The Origin of Ethics and the Rise of Moral Relativism

Abstract

Darwin neatly summed up his view of ethics and morality in his Autobiography, stating that one who does not believe in God or an afterlife—as he did not—“can have for his rule of life, as far as I can see, only to follow those impulses and instincts which are the strongest or which seem to him the best one.”¹ This was a radical departure from traditional ways of grounding morality, for Christianity relied on divine revelation, Kant and many Enlightenment thinkers grounded ethics in human rationality, and even those British moral philosophers basing ethics on moral feeling usually considered it an immutable part of human nature, whatever its origin. The philosopher David Hull in The Metaphysics of Evolution underscored the revolutionary nature of Darwin’s theory for ethics, stating, “Because so many moral, ethical, and political theories depend on some notion or other of human nature, Darwin’s theory brought into question all these theories.”² Even before Darwin wrote his autobiography, many opponents feared the ethical consequences of Darwinism, and Darwin’s comment about following our instincts surely did not soothe those worries.