Recent Tendencies in Ethics: Three Lectures to Clergy Given at Cambridge — John Shaqi
Recent Tendencies in Ethics: Three Lectures to Clergy Given at CambridgeSorley, W. R. (William Ritchie)
Philosophy
Recent Tendencies in Ethics: Three Lectures to Clergy Given at Cambridge
Sorley, W. R. (William Ritchie)
Ethics
If we return to the conflict of groups we shall see that even there
purposive selection enters. How (we may ask) do those qualities of
obedience, willingness to help another, and the like, arise in a
community and thus enable it to win the victory over a less organised
or more savage enemy? Surely it is not a sufficient answer to say that
these qualities have been somehow developed, and then have contributed
to the victory of the community possessing them. All through civilised
life, and probably throughout a great part of savage life, there is
the keenest enquiry into and perception of the qualities which
will make for success. These qualities are carefully selected and
positively fostered. You drill your armies--that is, you cultivate
the habit of discipline and all that discipline implies--so that the
victory may be gained; in other words, the quality is not produced by
natural selection at all. The issue may resemble the result of natural
selection, for it leads to conflict and defeat of the unfit; but the
conqueror is he who has foreseen the conditions of the struggle:
has deliberately equipped his forces for the fight, and been the
intelligent organiser of victory.
Even in the case of competition between individuals, at least among
civilised men, it is clear that natural selection is very far from
being the only factor. A man trains himself for a profession. It does
not just somehow come about that a number of people accidentally
develop certain varieties of occupation, and that natural selection
makes play with this result, cutting off the unfit and leaving only
those who are fairly well adapted to their positions. Something of
this sort no doubt takes place to a limited extent; but, so far as it
does take place, our methods are denounced as defective and, perhaps,
as old-fashioned. 'Haphazard' is a wasteful principle, and should be
superseded by intelligent initiative and deliberate preparation. And
this indeed is the usual process. One adapts oneself carefully and of
set purpose to the conditions of one's life, instead of simply waiting
for natural selection to cut one off should one happen to be unfit.
Even among animals there are certain processes which cannot be brought
under natural selection. There are the first efforts, slight as they
may be, towards learning by experience. There are also all those facts
which Darwin classes under sexual selection, where there is a positive
choosing, due no doubt not to intelligent purpose but nevertheless to
a subjective impulse. This marks the beginning of the end of the
reign of natural selection, because in it for the purely objective or
external factor there is substituted an internal, subjective factor;
instead of the process of cutting off unsuitable individuals among
chance varieties there appears the process of selecting that variety
which pleases or attracts.
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