Evolution, Ethics, and the Metaphysical Society, 1869–1875

Abstract

This chapter seeks to chart the lively debate about the evolutionary origins and development of morality as it occurred at the Metaphysical Society, a debate that began with the first paper delivered at the Society in 1869 and, after the intervention of several subsequent papers on the topic, came to an end in 1875. Proponents of an evolutionary ethics included the Darwinians John Lubbock and William Kingdon Clifford, while the critics included the journalist and editor Richard Holt Hutton, the classicist Alexander Grant, and the moral philosopher Henry Sidgwick. Much of the debate focused on competing interpretations of the historical record and the nature of historical evidence itself. For the critic of an evolutionary morality, the evidence for the origins and development of morality had to be sought in written records; for the proponent, the evidence needed to be sought much further back in time, in the era known as ‘prehistory’. This important distinction brought to the fore a related area of contention, namely the relationship between civilized European and contemporary aboriginal societies, and what that relationship meant for understanding the deep history of human moral development. The debate largely came to an end when Sidgwick challenged the unjustifiable normative claims that were often embedded in evolutionary descriptions of the origins and development of morality. He showed that a supposedly naturalist account of ethical principles was just as fraught as was the intuitionist account it sought to critique.