A Companion to Ethics E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Blackwell Companions to Philosophy
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 1387

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

In this volume, some of today's most distinguished philosophers survey the whole field of ethics, from its origins, through the great ethical traditions, to theories of how we ought to live, arguments about specific ethical issues, and the nature of ethics itself. The book can be read straight through from beginning to end; yet the inclusion of a multi-layered index, coupled with a descriptive outline of contents and bibliographies of relevant literature, means that the volume also serves as a work of reference, both for those coming afresh to the study of ethics and for readers already familiar with the subject.

Leseprobe

Contents

Introduction

Acknowledgements

Contributors

PART I: THE ROOTS

1 The origin of ethics

i The search for justification

ii The lure of egoism and the social contract

iii Moral and factual arguments

iv Dualistic fantasies

v The advantages of ethology

vi Two objections

vii Sociability, conflict and the origins of morality

viii The problem of partiality

ix Is morality reversible?

x Conclusion

2 Ethics in small-scale societies

3 Ancient ethics

i Ethics in ancient Mesopotamia

ii Ethics in ancient Egypt

iii Ethics in the Hebrew Scriptures

PART II: THE GREAT ETHICAL TRADITIONS

4 Indian ethics

i Brahmanical-Hindu ethics

ii Jaina ethics

iii Gandhian ethics

iv Concluding remarks

5 Buddhist ethics

i Introduction

ii Ethical concerns in the Buddhist tradition

iii The moral philosophy of Buddhism

iv A Buddhist perspective on the place of knowledge and truth in ethics

v Buddhism as an ethics of virtues and vices

vi Buddhist social ethics

vii Buddhist perspectives on practical ethics

viii Contributions to ethics in the later Buddhist traditions

6 Classical Chinese ethics

i The positive Dao period: Confucius and Mozi

ii The anti-language period: Yangzhu, Mencius and Laozi

iii The schools of names: formal meta-ethics

iv Zhuangzi: Daoist relativism

v Xunzi: pragmatic Confucianism

vi The Dark Ages: the end of the Hundred Schools

vii The continuing impact of classical thought

7 Jewish ethics

8 Christian ethics

i A survey of Christian faith and ethics

ii Jesus

iii St Paul

iv Criticisms of Christian ethics

9 Islamic ethics

i Introduction

ii Beginnings and development: foundational values

iii The theological and traditionalist approaches

iv Philosophical approaches

v Ethics in the Shi’a tradition

vi Sufi perspectives

vii Muslim ethics in the contemporary world

PART III: WESTERN PHILOSOPHICAL ETHICS: A SHORT HISTORY

10 Ethics in ancient Greece

i Historical outline

ii Themes and issues in Greek ethics

11 Medieval and Renaissance ethics

i Introduction

ii From the Church Fathers to the scholastics

iii The golden age of scholasticism

iv Renaissance pluralism and the decline of scholasticism

12 Modern moral philosophy

i Toward autonomy

ii Autonomy and theory: pro and con

iii New directions

PART IV: HOW OUGHT I TO LIVE?

13 Natural law

i Introduction

ii A thumbnail history

iii A theory of human rights

iv Natural law and its modern rivals

v A theory of human goods

vi Conclusion

14 Kantian ethics

i Introduction

ii Kant’s ethics: the critical background

iii Kant’s ethics: universal law and the construction of duty

iv Kant’s ethics: respect for persons

v Kant’s ethics: the problems of freedom, religion and history

vi ‘Kant’s ethics’

vii Kantian ethics

viii The Kantian legacy

15 The social contract tradition

i The historical background

ii Current social contract theories of ethics

iii Conclusion

16 Egoism

i Introduction

ii Psychological egoism

iii Egoism as a means to the common good

iv Rational and ethical egoism

v Conclusion

17 Contemporary deontology

i Teleological vs. deontological theories

ii The nature and structure of deontological constraints

iii Unanswered questions and potential problems

iv Concluding remarks

18 An ethic of prima facie duties

19 Consequentialism

i The definition of consequentialism

ii Once more, with some formality

iii The main argument against consequentialism

iv The main argument for consequentialism

20 Utility and the good

21 Virtue theory

i Introduction

ii Anscombe and MacIntyre

iii The historical foundation of virtue theory

iv Eliminatism

v Courage

vi Eliminatism, again

vii Essentialism

viii Moral feelings, desires, wants

ix Character, self, and society

22 Rights

i Historical introduction

ii The analysis of rights

iii Justifying a rights-vocabulary

iv For and against rights

PART V: APPLICATIONS

23 World poverty

i The challenge

ii What is helping?

iii Justice not charity

iv What is development?

v World population trends

vi The duty to alleviate poverty

vii Beyond the domain of our responsibility

viii Not harming people and the value of liberty

ix How much caring?

24 Environmental ethics

i What is an environmental ethic?

ii Justifying an environmental ethic

25 Euthanasia

i Introduction

ii Voluntary, non-voluntary and involuntary euthanasia

iii Active and passive euthanasia

iv Actions and omissions/killing and letting die

v Ordinary and extraordinary means

vi Intending death and foreseeing that death will occur

vii Conclusion

26 Abortion

i Introduction

ii Consequentialist arguments for abortion

iii Abortion and women’s rights

iv Questions about the moral status of fetuses

v The ethic of ‘reverence for life’

vi Genetic humanity

vii The sentience criterion

viii Personhood and moral rights

ix Why birth matters morally

x Potential personhood

xi Summary and conclusion

27 Sex

i Introduction

ii Traditional Western morality

iii Contractarian approaches

iv Challenges from the political left

v Epilogue

28 Personal relationships

i Morality and personal relationships: Do they conflict?

ii The interplay of morality and personal relationships

29 Equality, discrimination and preferential treatment

i Introduction

ii The backward-looking argument

iii The forward-looking argument

30 Animals

i Introduction

ii Rights

iii Utilitarianism

iv Sympathy

31 Business ethics

i Introduction

ii A brief history of business ethics

iii The myth of the profit motive

iv Other business myths and metaphors

v Micro-, macro- and molar ethics

vi The corporation in society: the idea of social responsibility

vii Obligations to stakeholders: consumers and community

viii The individual in the corporation: responsibilities and expectations

32 Crime and punishment

33 Politics and the problem of dirty hands

i Introduction

ii The Machiavellian challenge

iii The contemporary debate examined

iv The problem of corruption

v The relevance of ‘moral situations’

34 War and peace

i Ethics and the use of violence in war

ii Ethics and nuclear weapons

PART VI: THE NATURE OF ETHICS

35 Realism

36 Intuitionism

37 Naturalism

i What naturalism is

ii No-‘ought’-from-‘is’, or the autonomy of ethics

iii The naturalistic fallacy

iv Variants of naturalism

38 Subjectivism

39 Relativism

i Introduction

ii Meta-ethical relativism

iii Normative relativism

40 Universal prescriptivism

41 Morality and psychological development

i Introduction

ii Kohlberg’s account of moral development

iii Kohlberg’s theory examined

iv What is moral development?

v Conclusion

42 Method and moral theory

i Introduction

ii The nature of moral theories

iii The methods of theorizing

iv The role of examples

v Conclusion

PART VII: CHALLENGE AND CRITIQUE

43 The idea of a female ethic

44 The significance of evolution

i Introduction

ii Social Darwinism

iii Sociobiology: from ‘altruism’ to altruism

iv The biological contract

v Conclusion

45 Marx against morality

i Introduction

ii Marx’s anti-moralism

iii Historical materialism

iv Ideology

v Ideology as unfreedom

vi Morality as ideology

vii Justice

viii Morality and rationality

ix The illusion of impartial benevolence

x Can Marx do without morality?

xi Has morality any future?

xii Conclusion

46 How could ethics depend on religion?

i God and the moral good

ii God and the moral knowledge

iii God and moral motivation

iv Preaching and proving

47 The implications of determinism

i What determinism is all about and why it is supposed to matter ethically

ii Three traditional responses to the problem

iii Some contemporary attempts at reorienting the debate

iv Moral responsibility, rewards and punishments, nihilism

Afterword

Index

Blackwell Companions to Philosophy

This outstanding student reference series offers a comprehensive and authoritative survey of philosophy as a whole. Written by today’s leading philosophers, each volume provides lucid and engaging coverage of the key figures, terms, topics, and problems of the field. Taken together, the volumes provide the ideal basis for course use, representing an unparalleled work of reference for students and specialists alike.

Already published in the series:

1. The Blackwell Companion to Philosophy, Second Edition

Edited by Nicholas Bunnin and Eric Tsui-James

2. A Companion to Ethics

Edited by Peter Singer

3. A Companion to Aesthetics, Second Edition

Edited by David Cooper

4. A Companion to Epistemology

Edited by Jonathan Dancy and Ernest Sosa

5. A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy

Edited by Robert E. Goodin and Philip Pettit

6. A Companion to Philosophy of Mind

Edited by Samuel Guttenplan

7. A Companion to Metaphysics

Edited by Jaegwon Kim and Ernest Sosa

8. A Companion to Philosophy of Law and Legal Theory

Edited by Dennis Patterson

9. A Companion to Philosophy of Religion

Edited by Philip L. Quinn and Charles Taliaferro

10. A Companion to the Philosophy of Language

Edited by Bob Hale and Crispin Wright

11. A Companion to World Philosophies

Edited by Eliot Deutsch and Ron Bontekoe

12. A Companion to Continental Philosophy

Edited by Simon Critchley and William Schroeder

13. A Companion to Feminist Philosophy

Edited by Alison M. Jaggar and Iris Marion Young

14. A Companion to Cognitive Science

Edited by William Bechtel and George Graham

15. A Companion to Bioethics

Edited by Helga Kuhse and Peter Singer

16. A Companion to the Philosophers

Edited by Robert L. Arrington

17. A Companion to Business Ethics

Edited by Robert E. Frederick

18. A Companion to the Philosophy of Science

Edited by W. H. Newton-Smith

19. A Companion to Environmental Philosophy

Edited by Dale Jamieson

20. A Companion to Analytic Philosophy

Edited by A. P. Martinich and David Sosa

21. A Companion to Genethics

Edited by Justine Burley and John Harris

22. A Companion to Philosophical Logic

Edited by Dale Jacquette

23. A Companion to Early Modern Philosophy

Edited by Steven Nadler

24. A Companion to Philosophy in the Middle Ages

Edited by Jorge J. E. Gracia and Timothy B. Noone

25. A Companion to African-American Philosophy

Edited by Tommy L. Lott and John P. Pittman

26. A Companion to Applied Ethics

Edited by R. G. Frey and Christopher Heath Wellman

27. A Companion to the Philosophy of Education

Edited by Randall Curren

28. A Companion to African Philosophy

Edited by Kwasi Wiredu

29. A Companion to Heidegger

Edited by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Mark A. Wrathall

30. A Companion to Rationalism

Edited by Alan Nelson

31. A Companion to Ancient Philosophy

Edited by Mary Louise Gill and Pierre Pellegrin

32. A Companion to Pragmatism

Edited by John R. Shook and Joseph Margolis

33. A Companion to Nietzsche

Edited by Keith Ansell Pearson

34. A Companion to Socrates

Edited by Sara Ahbel-Rappe and Rachanar Kamtekar

35. A Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism

Edited by Hubert L Dreyfus and Mark A Wrathall

© 1991, 1993 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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First published 1991

First published in paperback (with corrections) 1993

29 2012

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A Companion to ethics/edited by Peter Singer.

p. cm. — (Blackwell companions to philosophy)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-631-18785-1 (pbk)

1. Ethics. 2. Social ethics. I. Singer, Peter. II. Series.

BJ1012.C62 1991

170—dc20

90–23456

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Introduction

The title A Companion to Ethics may suggest a volume with short entries, in alphabetical order, providing summary information about leading theories, ideas and people in the academic discipline of ethics. As a glance at the outline of the volume (following this introduction) will show, this book is very different. It consists of 47 original essays. These essays deal with the origins of ethics, with the great ethical traditions, with theories about how we ought to live, with arguments about specific ethical issues, and with the nature of ethics itself. (In accordance with current usage, in this book ‘ethics’ will usually be used not only for the study of morality (that is, as a synonym for ‘moral philosophy’) but also to refer to the subject matter of that study, in other words as meaning ‘morality’.)

I have chosen to organize the book in this way because it is vital that ethics not be treated as something remote, to be studied only by scholars locked away in universities. Ethics deals with values, with good and bad, with right and wrong. We cannot avoid involvement in ethics, for what we do – and what we don’t do – is always a possible subject of ethical evaluation. Anyone who thinks about what he or she ought to do is, consciously or unconsciously, involved in ethics. When we begin to think more seriously about these questions, we may begin by exploring our own underlying values but we will also be travelling over roads that have been trodden by many other thinkers, in different cultures, for well over two thousand years. For such a journey it is helpful to have a guide with information about the path we shall tread, how it came to be laid out, the major forks where people have taken alternative routes, and who has been there before us. More valuable still, however, is the kind of companion who will stimulate our thought about the route we are taking and warn us of the traps and culs-de-sac that have stopped others making progress.

So the best way to use this book is to go first to the Outline of Contents, a kind of map of the book, with explanatory notes at points where the map might otherwise be unclear to those who do not already know the territory. Then, depending on your interests, you may wish to start at the beginning and work your way through, or you may prefer to read specific essays on subjects that interest you. To find any subject not mentioned in the Outline of Contents, consult the Index. It is designed to make it easy to find not only specific concepts or theories, for example justice, or utilitarianism, but also particular aspects of topics. Thus under ‘killing’ you will find not a single heading, but also sub-headings that will lead you to discussions of ethical aspects of killing in Buddhism, Hinduism and Jainism; to the distinction between killing and letting die; to euthanasia and killing in war; to the treatment of killing by consequentialist, deontological, utilitarian and virtue-based ethical theories: and to killing in small-scale societies. In addition you will find cross-references to capital punishment and to murder, which have separate entries in the index. In this way I hope that the aim of producing a book that is readable will not have been achieved at the cost of rendering the book less helpful as a work of reference.

The selection of a companion is a personal matter; so too with the selection of topics (and authors) for this Companion. I have tried to be broad in my tastes, covering traditions that are certainly not mine, and inviting contributions from authors with whom I expected to disagree (and my expectations were not disappointed). Nevertheless, there can be no totally objective and impartial selection of topics or contributors. Another editor might have produced a very different volume. I was brought up in a Western English-speaking society, and educated in the Western philosophical tradition; I would not even be competent to edit a volume that gives equal space to other traditions. Within that Western philosophical tradition, although no-one can claim to be immune from intellectual trends, I have tried to focus on the timeless questions of Western ethical thought, in preference to the issues that are currently fashionable.

P.S.

Acknowledgements

I owe thanks to many. First, obviously, thanks are due to the contributors, not only for taking the time to write their articles, but even more for being willing to revise them in the light of my views as to what this volume should be like. Less obviously, Stephan Chambers, of Basil Blackwell, persuaded me to do the volume; without his initiative, it would not have existed at all. Alyn Shipton then took over the production process, and has been an invaluable source of encouragement and advice. Richard Beatty handled the desk editing with great skill and commendable attention to detail. Finally, Dale Jamieson and R. M. Hare have acted as informal editorial advisors at every stage of the book. Without them the task of editing would have been more difficult, and the final product, I am sure, of a lower standard.

PETER SINGERDecember 1990

Contributors

Brenda Almond is Reader in Philosophy and Education at the University of Hull. She is Joint Editor of the Journal of Applied Philosophy. Her books include Moral Concerns and The Philosophical Quest.

Kurt Baier teaches in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of The Moral Point of View, and works in the field of moral, political and legal philosophy.

Raymond A. Belliotti is a philosophy professor at SUNY Fredonia State University, and is also an attorney. His articles in the areas of philosophy of law, political philosophy and ethics have appeared in numerous journals.

Jonathan Berg is a Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Haifa and works mainly in philosophical logic and applied philosophy.

Purusottama Bilimoria teaches in the School of Humanities at Deakin University in Victoria, Australia. He is the author of Sabdapramāa: Word and Knowledge. He works in the fields of Indian philosophy, ethics, cross-cultural hermeneutics and philosophy of religion, and edits a book series on Indian Thought.

Bernard Boxill teaches in the Department of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of Blacks and Social Justice, and works in the field of political philosophy.

Stephen Buckle is a Lecturer in Philosophy at La Trobe University, Victoria, Australia. He is the author of Natural Law and the Theory of Property: Grotius to Hume, and co-editor of Embryo Experimentation.

C. A. J. Coady is Boyce Gibson Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Philosophy and Public Issues at the University of Melbourne. He has published extensively in epistemology, ethics and political philosophy and has a particular interest in questions to do with political violence.

Jonathan Dancy is Reader in Philosophy at the University of Keele. He is the author of An Introduction to Contemporary Epistemology and Berkeley: an Introduction, and of a forthcoming book on moral theory.

Nancy Davis (who publishes under ‘Nancy’ but answers to ‘Ann’) is an Associate Professor of Philosophy and an Associate of the Center for Values and Social Policy at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Her interests and publications lie primarily in moral theory, applied ethics (including bioethics) and moral methodology.

M. W. Padmasiri de Silva, formerly Professor of Philosophy at the University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka, now teaches philosophy at the National University of Singapore. His publications include Buddhist and Freudian Psychology, An Introduction to Buddhist Psychology and Tangles and Webs.

Nigel Dower teaches in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen. He is the author of World Poverty – Challenge and Response, and editor of Ethics and Environmental Responsibility, and has a general interest in the ethics of international relations.

Robert Elliot teaches in the Department of Philosophy at the University of New England, Armidale, Australia. He is a co-editor of Environmental Ethics: A Collection of Readings, and has published articles on environmental ethics, metaethics, philosophy of education and philosophy of mind.

Robert Goodin is Professorial Fellow in Philosophy at the Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University. He is Associate Editor of the journal Ethics, and author of various books in political theory and applied ethics, including most recently No Smoking: The Ethical Issues.

Jean Grimshaw teaches in the Department of Humanities, Bristol Polytechnic. She is the author of Feminist Philosophers: Women’s Perspectives on Philosophical Traditions, and works in the fields of philosophy, cultural studies and women’s studies.

Lori Gruen is currently working on a Ph.D. in Philosophy at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where she is affiliated with the Center for Values and Social Policy. She is the co-author of Animal Liberation: A Graphic Guide; has published articles on ethical issues concerning women, animals, and the environment: and has written on feminism and science.

John Haldane is Reader in Moral Philosophy at the University of St Andrews, where he is also Director of the Centre for Philosophy and Public Affairs. He has published widely in many areas of philosophy.

Chad Hansen is a professor of Philosophy at the University of Vermont. He has spent over seven years in Asia and speaks Cantonese, Mandarin and Japanese. His publications include Language and Logic in Ancient China and A Daoist Theory of Chinese Thought, along with numerous articles on Chinese philosophy.

R. M. Hare is Graduate Research Professor in the University of Florida and White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy Emeritus in the University of Oxford. His books include The Language of Morals, Freedom and Reason, and Moral Thinking.

Dale Jamieson is Associate Professor and Director of the Centre for Values and Social Policy at the University of Colorado. He has published many articles in various areas of philosophy, and is co-editor of Interpretation and Explanation in the Study of Animal Behavior.

Menachem Kellner teaches in the Department of Jewish History and Thought at the University of Haifa. He is the editor of Contemporary Jewish Ethics, translator of Isaac Abravanel’s Principles of Faith, and author of Dogma in Medieval Jewish Thought, Maimonides on Human Perfection, Maimonides on Judaism and the Jewish People, and essays on medieval and modern Jewish thought.

Helga Kuhse is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Human Bioethics at Monash University. She is the author of The Sanctity-of-Life Doctrine in Medicine and (with Peter Singer) of Should the Baby Live?

Will Kymlicka holds a Canada Research Fellowship at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Liberalism, Community, and Culture and Contemporary Political Philosophy.

Hugh LaFollette is Professor of Philosophy at East Tennessee State University. He has published essays in ethics and political philosophy and is currently completing a book entitled Just Good Friends.

Gerald A. Larue is Emeritus Professor of Biblical History and Archaeology, and Adjunct Professor of Gerontology at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. His most recent publication is Ancient Myth and Modern Life.

Jeff McMahan is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Illinois at Urbana. He is currently working on two forthcoming books, The Ethics of Killing and The Ethics of War and Nuclear Deterrence.

Mary Midgley, formerly Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Newcastle on Tyne, is the author of Beast and Man, Wickedness and other books on problems concerned with ethics, evolution and human nature.

Azim Nanji is Professor and Chair in the Department of Religion at the University of Florida. He specializes in the study of Muslim culture and thought and is the author of various books, chapters and articles on Islam and comparative topics. His most recent publications deal with Muslim ethical and cultural values in historical and modern contexts.

Onora O’Neill teaches in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Essex. She is the author of Faces of Hunger and Constructions of Reason, and works on ethics, political philosophy and the philosophy of Immanuel Kant.

Gregory Pence holds joint appointments in Medicine and Philosophy at the University of Alabama. He has published Classic Cases in Medical Ethics and a critical survey of work on virtues.

Philip Pettit holds a Personal Chair at the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University. Among his recent publications is a book entitled Not Just Deserts: A Republican Theory of Criminal Justice, co-authored with John Braithwaite.

Charles R. Pigden teaches in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Otago. His papers include ‘Logic and the autonomy of ethics’ and ‘Anscombe on “ought”’. He is interested in meta-ethics, the philosophy of logic, and the philosophy of literature.

Ronald Preston, formerly Canon Theologian of Manchester Cathedral, is Professor Emeritus of Social and Pastoral Theology at the University of Manchester. His books include Religion and the Persistence of Capitalism, Church and Society in the Late Twentieth Century, and The Future of Christian Ethics.

James Rachels is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He is the author of The End of Life: Euthanasia and Morality and Created from Animals: The Moral Implications of Darwinism.

Christopher Rowe holds a Personal Chair in Ancient Philosophy and Greek at the University of Bristol. He is the author of Plato and a commentary on Plato’s Phaedrus; his work is mainly on Plato, and on Aristotle’s ethical and political philosophy.

Michael Ruse teaches in the Philosophy and Zoology Departments at the University of Guelph, Ontario. His most recent book is The Darwinian Paradigm: Essays on its History, Philosophy and Religious Implications. At the moment he is writing a book on the concept of progress in evolutionary biology.

J. B. Schneewind, Chair of the Philosophy Department at The Johns Hopkins University, is author of Sidgwick’s Ethics and Victorian Moral Philosophy and editor of Moral Philosophy from Montaigne to Kant.

George Silberbauer, formerly a District Commissioner and Bushman Survey officer in Botswana, is now in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at Monash University. He is the author of Bushman Survey Report, Hunter and Habitat in the Central Kalahari Desert and Cazadores del Desierto, and works in the areas of disaster management, socio-ecology and philosophy of social science.

Peter Singer is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Human Bioethics at Monash University, Melbourne. His books include Democracy and Disobedience, Animal Liberation, Practical Ethics, The Expanding Circle, Marx, Hegel, The Reproduction Revolution (with Deane Wells) and Should the Baby Live? (with Helga Kuhse). With Helga Kuhse he now edits Bioethics, an international journal published by Basil Blackwell.

Michael Smith teaches in the Department of Philosophy at Monash University, and has taught previously at the University of Oxford and Princeton University. He is the author of The Moral Problem (forthcóming), as well as several papers in ethics and moral psychology.

Robert C. Solomon is Quincy Lee Centennial Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of several books about business ethics including Above the Bottom Line, It’s Good Business and Ethics and Excellence. He is also the author of The Passions, In the Spirit of Hegel About Love and A Passion for Justice.

C. L. Ten is Reader in Philosophy at Monash University. He is the author of Mill on Liberty and Crime, Guilt, and Punishment.

Laurence Thomas teaches in the Philosophy and Political Science Departments at Syracuse University, and is the author of Living Morally: A Psychology of Moral Character (Temple University Press, 1979), as well as numerous articles in moral and social philosophy.

Mary Anne Warren teaches in the Department of Philosophy at San Francisco State University. Her publications include The Nature of Woman: An Encyclopedia and Guide to the Literature and Gendercide: The Implications of Sex Selection.

David B. Wong teaches in the Department of Philosophy at Brandeis University. He is the author of Moral Relativity, and works in ethical theory, the history of philosophy, comparative ethics and Chinese philosophy.

Allen Wood is Professor of Philosophy at Cornell University. He is the author of numerous books and articles, chiefly in the field of the history of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German philosophy, including Kant’s Moral Religion, Kant’s Rational Theology, Karl Marx and Hegel’s Ethical Thought.

Robert Young is a member of the Department of Philosophy at La Trobe University, Melbourne. His publications have been in the philosophy of religion, metaphysics, ethics, social and political philosophy.

PART I

THE ROOTS

1

The origin of ethics

MARY MIDGLEY

i The search for justification

WHERE does ethics come from? Two very different questions are combined here, one about historical fact and the other about authority. Anxiety about both questions has been active in shaping many traditional myths about the origin of the universe. These myths describe, not only how human life began, but also why it is so hard, so painful, so confusing, so conflict-ridden. The primal clashes and disasters they tell of are intended – perhaps often primarily intended – to explain why human beings have to live by rules which can frustrate their desires. Both these questions are still pressing. And in the last few centuries, theorists have tried strenuously to answer them in more literal and systematic terms.

This quest does not flow just from curiosity, nor just from the hope of proving the rules unnecessary, though both are strong motives. It perhaps arises centrally from conflicts within ethics, or morality, itself. (I shall make no distinction between these two words for the very general purposes of this article.) In any culture, accepted duties sometimes clash, and deeper, more general principles are needed to arbitrate between them. People look for the point of the different rules involved, and try to weigh these points against each other. This search often forces them to look, more widely still, for a supreme arbiter – the point of morality as a whole.

This is why our original question is so complex. Asking where ethics comes from is not like asking the same question about meteorites. It is asking why we should now obey its rules. (Rules are not actually the whole of morality, but we can concentrate on them for the moment, because they are often the point where conflicts arise.) In order to answer this question, it is necessary to imagine what life would be like without these rules, and this inevitably does raise questions about origins. People tend to look backwards, asking whether there was once an ‘unfallen’ conflict-free state before the rules were imposed, a state where rules were not needed, perhaps because nobody ever wanted to do anything bad. They then ask ‘How did we come to lose this pre-ethical condition? Can we get back to it?’

In our own culture, two sweeping answers to these questions have been widely accepted. One – coming predominantly from the Greeks and from Hobbes – explains ethics simply as a device of egoistic prudence; its origin-myth is the social contract. It sees the pre-ethical state as one of solitude; the primal disaster being that people ever began to meet each other at all. Once they did, conflict was inevitable, and the state of nature was then, as Hobbes put it, ‘a war of every man against every man’ (Hobbes, 1651, Part One, Ch. 13, p. 64) even if, as Rousseau insisted, they had not been actually hostile to each other before colliding (Rousseau, 1762, pp. 188, 194; 1754, Part One). Survival itself, let alone social order, became possible only through rules arrived at by a reluctant bargain. (This story was of course usually seen as symbolical, not as literal history.) The other acount, which is Christian, explains morality as our necessary attempt to bring our imperfect nature in line with the will of God. Its origin-myth is the Fall of Man, which has produced that imperfection in our nature in the way described – again symbolically – in the Book of Genesis.

Simplicity itself is always welcome in a confusing world, so the popularity of these two accounts is not surprising. But simple accounts cannot really explain complex facts, and it has already become clear that neither of these sweeping formulae can really deal with our questions. The Christian account shifts the problem rather than solving it, since we still need to know why we should obey God. Christian teaching has of course plenty to say about this, but what it says is complex, and cannot keep its attractive simplicity once the question about authority is raised. I cannot discuss further here the very important relations between ethics and religion (see Article 46, HOW COULD ETHICS DEPEND ON RELIGION?). But it is important that this Christian answer does not just derive our duty to obey God naively from his position as an all-powerful being who has created us – a derivation which would not confer moral authority. If a bad being had created us for bad purposes, we should not think we had a duty to obey that being, whatever prudence might dictate. The idea of God is not just the idea of such a being, but crystallizes a whole mass of very complex ideals and standards that lie behind moral rules and give them their meaning. But the authority of these ideals and standards is just what we are enquiring about. So that question is still with us.

ii The lure of egoism and the social contract

The notion that ethics is really just a contract based on egoistic prudence is indeed much simpler, but for that very reason it is far too unrealistic to account for the actual complexities of ethics. It may be true that a society of perfectly consistent prudent egoists. if it ever existed. would invent institutions for mutual insurance which would look like many of those found in actual human societies. And it certainly is true that these careful egoists would avoid many of the atrocities that actual human beings commit, because human rashness and folly notoriously and constantly magnify the bad effects of our vices.

But this cannot mean that morality, as it actually exists anywhere, arises only from this calculating self-interest. There are several reasons why this is impossible, but I shall mention only two. (For further discussion, see Article 16, EGOISM.)

(1) The first rests on an obvious human defect. People simply are not so prudent or consistent as this account would imply. Even the very moderate amount of deliberately decent conduct that is actually found in human life would not be possible if it relied solely on these traits.

(2) The second is an equally well-known range of human good qualities. People who do make an effort to behave decently plainly are often moved by a quite different set of motives, arising directly out of consideration for the claims of others. They act from a sense of justice, from friendship, loyalty, compassion, gratitude, generosity, sympathy, family affection and the like – qualities that are recognized and honoured in most human societies. Egoist theorizers such as Hobbes sometimes explain this by claiming that these alleged motives are unreal, only empty names. But it is hard to see how names could ever have been invented, and have become current, for non-existent motives. And it is still more puzzling how anyone could ever have successfully pretended to be moved by them.

I have mentioned this egoistic explanation at once because, in spite of its crying defects, it is very influential today. In asking about the origin of ethics, modern people are quite likely to find themselves unthinkingly using its language. They will pose their question in the Hobbesian form, ‘How did an original society of egoists ever come to find itself lumbered with rules that required consideration for others?’ The crippling difficulties that infest this approach will become clearer as we go on.

iii Moral and factual arguments

We might be asked to accept extreme individualism on strictly scientific grounds, as a factual discovery. It then appears as a piece of information about how human beings are actually constituted. Today, the most usual form for this argument rests on the idea of evolution as proceeding, for all species, by the ‘survival of the fittest’ in unmitigated cut-throat competition between individuals. That process is held to have shaped them into isolated, wholly egoistic social atoms. This picture is often conceived to rest so directly on evidence as to be – unlike all earlier stories about origins – not a myth at all but wholly scientific.

We should be sceptical about this claim. In the crude form just cited, the pseudo-Darwinian myth contains at least as much emotive symbolism from current ideologies and as much propaganda for limited, contemporary social ideals as does its predecessor the Social Contract story. It does also incorporate some genuine scientific evidence and principles, but it ignores and distorts a great deal more than it uses. It is particularly remote from current science on two issues: first, its fantasy-ridden, over-dramatized notion of competition, and second, the strangely predominant place that it gives to our own species in the evolutionary process.

(1) It is essential to distinguish the mere fact of happening to ‘compete’ from the complex of human motives which current ideology endorses as fitting for competitors. Any two organisms may be said to be ‘in competition’ if they both need or want something they cannot both get. But they are not acting competitively unless they both know this and respond by deliberately trying to defeat each other. Since the overwhelming majority of organisms are plants, bacteria etc. which are not even conscious, the very possibility of deliberate, hostile competition is an extremely rare thing in nature. Moreover, both at the conscious and the unconscious level, all life-processes depend on an immense background of harmonious co-operation, which is necessary to build up the complex system within which the much rarer phenomenon of competition becomes possible. Competition is real but necessarily limited. For instance, the plants in a particular ecosystem normally exist in interdependence both with each other and with the animals that eat them, and those animals are equally interdependent with each other and with their predators. If there had really been a natural ‘war of all against all’, the biosphere could never have developed in the first place. It is not surprising therefore that conscious life, arising out of such a background, acts in fact in a way that is much more often co-operative than competitive. And when we come shortly to consider the motivation of social creatures, we shall clearly see that co-operative motivations supply the main structure of their behaviour.

(2) Many popular versions of the pseudo-Darwinian myth (though not all) present the evolutionary process as a pyramid or ladder existing for the purpose of producing MAN as its apex, and sometimes as programmed to develop MAN further to some distant ‘omega point’ which will further glorify contemporary Western human ideals. This notion has no basis in today’s genuine biological theory (Midgley, 1985). Current biology depicts life-forms quite differently, on the pattern sketched out by Darwin in the Origin of Species, as spreading, bush-like, from a common source to fill the available niches, without any special ‘upward’ direction. The pyramid picture was proposed by J.-B. Lamarck and developed by Teilhard de Chardin; it does not belong to modern science at all but to traditional metaphysics. Of course that does not refute it But since the views of human nature associated with it have been widely seen as ‘scientific’, the point is of some importance for us in assessing the standing of these views, and relating them to our questions about the origin of ethics.

iv Dualistic fantasies

These questions have begun to look harder since it became generally accepted that our species took its rise from others which we class as merely ‘animals’. In our culture, the species-barrier has commonly been seen as being also the boundary of the moral realm, and metaphysical doctrines have been built to protect this boundary. Christians, unlike Buddhists, have believed that souls, the seat of all the faculties that we honour, belong only to human beings. Any emphasis on the relationship between our own and other species was seen as degrading us, as suggesting that our spirituality was ‘really’ only a set of animal reactions. This idea of animality as a foreign principle quite alien to spirit is an ancient one, often used to dramatize psychological conflicts as raging between the virtues and ‘the beast within’. The human soul then appears as an isolated intruder in the physical cosmos, a stranger far from its home.

This sharp and simple dualism was important to Plato, and to early Christian thinking. It is probably much less influential today. Its contemptuous attitude to natural motives has not worn well, and on the theoretical side it faces enormous difficulties in explaining the relation between soul and body. Yet dualism still seems to be used as a background framework for certain topics, notably for our thought about other animals. Aristotle countered Plato by proposing a much less divisive, more reconciliatory metaphysic to bring together the various aspects both of human individuality and of the outside world. St Thomas followed this lead. and recent thought has in general been moving the same way. But this more monistic approach has encountered great difficulty in conceiving how human beings could actually have developed out of non-human animals. The trouble was that those animals were viewed as symbols of anti-human forces, indeed often simply as embodied vices (wolf, pig, raven). Until this view was challenged, only two alternatives seemed open – either a depressed, reductive view of humans as ‘no better than the other animals’, or a purely other-worldly view of them as spirits inserted during the evolutionary process into bodies to which they were quite unrelated. (See Midgley, 1979, Ch. 2.)

Hence come the two simple ideas mentioned earlier about the origin of ethics. On the social contract pattern all animate beings equally were egoists, and human beings were distinctive only in their calculating intelligence. They were merely the first enlightened egoists. On the religious view, by contrast, the insertion of souls introduced, at a stroke, not just intelligence but also a vast range of new notivation, much of it altruistic. To Darwin’s distress, his collaborator A. R. Wallace adopted this second view, arguing that God must have added souls to emerging primate bodies by miraculous intervention during the course of evolution. And today, even among non-religious thinkers, there is still often found an intense exaltation of human capacities which treats them as something totally different in kind from those of all other animals, to an extent which seems to demand a different, non-terrestrial source. Indeed, science-fiction accounts of a derivation from some distant planet are occasionally invoked with apparent seriousness to meet this supposed need.

v The advantages of ethology

We can, however, avoid both these bad alternatives today by simply taking a more realistic, less mythical view of non-human animals. In our own time, their behaviour has at last been systematically studied, and the rich, complex nature of social life among many birds and mammals is now becoming a matter of common knowledge. People indeed have long known something about it, though they did not use that knowledge when they thought of animals as incarnations of evil. Thus, two centuries ago Kant wrote, ‘The more we come in contact with animals the more we love them, for we see how great is their care for their young. It is then difficult for us to be cruel in thought even to a wolf.’

Social traits like parental care, co-operative foraging and reciprocal kindness show plainly that such creatures are not in fact crude, exclusive egoists, but beings who have evolved the strong and special motivations needed to form and maintain a simple society. Mutual grooming, mutual removal of parasites and mutual protection are common among social mammals and birds. They have not produced these habits by using those powers of prudent selfish calculation which the Social Contract story views as the mechanism necessary for such a feat, since they do not possess them. Wolves, beavers, jackdaws, and other social creatures, including all our primate relatives, do not build their societies by wily calculation from a Hobbesian ‘state of nature’, an original war of all against all. They are able to live together, and sometimes to co-operate in remarkable tasks of hunting, building, joint protection or the like, simply because they are naturally disposed to love and trust one another.

This affection becomes evident in the unmistakable misery of any social animal, from a horse or a dog to a chimpanzee. if it is kept in isolation. Though they often ignore each other and will indeed in certain circumstances compete with and attack each other, they do this against a wider background of friendly acceptance. Devoted care of the young, often including real self-denial over food, is widespread and is often shared by other helpers besides the parents. (It may perhaps be seen as the original matrix of morality). Some creatures, notably elephants, will adopt orphans. Defence of the weak by the strong is common and there are many well-attested examples of cases where the defenders have paid for it with their lives. Old and helpless birds are sometimes fed. Reciprocal help among friends is often seen. All this is by now not a matter of folklore but of detailed, systematic, well-researched record. And there surely is every reason to accept that in this matter human beings closely resemble all their nearest relatives. (For the anthropological evidence of this, see Konner, 1982.)

vi Two objections

Before we examine the link between these natural dispositions and human morality, two possible contrary ideological objections to this approach must be considered. There is the behaviourist thesis that human beings have no natural dispositions at all being blank paper at birth, and the sociobiological reply that social dispositions do exist, but are all in some sense ‘selfish’. (Readers not interested in these ideologies could skip this discusssion.)

(1) The behaviourist thesis was, I think, always an obvious exaggeration. The idea of a purely passive, motiveless infant never made sense. The exaggeration had a serious moral point – namely, to reject certain dangerous ideas about just what the innate tendencies were, ideas which were used to justify institutions such as war, racism and slavery. But these were ideological misrepresentations of the human heritage. It has proved much better to attack them on their own ground, without the crippling difficulties imposed by espousing so unconvincing a story as the Blank Paper theory.

(2) Over sociobiology, the trouble is really one of wording. Sociobiologists use the word ‘selfish’ in a quite extraordinary way, to mean, roughly, ‘gene-promoting; likely to increase the future survival and spread of an organism’s genes’. They are saying that the traits actually transmitted in evolution must be ones which do this work, which is true. By using the language of ‘selfishness’ however, they inescapably link this harmless idea to the still powerful egoist pseudo-Darwinian myth, since the word selfish is entirely a description of motive – not just of consequences – and its central meaning is the negative one that one does not care for others. Sociobiologists do sometimes point out that this is a technical use of the word, but nearly all of them get carried away by its normal meaning and may be heard preaching egoism as ardently as Hobbes. (See Wilson, 1975, also Midgley, 1979 – index s.v. Wilson – and Midgley, 1985, Ch. 14.)

vii Sociability, conflict and the origins of morality

Having said something to meet these objections to the idea that humans have natural social dispositions, we ask next, what relation have these dispositions to morality? They do not constitute it, but they surely do contribute something essential to making it possible. Do they perhaps supply, as it were, the raw material of the moral life – the general motivations which lead towards it and give it its rough direction – while still needing the work of intelligence, and especially speech, to organize it, to contribute its form? This suggestion was sketched out by Darwin, in a remarkable passage which uses central ideas from Aristotle, Hume and Kant (Darwin, 1859, Vol. 1, Part 1, Ch. 3. This discussion has so far had little attention because versions of the noisy pseudo-Darwinian myth were widely accepted as the only evolutionary approach to ethics).

By this account, the relation of the natural social motives to morality would be much like that of natural curiosity to science, or of natural wonder and admiration to art. Natural affections do not of themselves create rules – indeed, it might seem that in an unfallen state they would make rules unnecessary. But in our actual, imperfect state, these affections often conflict with each other, or with other strong and important motives. In non-human animals, those conflicts may be settled simply by further second-order natural dispositions. But beings who reflect much on their own and each others’ lives, as we do, need to arbitrate these conflicts somehow in a way that makes their lives feel reasonably coherent and continuous. To do this we set priorities between different aims, and this means accepting lasting principles or rules. (It is, of course, not clear at all that other social creatures are totally non-reflective, since much of our own reflection is nonverbal, but we cannot discuss their situation here. On the very complex primate situation, see Desmond 1979.)

Darwin illustrated the difference between the reflective and non-reflective predicaments in the case of a swallow, which can desert the young it has been devotedly feeding without apparent hesitation when its flock migrates. (Darwin, 1859, pp. 84, 91.) As he points out, someone blessed or cursed with a much longer memory and a more active imagination could not do this without agonizing conflict. And there is a most interesting difference between the two motives involved. An impulse which is violent but temporary – in this case migration – is opposed to a habitual feeling, much weaker at any one time, but stronger in that it is far more persistent and lies deeper in the character. Darwin thought that the rules chosen would tend to arbitrate in favour of the milder but more persistent motives, because violating them would lead to much longer and more distressing remorse later on.

In searching, then, for the special force possessed by ‘the imperious word ought’ (p. 92), he pointed to the clash between these social affections and the strong but temporary motives which often oppose them. Intelligent beings would, he concluded, naturally try to produce rules which would protect the priority of the first group. He therefore thought it exceedingly likely that ‘any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well-developed, or anything like as well-developed, as in man’ (p. 72). Thus ‘the social instincts – the prime principle of man’s moral constitution – with the aid of active intellectual powers and the effects of habit, naturally lead to the Golden Rule, “As ye would that men should do unto you, do ye to them likewise” and this lies at the foundation of morality’ (p. 106).

viii The problem of partiality

How convincing is this? Of course we cannot test Darwin’s generalization empirically; we have not communicated well enough with any non-human species that we recognize as sufficiently intelligent. (It might be immensely helpful, for instance, if we could hear something from the whales …) We must simply compare the cases. How suitable do these traits in other social creatures seem to be to furnish material that could develop into something like human morality?

Some objectors rule them out of court entirely because they occur fitfully, and their incidence is strongly biased in favour of close kin. But this same fitfulness and this same bias towards kin prevail to some extent – often very powerfully – in all human morality. They are strong among the small hunter-gatherer societies that seem closest to the original human condition. People growing up in such circumstances are of course in general surrounded – just as young wolves or chimpanzees are – by those who actually are their kin, so that the normal attitude they acquire to those around them is, in varying degrees, one which makes wider concern and sympathy possible.

But it is important to notice that this bias does not vanish, it does not even become noticeably weaker, with the development of civilization. It is still fully active in our own culture. If any modern parents were to give no more care and affection to their own children than they did to all others, they would be perceived as monsters. We quite naturally spend our resources freely on meeting even the minor needs of our close families and friends before considering even the grave needs of outsiders. It strikes us as normal for human parents to spend more on toys for their children than they spend in a year on aid to the destitute. Human society does indeed make some provision for outsiders, but in doing so it starts from the same strong bias towards kin which shapes animal societies.

This same consideration applies to another, parallel objection often brought against treating animal sociability as a possible source of morality, namely the bias towards reciprocity. It is true that, if we were dealing with calculating egoists, the mere returning of benefits to those who had formerly given them might be nothing but a prudent bargain. But again, in all existing human moralities this transaction appears in quite a different light, not just as insurance for the future but as appropriate gratitude owed for kindness shown in the past, and as flowing naturally from the affection that goes with it. There is no reason why this should not be equally true of other social creatures.

It is quite true that these narrowing biases need to be – and gradually are – systematically corrected by the recognition of wider duties as human morality develops (see Singer, 1981). This widening, however, is surely the contribution of the human intelligence, gradually developing wider social horizons as it devises institutions. It is not and cannot be a substitute for the original natural affections themselves. A certain narrowness in those affections is only to be expected, since in evolution they have served the essential function of making possible strenuous and devoted provision for the young. This could not have been effectively done if all parents had cared as much for every passing infant as they did for their own. In such a casual, impartial regime, probably few warm-blooded infants would survive. Thus, as the sociobiologists rightly point out, heritable altruistic dispositions are not easily passed on unless they make possible an increase in the survival of the altruist’s own kin, who share the gene that gives rise to them. But when that does occur, it becomes possible for such traits to develop and to spread through ‘kin selection’, in a way that did not seem conceivable on the older, crude model that only considered competition for survival between individuals.

ix Is morality reversible?

If, then, these dispositions are indeed not disqualified by their narrowness from serving as essential material for the development of morality, does Darwin’s picture become a convincing one? There is surely great force in his suggestion that what makes morality necessary is conflict – that an ‘unfallen’ harmonious state would not require it. If this is right, then the idea of ‘immoralism’ as the proposal to get rid of morality (Nietzsche, 1886, 1, section 32) would involve making everybody somehow conflict-free. Unless that were done, we need priority-rules, not just because they make society smoother, nor even just to make it possible at all, but also more deeply, to avoid lapsing individually into states of helpless, conflict-torn confusion. In some sense, this is ‘the origin of ethics’ and our search need take us no further.

It may, however, seem less clear just which kind of priorities these rules are bound to express. Is Darwin right in expecting them on the whole to favour the social affections, and to validate the Golden Rule? Or is this just a cultural prejudice? Might a morality be found which was the mirror-image of our own, counting our virtues as vices and our vices as virtues, and demanding generally that we should do to others just what we would least want done to ourselves (a suggestion for which also Nietzsche sometimes wished to make room)?

Now it is of course true that cultures vary vastly, and since Darwin’s day we have become much more aware of that variation. Yet anthropologists, who did the world a huge service by demonstrating that variability, are now pointing out that it should not be exaggerated (Konner, 1982; Mead, 1956). Different human societies do have many deep structural elements in common. If they did not, no mutual understanding would be possible at all, and indeed it would scarcely have been possible to do anthropology. Among those elements, the kind of consideration and sympathy for others that is generalized by the Golden Rule plays a central part, and if we ask ‘Could there be a culture without that attitude?’ we may find real difficulty in imagining how it would count as a culture at all. The mere mutual terror of co-existing egoistic solitaries that Hobbes invoked for his Social Contract could certainly never produce one. Common standards, common ideals, common tastes, common priorities that make a common morality possible, rest on shared joys and sorrows and all require active sympathy. Morality needs, not just conflicts, but a willingness and a capacity to look for shared solutions to them. As much as language, it seems to be something that could only occur among naturally social beings. (For more discussion of the common elements of human culture, see Article 2, ETHICS IN SMALL-SCALE SOCIETIES.)

x Conclusion

This account of the origin of ethics is intended to avoid on the one hand the unrealistic, reductive abstractions of egoist theorizing, and on the other the equally unreal, moralistic boasting that tends to make the whole origin of human beings as a terrestrial primate species look incomprehensible. It does not equate human morality with anything found among other social creatures. It is always a fallacy (the ‘genetic fallacy’) to equate any product with its source – to say ‘that flower is really only organized dirt’. Morality as it emerges from this matrix is what it is.

References

Darwin, C.: The Descent of Man (1859); (London: Princeton University Press, 1981).

Desmond, A.: The Ape’s Reflexion (London: Blond and Briggs, 1979).

Hobbes, T.: Leviathan (London: 1651); Everyman edition (London: Dent and Dutton 1914).

Kant, I.: Lectures on Ethics; trans. L. Infield (London: Methuen, 1930), p. 239.

Konner, M.: The Tangled Wing; Biological Constraints on the Human Spirit (London: Heine-mann, 1982).

Mead, M.: New Lives for Old (London: Gollancz, 1956).

Midgley, M.: Beast and Man, The Roots of Human Nature (Harvester Press: Hassocks, 1979).

___: Evolution As A Religion (London and New York: Methuen, 1985).

Nietzsche, F.: Beyond Good and Evil (1886); trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1973).

___: On The Genealogy of Morals (1887); trans. Walter Kaufman and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1969).

Rousseau, J.-J.: The Social Contract (1762) and Dissertation on the Origin of Inequality (1754); Everyman edition (London: Dent and Dutton, 1930).

Singer, P.: The Expanding Circle; Ethics and Sociobiology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981).

Wilson, E. O.: Sociobiology, The New Synthesis (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985).

Further reading

Bellah, R. et al.: Habits of the Heart; Middle America Observed (London: Hutchinson, 1988).

Kohn, A.: No Contest; The Case Against Competition, Why We Lose in our Race to Win (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1986).

2

Ethics in small-scale societies

GEORGE SILBERBAUER

A SMALL-SCALE