been born of healthy and well-to-do parents, and been well taken care of when you were a child, you would never have offended against the laws of your country, nor found yourself in your present disgraceful position. If you tell me that you had no hand in your parentage and education, and that it is therefore unjust to lay these things to your charge, I answer that whether your being in a consumption is your fault or no, it is a fault in you, and it is my duty to see that against such faults as this the commonwealth shall be protected. You may say that it is your misfortune to be criminal; I answer that it is your crime to be unfortunate.’

Butler is at pains to point out that he is not recommending the complete dissolution of a society he deems to be failing. Rather, he is keen only to show the essential artifice involved in maintaining it (the belief in personal responsibility), and to make sure that people living in society know that they are engaging in this artifice when they are doing it. This is evidenced by the fact that Butler offers a ‘wilful defence’ of the value judgments of his ‘own caste’. ‘I write with great diffidence’, he says, ‘but it seems to me that there is no unfairness in punishing people for their misfortunes, or rewarding them for their sheer good luck: it is the normal condition of human life that this should be done, and no right-minded person will complain of being subjected to the common treatment.’ However, rather than being a flaw in Butler’s position, Mudford (1970) suggests that ‘a system lacking in dogmatism, except of a personal kind, and providing an ethic which in itself does no mutual harm to those who practice it, seems to Butler to represent a way of avoiding those inherited dogmatic beliefs, not testable by experience, on which so much of human folly depends.’ Butler believes that it is our attitude to moral claims, rather than our making of moral claims, that leads us into folly. Treating moral claims as normalising moves in the game, rather than as actual statements of fact, thus promises to set us free:

‘They believe that illness is in many cases just as curable as the moral diseases which they see daily cured around them, but that a great reform is impossible till men learn to take a juster view of what physical obliquity proceeds from. Men will hide their illnesses as long as they are scouted on its becoming known that they are ill; it is the scouting, not the physic, which produces the concealment; and if a man felt that the news of his being in ill health would be received by his neighbours not as a deplorable fact, but one as much the result of necessary antecedent causes as though he had broken into a jeweller’s shop and stolen a valuable diamond necklace - as a fact which might just as easily have happened to themselves, only that they had the luck to be better born or reared’.

So Butler thinks that there is no problem in employing the artifice of personal responsibility, so long as people understand that their being punished or chastised does not represent a genuine condemnation of who they are as a person, but is instead a necessary move to keep society operational. We might share Butler’s opinion that this is as it should be, if only we could convince ourselves that the operation of society was good for the individuals within it. The rise of ‘depressive hedonism’ described by Mark Fisher suggests that we do not, currently, feel this is the case, but that is a topic for another essay. For now, I wish only to establish a framework for understanding why individuals might be motivated to act in the interests of society.

Social Darwinism seems to paint in brushstrokes too broad to capture anything meaningful: either we condemn everyone, or we condemn no one, and either way we are left with no principled way to organise society, save for the total extermination of all weak individuals. This is certainly an interesting option, but for most of us, I imagine that the prospect of treating society in this way feels morally unattractive. Why might this be? Is it that we are scared we will be found to be ‘weak’, perhaps? Or does it issue from genuine concern for our fellow man? Why do we think it is ok to punish some transgressions of the group ideals but not others? It is noted that the Erewhonians ‘regard bodily ailments as the more venial in proportion as they have been produced by causes independent of the constitution.’ Might it be that moral weakness is punished because we have more control over it than we do over physical sickness? This is what we’d like to think, but we now have a compelling case for the claim that this is just a hangover from the pre-Darwinian, moral caricature of society we were working with in the absence of this new and better theory. Can it really be right that society is just for the strong, and that the weak must be artfully excluded from it? And if this is the case, then why have we been so at pains to make society inclusive of at least some ‘weakness’?

Darwinian Moral Naturalism

Darwin’s framework of ‘moral naturalism’ can help us begin to make sense of this. Darwin argues that our morality has a natural basis in our ‘animal instincts’, wherein our moral sense is built, variously, from feelings of self-preservation or ‘sympathy’ which arise within us. Darwin suggests that our moral decisions are based on these feelings, and divides them into ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ ‘moral instincts’.Our feelings motivate us toward action; they are at least part of the content we evaluate when we are trying to decide whether to call in sick for work, give change to the homeless, or make a cup of tea for your friend.

‘The higher’, says Darwin, ‘are founded on the social instinct, and relate to the welfare of others. They are supported by the approbation of our fellow-men and by reason. The lower rules, though some of them when implying self-sacrifice hardly deserve to be called lower, relate chiefly to self, and arise from public opinion, matured by experience and cultivation.’

So Darwin notes that our ‘higher’ moral feelings are group-directed, and arise from a natural instinct for group preservation. Why might this instinct exist? It is fairly well accepted in the philosophy of biology that natural selection takes place on multiple ‘levels’. Rather than just affecting individual organisms, natural selection is also thought to affect genes, groups, and perhaps even species, as entities of these various sizes can be meaningfully described as if competing with each other (at their respective levels) so as to lead to a ‘struggle for life’ between them. So if groups compete, then obviously the survival value of the group you are in impacts quite heavily on your individual survival value. This would explain why some people, at least, feel motivated towards helping the group: promoting traits which help the group survive (i.e. empathy and cooperation) will ensure that the group is more stable, more heterogenous, and more able to compete with other groups. Darwin describes it thus:

‘A tribe including many members who, from possessing in a high degree the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage, and sympathy, were always ready to aid one another, and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over most other tribes; and this would be natural selection. At all times throughout the world tribes have supplanted other tribes; and as morality is one important element in their success, the standard of morality and the number of well-endowed men will thus everywhere tend to rise and increase.’

So, having group-directed urges helps guarantee the differential success of the group, which in turn helps guarantee the differential success of the individual within it. The relation between morality and fitness now seems simple: your ‘good’ actions help the group in which you operate survive, whereas your ‘selfish’ actions help you compete within your group.

We can now apply this model to the case of the sick man being punished in Erewhon. The judge says that ‘Your presence in the society of respectable people would lead the less able-bodied to think more lightly of all forms of illness.’ The judge claims that the sick man’s continued presence in society would have a negative impact on the fitness of the group, in that it would cause the other individuals in the group to take their individual health less seriously. A group that tolerates the sick promotes weakness to the extent that the other members of the group are capable of influencing the extent to which they become sick. If the judge morally sanctions the sick man, he morally sanctions being sick, and so encourages it, thus (he thinks) increasing the number of incidences of sickness in the group and weakening the group. However, the relationship between individual and group fitness is not so straightforward as the fitness of the group being the sum total of individual fitnesses. This is expressed nicely by the problem of altruism: maximally altruistic species like bees have members who never reproduce, but precisely because they don’t they contribute massively to the fitness of the hive (not just the queen, since her hive mates are along for the ride, and they’re all related). Therefore, a group needs members with sympathetic ( i.e. other-oriented) tendencies in order to compete successfully as a group. This is why, to us, the Erewhonian society seems cruel and perverse: since people being sick doesn’t promote group-negative values in the society, we don’t want to morally censure sick people. If we turn to the case of the embezzler, which represents the other side of Butler’s inversion, we can see the point in full.

One of the first people Higgs meets in Erewhon is a man named Nosnibor Senoj, who is currently being ‘cured’ of a spot of embezzlement. Senoj ‘had been on the Stock Exchange of the city for many years and had amassed enormous wealth, without exceeding the limits of what was generally considered justifiable, or at any rate, permissible dealing; but at length on several occasions he had become aware of a desire to make money by fraudulent representations, and had actually dealt with two or three sums in a way which had made him rather uncomfortable. He had unfortunately made light of it and pooh-poohed the ailment, until circumstances eventually presented themselves which enabled him to cheat upon a very considerable scale… he seized the opportunity, and became aware, when it was too late, that he was seriously out of order. He had neglected himself too long.’ Why, in Erewhon, is Senoj not punished for embezzlement? Because it is deemed not to harm society, or at any rate to harm it significantly less than getting sick. By drawing the parallel between moral and physical failings, Butler shows that we cannot, without contradiction, treat the two differently. He thus shows that we morally condemn only those actions we deem damaging to society. Why might the Erewhonians have picked sickness, and us weakness? The idea is that you can’t do anything about sickness but you can about moral failings: so we try and help the sick and improve the immoral. But in Erewhon they take the ‘not able to do anything about sickness’ to its logical extreme, and exclude the sick from society; conversely, they recognise moral failings as curable and thus seek to cure, rather than punish, them. So we see clearly now that Butler’s point is this: given the shared origin of physical and moral maladies, we cannot consistently treat the two in different ways, without at least acknowledging the essential fiction involved in doing so.

But Darwin’s model provides a compelling justification of this treatment. On Darwin’s model, we punish those traits, call those traits ‘bad’, which go against group fitness. A strategy like embezzlement is good for short-term fitness: it exploits a mechanism in the operation of society for personal gain, at the cost of society. So whilst we’d want to call it fitness-enhancing, we can see why we wouldn’t want to call it good: because it has negative consequences for group survival. So an individual can be praiseworthy in a social sense without being praiseworthy in a moral sense: we can recognise that someone has done something good for himself, whilst still maintaining our suspicion that what he has done is not ‘good’. By delineating between types of good and types of moral behaviour, we avoid having to identify goodness and fitness, and manage to leave a place for moralising within our new, naturalised framework.

Butler forces us to recognise the essential artifice in treating moral and physical weaknesses in different ways. He puts a nail in the coffin of dualism, and asks us to explain the social function of moralising. Darwin offers us a framework for doing so, which also explains why we find the Erewhonian land so jarring. The consequence is this: If Darwin is right, then Butler is wrong to suggest that our society is as hypocritical as the Erewhonian’s (if this is what Butler is saying), because the sort of weaknesses our society punishes are those which seem to be deleterious to society.

Whilst our moral and mental failings may be just as out of our control as our physical sicknesses (this having been demonstrated by the Darwinian Revolution), society chooses to punish them to the extent that doing so makes sure they don’t happen as much. With violent crimes like murder and rape, this is pretty clear: if you are caught doing one of those things to someone, the state reserved the right to execute you, publicly. That’s a pretty big disincentive. Of course, its not going to put off the people who kill because they have nothing to live for, are mad, or are so incensed that they can’t see reason, but it is going to stop people killing their neighbours just because they’re a bit annoying, or assaulting women in dark alleys for the fun of it. The Darwinian Revolution was significant, then, because it contained the idea that all this moralising was really the product of something deeper. Our initial interpretation of survival of the fittest as all against all, as fiercely individualistic, needs analysis (another time), but we can remark that it represents a foundering first attempt to reconcile our moral discourse with the new natural law: to find which real property was tracked by our term ‘good’. Social Darwinism, in the sense of blaming the weak for their weaknesses, represented a dominance of the moral discourse, whereas the realisation that while goodness tracks a real force, it is not the only guiding force in society, represents the transition to the science-dominant perspective of life, without eradicating god from the mechanism completely. Our shift towards tolerance of mental illness and sexual perversity, along with the softening of our prisons and the general medicalisation of crime that has transformed our thought in the last century, shows a science-driven understanding of the mind, which explains its determined basis and the extent to which we can shape that through culture, laden with moral values, transformed from those before, but still intrinsically moral.

So we punish things where we think punishing them will have an effect, but Darwin’s Origin showed us that people will still behave in group-averse (ie bad) ways, despite punishment, so long as doing so does not significantly undermine the operation of the group. This is why we smart at the curing of the embezzler: we want him to be censured, because we want to disincentivise people from behaving like that (unless, perhaps, we find ourselves in the position to embezzle). By showing us the essential contradiction between our (occasionally equally strong) self-directed and other-directed moral senses, Butler forces us to recognise the fact that our moral sense is fundamentally contradictory and essentially Machiavellian. ‘it argues for the necessity of recognising man as a primitive creature’.

By dubbing group-directed morals ‘higher’, Darwin is ascribing them a superior moral status, surreptitiously imbuing them with value. He asks us to consider the good of the group as more important than the good of the individual. This may seem like an unwarranted moralising, but it is justified, I think, by the fact that the success of any human individual seems to depend very largely on the success of the group which sustains him. We are deeply cooperative animals, and so whilst egoism may be a beneficial strategy within the group, the human who set out completely on his own could not achieve anything like the incredible technical advances that we have in culture. So we see that some of our fitness-enhancing traits (our group-directed action) are what we would want to call morally ‘good’, and that some of the others are not. Thus, we see that we cannot identify fitness and goodness; but we are comforted somewhat by the fact that our moral discourse does reliably caricature the basic relation between individual and group fitness. ‘From a naturalist point of view’, says Darwin, ‘it is probable that instinctive sympathy was first developed for animals to thrive by living in society just as the pleasure of eating was first acquired to induce animals to eat.’ Our moral feelings, then, can plausibly be construed as stemming from genuine biological needs. Consequently, whilst altruistic behaviours may seem to diminish an individual’s fitness, and selfish behaviours seem to improve it, the dependence of an individual’s fitness on the survival of the group gives us some hope that behaving in a Machiavellian manner (doing what you want) is not the best way to guarantee success: our moral feelings track a genuine determinant of success, which is cooperation with the group. The disconnect between goodness and fitness correlates to the disconnect between the individual and the group: sometimes one can improve one’s own fitness in the short term at the expense of the group (as the case of embezzlement shows), but we still want to call this ‘bad’ precisely because it impacts the fitness of the group, which is ultimately a significant condition of individual prosperity. However, there is a more-than-trifling concern with this. Cuckoos prey on reed warblers. By preying on them, they force them to improve their predator-detection mechanisms over generations. Could it not be argued, then, that the behaviour of the cuckoo, whilst intentionally harmful to the warbler, in fact has a positive impact on its fitness, since it forces it to develop detection systems which will protect it from other predators down the line ( i.e. make it harder to exploit). In the same way, it could be argued that human culture requires embezzlers and the like in order to produce anti-embezzlement mechanisms, i.e. in its legal institutions. Given this problem, how are we to find a principled way of establishing when a person is acting immorally? Have we to look solely to his intentions? Similarly, how are we to know when acting in the interests of the group is for the best? It might be that the group one is in spreads ideas that are damaging to its members, such that survival of the group might not be seen as an end to-be-pursued. How are we to know when altruistic acts are to be favoured over selfish ones?

To sum up: Butler’s satire shows us the effect of the Darwinian revolution on the collective consciousness, which is to demonstrate to us the essential hypocrisy and falsehood involved in moral censure. It shows that the Darwinian Revolution puts us at a greater remove from our own claims, allowing us to treat them as useful fictions rather than objective truths. I have suggested that the response of ‘Social Darwinism’ to the introduction of Darwin’s Origin to the collective unconscious represented an attempt to retain the objectivity of moral discourse and reconcile it with a scientifically justified picture, and that the swift failure of this doctrine shows the difficulty involved in achieving this. I have offered reasons to doubt the identification of goodness and fitness, and offered Darwin’s dualistic framework of moral values as an explanation of why we call some actions ‘good’ when we only mean ‘fit’. I have also maintained that this framework makes sense of our reaction to Erewhon, and suggests that our society, although hypocritical, is at least more justified in its hypocrisies than that of the Erewhonians. What do you think? Do you think it impermissible to punish people for ‘moral’ failings? Do you think Darwin’s framework is too idealistic? What do you think the relation between normative moral beliefs and descriptive scientific beliefs is? Butler’s challenge remains: how is it possible to control one type of weakness through social engineering, but not the other? Join us next week when we’ll be looking at Nietzsche and Foucault, in order to demonstrate the idea of ‘truth as survival value’ taken, over time, to its logical extreme.

Bibliography

Butler, S., ‘Erewhon’, Penguin Books, 1977.

Darwin, C., ‘The Descent of Man’, John Murray, 1874.

Darwin, C., ‘The Origin of Species’, John Murray, 1859.

Mudford, P., Introduction to Erewhon, Penguin Books, 1970.