Notes

  1. . Aristotle Nichomachean Ethics 1178a. 6–7.
  2. . Arthur Schopenhauer, On Human Nature (1897; reprint ed., London: George Allen & Unwin, 1957), p. 18.
  3. . Joris Karl Huysmans, Against Nature, trans. Robert Baldick (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1966).
  4. . More variants could be obtained by applying a distinction between axiology (judgments of worth) and deontology (judgments about what one must, may, or may not do). Axiology only partly constrains deontology. On some views only what is good may be done; on others whatever is not bad may be done. The number of variant arguments, both naturalist and antinaturalist, could be multiplied accordingly. But these refinements will not affect my discussion, and I shall neglect them. Nor shall I offer to discriminate between kinds of value, ethical and otherwise. I shall require only the assumption that values, or ethics, provide rational reasons for acting.
  5. . Cf.: “Reason deals in neutral descriptions…. Value terminology will be the prerogative of the will;…pure choice, pure movement, and not thought or vision…” (Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good [London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970], p. 8).
  6. . John Stuart Mill, “On Human Nature,” in Three Essays on Religion (New York: Greenwood Press, 1969).
  7. . Nelson Goodman, Fact, Fiction and Forecast, 2d ed. (Indianapolis: Bobbs‐Merill Co., 1965), p. 57
  8. . John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism (Indianapolis: Bobbs‐Merrill Co., 1957), p. 44.
  9. . H.Frankfurt, “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person,” Journal of Philosophy  68 (1971): 5–20.
  10. . Aristotle Nichomachean Ethics 1097b30.
  11. . Ibid., 1098a 18.
  12. . Thomas Henry Huxley and Julian Huxley, Evolution and Ethics (1947; reprint ed., New York: Kraus Reprint, 1969), p. 125.
  13. . As quoted in Ronald Munson, ed., Man and Nature: Philosophical Issues in Biology (New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1971), pp. 270–71.
  14. . Huxley and Huxley, p. 82.
  15. . Ibid., 6. 80.
  16. . Larry, Wright, “Functions.,” Philosophical Review  82 (1973): 139–68.
  17. . For some criticisms of this approach see C. Boorse, “Wright on Functions,” Philosophical Review 85 (1976): 70–86, and Andrew Woodfield, Teleology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), pp. 82–85, and further references given in the latter.
  18. . Cf. James D. Wallace, Virtues and Vices (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1978). Wallace claims (p. 24) that adaptation is a “normative fact” for which natural selection provides an objective explanation in purely biological terms. But see my critical discussion of Wallace's book in Nous (in press).
  19. . I believe this idea comes from a book by Lecomte du Nouy which I cannot now trace. A related difficulty is discussed by R. C. Lewontin: “If ecological niches can be specified only by the organisms that occupy them, evolution cannot be described as a process of adaptation because all organisms are already adapted” (“Adaptation,” Scientific American [September 19781, p. 215). The solution Lewontin offers is the “Red Queen Hypothesis,” attributed to Leigh van Valen: Species change in response to changing environments, and organisms have to “keep running to stay in the same place.” This saves the notion of evolution by adaptation from its apparent absurdity, but it does not solve the philosophical problem in the text.
  20. . See, e.g., the last chapters of Richard Dawkin's The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976) and T. A. Goudge's The Ascent of Life (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1967).
  21. . David Hume, Treatise on Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby‐Bigge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 271.
  22. . In Philebus 45a‐b Plato describes the greatest and most intense pleasures as being those experienced in diseased conditions. Sigmund Freud says that the pleasures of sublimation can never be as intense as those of direct instinctual satisfaction (The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Feud, trans. James Strachey et al. [London: Hogarth Press, 1957–73], 21:79); and Mill insists that the “higher” pleasures are preferable though they are not greater (n. 8 above).
  23. . J. Bowlby, Attachment (New York: Basic Books, 1969), p. 59.
  24. . Mary Midgley, Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1978), p. 274.
  25. . Freud, 22:77.
  26. . Paul D. MacLean, “On the Evolution of Three Mentalities,” in New Dimensions in Psychiatry, ed. S. Arieti and G. Chrzanowski, vol. 2 (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1977).
  27. . Edward O. Wilson, On Human Nature (New York: Bantam Books, 1978), pp. 149–50.
  28. . S. J. Gould, Ever Since Darwin (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1977), p. 267.
  29. . Mary, Midgley, “Gene Juggling,” Philosophy  54 (October 1979): 453.
  30. . Cf. L.King'sWhat Is DiseasePhilosophy of Science  21 (1954): 193–203, for the view that it can, and C. Boorse's “On the Distinction Between Disease and Illness,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 5 (1975): 49–68, for the contrary view.
  31. . Theodosius Dobzhanky, Genetic Diversity and Human Equality (New York: Basic Books, 1973), pp. 21–22.
  32. . S. A. Shields, “Functionalism, Darwinism, and the Psychology of Women,” in Psychology of Women, ed. J. H. Williams (New York: W. W. Norton & Go., 1979), pp. 23–32.
  33. . Joyce Trebilcott, “Sex Roles: The Argument from Nature,” in Philosophy of Woman: Classical to Current Concepts, ed. Mary B. Mahowald (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1977), p. 292.
  34. . Midgley (n. 24 above), p. 265.
  35. . Ibid., p. 186.
  36. . Lionel Tiger, Men in Groups (New York: Vintage Press, 1970).
  37. . W. B. Webb, “Sleep,” in The Encyclopaedia of Ignorance, ed. R. Duncan arid M. Weston‐Smith (Toronto: Pergamon Press, 1977), p. 375.
  38. . Carl Sagan, The Dragons of Eden (New York: Random House, 1977). p. 131.
  39. . John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill, Essays on Sex Equality, ed. Alice S. Rossi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), p. 154; Trebilcott, p. 291.
  40. . This distinction was made clear to me by P. van den Berghe in a paper read to a colloquium on sociobiology, University of Toronto, Spring 1979.
  41. . Dobzhansky (n. 31 above, p. 33) makes essentially the same point with respect to the genetic effects of caste: “Genetically conditioned adaptedness will be dissipated for at least two reasons. First, inept progeny will be pressed to follow their parents' careers despite the genetic incapacity. Second, whatever natural selection may have operated in the formation of the caste gene pool will probably be modified, abandoned, and perhaps even reversed.” In the text I imagine that there may be conditions under which selection continues but is very slight.
  42. . K. F. Rotkin, “The Phallacy of our Sexual Norm,” in Beyond Sex Role Stereotypes, ed. A. G. Kaplan and J. P. Bean (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1976), pp. 155, 157.
  43. . M. Jouvet, “Does a Genetic Programming of the Brain Occur during Paradoxical Sleep?” (paper).
  44. . For some brilliant variations on this theme see Stanislaw Lem's “Die Kultur als Fehler” in his A Perfect Vacuum: Perfect Reviews of Nonexistent Books, trans. Michael Kardel (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979).
  45. . Cf. Jean Piaget's notion of behavior as the “motor of evolution.” I owe to Francis Burton the realization that Piaget's idea is essentially a generalization of Charles Darwin's theory of sexual selection.
  46. . Edward O. Wilson, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975), p. 555.