To each nation its own preventive strategy: that could be the motto drawn from the evolution of the public health response to contagious disease during the century from the first European cholera epidemics to the cusp of the antibiotical era. Why? Given that, in epidemiological and biological terms, the problem faced by each country has been much the same, why have they responded in markedly different ways? Is there an Archimedian point from which to pry an account of why nations have reacted with such different preventive tactics? That each has learned from epidemiological experience how better to counter the next onslaught is an observation on the historical evolution of public health so commonplace that, if anything, the historiographical temptation has been rather to caution against whiggish assumptions of an ever improving mastery of preventive techniques. What is at stake here, in contrast, are not such common learning experiences through which all nations eventually pass, arriving presumably at similar goals, but rather the different strategies they have adopted despite being faced with common problems.

Differences in scientific knowledge among nations that might have prompted varied responses cannot provide an explanation for at least two reasons. First, for the purposes of prevention, the state of the art inthe nineteenth century was comparable, if not identical, across all.

Philosophers usually think that evolutionary ethics – the attempt to locate and ground morality in our biological origins – met its Waterloo in the crucial year 1903. It was then that the English philosopher G. E. Moore published his devastating critique of the ideas of the prominent nineteenth-century evolutionary ethicist Herbert Spencer (1851, 1868, 1892). In a definitive manner, Moore's Principia Ethica (1903) showed that Spencer and all who thought like him were guilty of that gross conceptual mistake that Moore labeled the “naturalistic fallacy.” Before Moore, evolutionary ethics had flourished like the rank weed that it was. After Moore, evolutionary ethics lay smoldering on the bonfire of discarded ideas. And a good thing, too, thinks the philosopher, for there have been few excesses of nineteenth-century capitalism or twentieth-century militarism and fascism that have not had their biologyoriented partisans. Choose your vileness, and there has been someone prepared to defend it in the name of evolution.

Those whose inquiries have taken them beyond philosophical folklore will know that today there is little need to spend much time on that latter charge (Russett 1976; Kelley 1981; Ruse 1986, 1996; Richards 1987; Pittenger 1993; Crook 1994). For years, historians have been looking at the claims of the evolutionary ethicists – “social Darwinians” as they are often called – and it is clear that although some pretty dreadful things have been suggested and sometimes even perpetrated in the name of evolution, the picture is by no means uniformly black.

Thus asserted “Prof. H. Dingle” (Herbert Dingle) in an article in Nature in 1946, as quoted in “50 Years Ago” in 1996. He continued:

Although not everyone would endorse Professor Dingle's confidence about the absoluteness of the certainty in science, few would disagree with the proposition that science and ethics rest on different bases. And many would agree that attempts to provide a compelling epistemic warrant for ethical theory have failed. Indeed, moral theorists have often been willing to give up the search and engage in descriptive and normative ethical discussions, leaving the metatheoretical search to others. Biologists and philosophers of biology have eagerly taken up the challenge. Thus an unabashed program for naturalizing ethics has gained enthusiastic supporters in recent decades. Sociobiology, evolutionary ethics, and genetic determinism have all played their parts.

INTRODUCTION

The contemporary debate over the moral status of animals reflects a mixture of traditions. Utilitarianism, which measures moral standing in terms of the ability to suffer, has been used to defend the widening-circle conception of morality. The difference between humans and other animals vis-à-vis moral standing diminishes in its light. Focusing on questions of agency, conscience, and reflective powers, the differences between humans and nonhumans seem greater. Darwinism has been invoked to bridge the gaps between the intellectual and moral capacities of humans and those of other animals. This has led some to argue either that differences in agency, conscience, and the power to reflect are overrated (e.g., Rodd 1990) or that they may not be absolute indicators of moral consideration (e.g., Rachels 1990).

Debates over the moral status of nonhuman animals have had a long and stormy history. The considerations that drive the current debate – questions of the intellectual capacities of animals, questions about their moral sensibilities, and questions about their sensitive capacities – are ancient (Sorabji 1993). Nonetheless, they first began to assume their modern form in the writings of the eighteenth-century British moral philosophers. Those individuals were struggling with the moral implications of (1) discoveries in the natural sciences and (2) an increasingly secularized approach to philosophical issues. Vivisection experiments and rudimentary anatomical studies not only showed that the bodies of animals were remarkably similar to the bodies of human beings but also showed that the brutes were capable of experiencing pain and suffering.

INTRODUCTION

First, a few dates. When Charles Darwin (1809–82) published The Origin of Species, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) was age fifteen. The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche's first book, appeared in 1872, a year after Darwin's The Descent of Man. It revealed no particular interest in biological theories, although it already contained the theme of vital values. Nietzsche's serious commentaries on Darwin and the Darwinians began in Human All-Too-Human (1878) and developed uninterruptedly from then on. The high point of that somewhat one-sided “dialogue” was the Genealogy of Morals (1887), a book explicitly written against the Darwinian view of the origin of morals and published shortly before Nietzsche's definitive descent into madness (early 1889). On the other side of the relationship, Darwin never alluded to Nietzsche in his published work, nor, as far as I know, in his correspondence. It is likely that Darwin did not know of Nietzsche's existence. Therefore, there was nothing like a reciprocal relationship between Nietzsche and Darwin. But there is no doubt that Nietzsche, the most famous philosopher of the second half of the nineteenth century, was concerned with Darwin. This essay aims to provide a systematic evaluation of Nietzsche's work in those areas in which he felt the necessity to position himself with regard to Darwin, or “Darwinism,” as he knew it.

Strangely enough, although most philosophers may be vaguely aware of some relationship between Nietzsche and Darwin, analyses of that relationship have been rare in the modern philosophical literature (after 1945), and they generally have been poorly documented. That has been true for both historians of philosophy and philosophers of biology.

“French evolutionary ethics” might, at first glance, appear to be an oxymoron, for evolutionary ethics has been a philosophical tradition primarily in English-speaking and German-speaking countries. Russian and other variants have existed, but British, American, and German writers have constituted the bulk of its serious supporters as a school of ethics. For example, Cora Williams's general survey, A Review of the Systems of Ethics Founded on the Theory of Evolution (1893), examined the work of a dozen authors – six of them Anglo-Americans, and six Germans (Williams 1893). That the study of evolutionary ethics developed where it did is hardly surprising, for the scientific communities in those countries were the ones in which the biological theory of evolution was most widely accepted. By contrast, French philosophers who were concerned with the life sciences were notoriously hostile to Darwin and to other British evolutionary theories, as well as to German versions of evolution. Later in the nineteenth century, evolutionary ideas began to be accepted in France, but even then they were more closely related to the ideas of Lamarck than to Darwinism. Many English and American academics have been surprised to see the inscription on the base of Lamarck's statue at the north entrance of the Jardin des Plantes: “Fondateur de la Doctrine de l'Evolution.” The “transformationist” biology that became popular in France rejected the Darwinian concept of selection as the key creative force in producing new species, and, moreover, it favored a teleological view of nature in place of the nondirectional perspective common to Darwinians. Perhaps most important, Lamarck's emphasis on the ability of organisms to adapt directly to a changing environment was strongly supported.

The relationship between ethics and biology within the French Enlightenment tradition can only loosely be associated with the Darwinian meaning of “evolutionary ethics.” There was no notion of “evolution” in our modern sense until the writings of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1826) in 1800, nor was there a unified understanding of how moral reasoning relates to the biological constitution of human beings. As a feature of the general Enlightenment philosophical project, one must consider individual ethical vignettes united in a family resemblance of relations. The unity of these diverse developments can best be characterized as efforts to supplant the authority of revealed religion and tradition by naturalistic foundations for morality, society, and economic order. Reflections on the “biological” foundation for ethical action provide a component of this more general enterprise.

Darwin's connections of ethics and evolutionary biology, developed primarily in chapter five of the Descent of Man (1871), associate him with the eighteenth-century Scottish moral-sense tradition of David Hume, Adam Smith, Dugald Stewart, and especially James Mackintosh (Manier 1977, pp. 96–101). Nonetheless, indirect connections from Darwin to French traditions can be specified. His membership in the student Plinian Society during his medical studies in Edinburgh (1825–7) led him into contact with Robert Edmond Grant, the foremost advocate of Lamarckianism in the British Isles. That may have acquainted him with the contemporary French discussions of transformist ethics.

INTRODUCTION

Some two thousand three hundred years ago, Plato presented us a classic formulation of an ethical problem that has disconcerted thinkers about morality ever since. In his book The Republic, Plato has Glaucon tell the story of a young shepherd, Gyges, who discovers a ring that enables him to become invisible at will. With the special powers the ring gives him, Gyges proceeds to seduce the queen of his city, murder the king, and seize the throne. Glaucon intends his little parable to point a lesson about human nature. All of us, he suggests, behave morally only because, unlike Gyges, we know that immoral behavior usually will be detected and punished. “There is no one,” he says, “who would have such iron strength of will as to stick to what is right and keep his hands off other people's property. For he would be able to steal from the shops whatever he wanted without fear of detection, to go into any man's house and seduce his wife, to murder or release from prison anyone he felt inclined” (Plato 1955, p. 91).

What Plato has illustrated for us in this story is the ethical problem of egoism: Why, if we can get away with it, shouldn't we pursue our own selfinterest at the expense of any, or even all, other people? Why should we ever behave altruistically, that is, act so as to bring about the good of others, except when we have to do so to get them to help us further our own good?

In analyzing the ways in which biologists have related their scientific knowledge to moral issues, historians have not paid much attention to the geneticists working at the turn of the twentieth century. Perhaps that has been because they have looked mainly at the influence of evolutionism on ethics, and students of heredity in the early part of the twentieth century supposedly had little interest in evolution, at least in Darwinian evolution (Bowler 1988). That may explain why most major works on evolutionary ethics have focused only on geneticists' interest in eugenics (Richards 1987), and some have even argued that biologists did not pursue evolutionary ethics at the turn of the century (Farber 1994). Whatever the reasons may have been, the existing literature suggests that geneticists were interested in the social implications of their science, but they tended to focus rather narrowly on eugenics, the manipulation of human breeding for social improvement.

My research has suggested a very different picture of the relationship between genetics and studies of evolution in general, and geneticists' interest in ethics in particular. Elsewhere I have argued that the apparent schism between genetics and studies of evolution in the first two decades of the twentieth century was an artifact of a historiographic approach that considered the ideas of William Bateson and T. H. Morgan to be fair representations of geneticists' views during that time (Vicedo 1992). Furthermore, Barbara Kimmelman and I have shown that many first-generation geneticists in the United States were deeply concerned with evolution and the potential for studies on heredity to illuminate evolutionary problems (Vicedo and Kimmelman 1993).

INTRODUCTION

Study of biology flourished under the swastika. Although we tend to dismiss Nazi science as pseudoscience and equate research in biology with racial hygiene, the history of biology during the Third Reich was in fact quite complex. Work supported by Heinrich Himmler's Das Ahnenerbe (“ancestral heritage”), the research and teaching arm of the Schute-Staffel (SS), was indeed racist nonsense (Deichmann 1996, pp. 251–76). But most of the science supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), the major government funding agency, would have been considered mainstream science in the 1930s and 1940s. Its content and standards differed little from those of the science being pursued elsewhere in the western world.

Of course, research under the Third Reich was funded in the expectation that it would ultimately advance the aims of the regime. That fact prompts us to ask how we should think about the activities of scientists who did not engage in overtly criminal acts, but rather practiced “normal research.” We do not hesitate to condemn researchers who actively promoted and implemented the racial policies of the National Socialist state. We know what to think about those who produced anti-Semitic propaganda or reports on racial ancestry in connection with enforcement of the Nuremberg laws, helped formulate euthanasia policy, informed on colleagues who employed half-Jewish or politically suspect assistants, or conducted obscene experiments on human subjects. But more difficult, and more interesting, questions are raised by the behavior of scientists whose work was no more racist in either its intention or its assumptions than that of their non-German peers, but who in some way sought to profit from the National Socialist regime.

Two of the most fundamental issues grappled with by German romantics, Naturphilosophen, and investigators of nature during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were the nature of freedom and the freedom of nature. Fichte, Schelling, Goethe, Schiller, the Schlegel brothers, Schleiermacher, and Novalis all sought to restructure civic order based upon natural order and freedom. Each of those scholars turned to the philosophy of Kant in order to reformulate the relationship between nature and culture. Fichte and Schelling, in particular, set out to establish systematic studies of human freedom, transcending the boundaries set by their intellectual hero from Konigsberg. Filled with the Jacobin spirit kindled by the French Revolution, Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre, as he acknowledged, owed much to the ideology of the French Republic. It was “the first system of freedom,” and “as that nation [revolutionary France] tore man loose from his outer chains, Fichte's system of knowledge removed the Kantian fetters of the things-in-themselves and declared man to be ontologically free as well” (Fichte 1970, p. 298; Morgan 1991, p. 27).

Schelling echoed Fichte's emphasis on political freedom and support for the French Revolution. Indeed, Schelling implicitly linked the two revolutions, Kantian and French. In his obituary for Kant in 1804, Schelling wrote that “it was one and the same spirit, which was long in forming, that created – according to the differences of nation and circumstance – the atmosphere there [in France] for a real revolution and here [in the German territories] for an ideal revolution” (Schelling 1992, vol. 3, pp. 585–94).

On learning that Alexander von Humboldt's health had worsened, Darwin wrote to his friend Joseph Hooker, then in Paris:

Alexander von Humboldt – romantic adventurer, friend of Goethe, and the very doyen of German science in the first half of the nineteenth century – had preceded Darwin to the Americas. He wrote of his explorations in Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent, during the Years 1799–1804, and elaborated their findings in his greatly celebrated Cosmos. These two multivolume books had a tremendous impact on Darwin and helped forge the romantic conception of nature that underlay his theory of evolution. That romantic conception reveals itself most perspicuously in the moral evaluation of nature and man that Darwin plaited through his two principal works: the Origin of Species and the Descent of Man.

Darwin's conceptions of nature and man have, of course, typically been regarded as the very antithesis of the romantic. The moral theory most often ascribed to him harks back to Hobbes: ethical propositions are presumed to be merely flimflam for efforts at selfish aggrandizement.

A THEORY OF VALUES

Although this century has produced more, and more varied, ethical and metaethical theory than any other, even our more educated and intelligent people are simply embarrassed when asked how they justify the value choices and commitments they make. We could well use a credible superstructure of facts and concepts within which we might carry on intersubjective and intercultural discussions of value differences, discussions that would offer some reasonable prospect of eventual agreement. What follows here is the outline of such a superstructure, a biologically based, naturalistic, species-universal, and prescriptive value theory (McShea, 1990). The theory is designed to answer such questions as these: Can a value statement be true? If so, in what sense and for whom? How can a value statement have prescriptive force?

The theory is an update of a philosophical ethical tradition that includes Aristotle, Spinoza, and especially Hume, who set forth a naturalistic, biologically based account of human nature and the meaning of life. Modern human nature theorists, with whom we would expect to find much common ground include Mackie (1977), Murphy (1982), Ruse (1986), and occasionally Midgley (1978), although most probably would not concur in the understanding of Hume on which the theory is based.

Six Value Bases

As the greatest success of science is not the discovery of this or that truth about things, but the learned ability to think scientifically, so the reward for the study of good value theory is not the discovery of moral laws or truths, but the habit of leading an examined life (which is morality itself).

INTRODUCTION

Traditionally, attempts to relate Aristotle's well-known passion for biology to his ethical thought have focused on two points of intersection. In Nicomachean Ethics I 7, Aristotle relies heavily on the idea that human excellence (or virtue) must be the excellence of a specifically human functional capacity, and his approach to defining that capacity is reminiscent of De Anima II 2-3: Functions shared with plants and animals are ruled out in favor of those that are distinctively human, those associated with reason. This so-called function argument has generated a good deal of scholarly discussion, but a careful reading of it, especially in light of Aristotle's remarks at 1102a 13–32 about the limited need for a scientific understanding of the soul for the purposes of ethics, must lead one to conclude that no detailed understanding of biology was needed to craft it.

A second point of possible intersection on which scholars have focused is Aristotle's concept of a political animal, used often in the biological works and extending to many species other than man. Furthermore, Aristotle's Politics, much more than his Nicomachean Ethics, is a “biological” work, opening with an extended narrative about the natural growth of the polls out of essentially biological origins:

A History of Experimental Psychology was not the comprehensive work that Edwin Boring had envisioned. His original plan had been “to start with the men and the schools as an introduction and then to trace the history of experimentation and thought in the fields of sensation, perception, feeling, emotion, learning, memory, attention, action and thought.” Despite its title, the 1929 book contained only the introductory portion of the larger project, and Boring belatedly realized that he “had not yet got to the experimentation in experimental psychology.” Throughout the 1930s he worked on the conceptual and technical history of research in sensation and perception, which he considered the core of scientific psychology.

In addition to his historical research, Boring tried his hand at textbook writing. Concerned that introductory psychology books did not emphasize strongly enough the findings of experimental research, he collaborated with two longtime professional allies to produce Psychology: A Factual Textbook, published in 1935. Boring's coauthors were Herbert S. Langfeld, his predecessor at Harvard and then head of the psychology department at Princeton, and Harry P. Weld, a professor at Cornell whom he had known since before the First World War. All three men shared a strong positive bias toward the experimental tradition in psychology.

Seeking to produce “an authoritative text” that avoided wrangling over theoretical perspectives, the trio wanted the book “to be science but to have no special point of view.”

In May 1939 about fifty psychologists attended a reunion in New York City to reminisce about their service in the First World War. Many prominent psychologists were on the guest list, including James Angell, Walter V. Bingham, Truman Kelley, Beardsley Ruml, Walter Dill Scott, Edward Thorndike, Leonard Thurstone, John B. Watson, and Robert Yerkes. They gathered to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of their demobilization as members of the Committee on Classification of Personnel, which had directed the army's personnel system during the war, and to congratulate their former commanding officer, Colonel Walter Dill Scott, who was retiring after two decades as president of Northwestern University.

The event was organized by Walter Bingham, the former executive secretary of the committee who was currently serving as president of the New York State Association for Applied Psychology. Bingham had been a vigorous proselytizer on behalf of applied psychology since the Great War. No doubt aware of the increasingly ominous political situation in Europe, he used the reunion to start rebuilding the military psychology network. One colleague had suggested that a military representative be invited so that “a new tie can be forged which will be the [start] of putting the services of some of the old crowd at the disposal of the country, should the emergency arise.” Bingham followed up, and the army sent a lieutenant colonel from the Adjutant General's Office to the gathering.