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Relationality in the Thought of Mary Midgley

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 June 2020

Gregory S. McElwain
Gregory S. McElwain*
Affiliation:
The College of Idaho
*
gmcelwain@collegeofidaho.edu
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Abstract

For over 40 years, Mary Midgley has been celebrated for the sensibility with which she approached some of the most challenging and pressing issues in philosophy. Her expansive corpus addresses such diverse topics as human nature, morality, animals and the environment, gender, science, and religion. While there are many threads that tie together this impressive plurality of topics, the thread of relationality unites much of Midgley's thought on human nature and morality. This paper explores Midgley's pursuit of a relational notion of the self and our connections to others, including animals and the natural world.

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Papers
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Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 87: A Centenary Celebration: Anscombe, Foot, Midgley, Murdoch , July 2020 , pp. 235 - 248
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2020

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References

1 This paper is adapted from portions of McElwain, Gregory S., Mary Midgley: An Introduction (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan: With Selected Variants from the Latin Edition of 1668, ed. Curley, E. M. (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1994), 76Google Scholar.

3 Midgley, Mary, The Ethical Primate: Humans, Freedom and Morality (London: Routledge, 1994), 119CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Midgley, Mary, The Solitary Self: Darwin and the Selfish Gene (Durham: Acumen, 2010), 130–131Google Scholar.

5 Midgley, Mary, Evolution as a Religion: Strange Hopes and Stranger Fears (London: Routledge, [1985] 2002), 136–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Midgley sees connections between notions of the radically free agent and Hobbesian atomism. These notions – which often grow out of the vivid visions of heroic individualism in Nietzsche and Sartre – imagine the self to be radically shaped and determined by the active will. This agent forges its way in the world, independent of the connections and dependences of the outside world.

7 Midgley, Mary, The Myths We Live By (London: Routledge, [2004] 2011), 132CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This coincides with her critique of traditional individualist conceptions of the self as largely masculinist (see McElwain, Mary Midgley, 107–20).

8 Midgley, Mary, ‘Philosophical Plumbing’, in The Impulse to Philosophise: Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 33, ed. Griffiths, Phillips (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 145Google Scholar, italics mine.

9 Op. cit. note 8, 146–47.

10 Midgley, The Solitary Self op. cit. note 4, 64–65.

11 Op. cit note 4, 64.

12 Op. cit. note 4, 125.

13 Op. cit. note 4, 140.

14 Mary Midgley, Science and Poetry (London: Routledge, [2001] 2006), 20.

15 Midgley, Mary, Can't We Make Moral Judgements? (London: Bloomsbury, [1989] 2017), 111Google Scholar.

16 Midgley, Mary, Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature, revised ed. (London: Routledge, [1979] 2002), xxxiiiGoogle Scholar.

17 Midgley, Mary, Animals and Why They Matter (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1983), 111 and 112Google Scholar.

18 Midgley, Mary, Utopias, Dolphins and Computers: Problems of Philosophical Plumbing (London: Routledge, 1996), 111–12Google Scholar.

19 Midgley, Animals and Why They Matter, op. cit. note 17, 114. Cruelty involves a belief that something is a subject capable of suffering. Dogs are kicked and horses are beaten not because they are things (like machines and stuffed animals), but because they are beings that feel and experience pain in a significant way. In other words, belief in animal sentience is essential ‘for exploiting them successfully’. In fact, Midgley points out, ‘exploitation requires sympathy’ (114 and 116). Abuse and cruelty to animals is an outcome of our ability to understand and relate to the ‘inner’ as well as the ‘outer’ states of other animals, coupled with the tendency to devalue or disregard these states.

20 Op. cit. note 17, 118.

21 Op. cit. note 17, 119.

22 Op. cit. note 17, 118.

23 These positions are presented influentially, respectively, by Singer, Peter (Animal Liberation, 2nd ed. [New York: New York Review of Books, (1976) 1990])Google Scholar, and Regan, Tom (The Case for Animal Rights [Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1983])Google Scholar.

24 Mary Midgley, Utopias, Dolphins and Computers, op. cit. note 18, 116.

25 Mary Midgley, The Ethical Primate, op. cit. note 3, 102–3.

26 Mary Midgley, Evolution as a Religion, op. cit. note 5, 178.

27 Op. cit. note 5, 170.

28 Midgley, Science and Poetry, op. cit. note 14, 20.

29 Mary Midgley, Utopias, Dolphins and Computers, op. cit. note 18, 124.

30 Mary Midgley, Interview by Gregory S. McElwain, March 6, 2011, in Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK.

31 Donald Worster examines the extent to which organicist visions of nature influence ethics in Nature's Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (Studies in Environment and History), 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1977] 1994). See also Glacken, C. J., Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967)Google Scholar.

32 Mary Midgley, Science and Poetry, op. cit. note 14, 258. Emphasis removed.

33 Midgley, Mary, ‘Introduction: The Not-So-Simple Earth,’ in Earthy Realism: The Meaning of Gaia, ed. Midgley, Mary (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2007), 3Google Scholar. See Lovelock, James, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1979] 2000)Google Scholar.

34 Midgley, Mary, ‘Visions, Secular and Sacred’, The Hastings Center Report 25, no. 5 (1995), 26CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

35 Mary Midgley, Interview by Gregory S. McElwain, May 26, 2015, in Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK.

36 Mary Midgley, Interview by Gregory S. McElwain, October 23, 2017, in Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK.