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On Being Terrestrial

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

Mary Midgley
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Extract

We will start with a fable—

There was once a creator who wanted to create free beings.

The other creators, it seems, didn't share this ambition, indeed they thought his project was philosophically confused. They were well satisfied with their own worlds. But our creator (we will call him C) sat down to work it out.

‘How will you even start?’ asked his friend D, the Doubter.

‘Well, I know what I won't do’, answered C. ‘I won't just give them an empty faculty named Desire, and tell them to invent values and want what they choose. Unless they want something definite for a start, they won't even be able to start choosing.’

‘Exactly’, said D.

‘So what I think I must do,’ C went on, ‘is to give them a lot of desires which conflict, and make them bright enough to see they have got to do something about it.’

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 17: Objectivity and Cultural Divergence , March 1984 , pp. 79 - 91
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1984

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References

1 See Kant, , The Moral Law, Paton, H. J. (trans.) (London: Hutchinson University Library, 1948) Ch. 1, Sect. 5, 61.Google Scholar

2 All page references for The Descent of Man are given for the first edition, reprinted by Princeton University Press in 1981 (paperback). Later editions vary the arrangement a good deal because Darwin continued to work on his argument, but in all ‘the development of the Intellectual and Moral Faculties’ figures prominently and may be found in the index.

3 Richard Hofstadter's fascinating book Social Darwinism in American Thought (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955)Google Scholar documents the story, tracing Spencer's enormous influence (he outsold every other philosopher in the United States at that time) and describing the pains which he took—especially on his lecture tour in the 1880s—to leave no doubt about his approval of paticular tycoons and their methods. The effect has been profound and lasting.

4 Harvard University Press, 1975.

5 See his paper ‘The Social Function of Intellect’, in Growing Points in Ethology, Bateson, P. P. G. and Hinde, R. A. (eds) (Cambridge University Press, 1976).Google Scholar