Slipping Out Over the Wall

This chapter explores Mary Midgley’s unconventional career, and her contributions—through her interests in biology and animal behavior (ethology)—to her friends’ project of reimagining ethics. The connection between Midgley’s work and that of Anscombe, Foot, and Murdoch is often missed because Midgley began writing much later in life. Midgley left her academic career early to follow her husband to Newcastle, where she stayed home, raising their three boys and reviewing books for the BBC. In the mid-1960s, she began teaching philosophy at the University of Newcastle, free from the stifling atmosphere of Oxford. Linking her interest in ethology to ethics, she eventually wrote Beast and Man, raising questions about rationality, instinct, and the sorts of goods—the sort of ethics—toward which humans’ animal nature points. Sadly, Foot never regarded Midgley’s work as “proper philosophy,” though Midgley’s insights could have addressed Foot’s most pressing philosophical worries.