Mary Midgley

Mary Midgley, née Scrutton, (b. 13 September 1919) is a British moral philosopher. She was a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, and is best known for her popular works on religion, science and ethics. She strongly opposes reductionist and scientistic philosophies and is especially concerned with attempts, as she sees it, to make science function as a substitute for the humanities, a role for which she claims it is wholy inadequate. Midgley has famously sparred with Richard Dawkins over selfish genes and memes and has also written in favour of a moral interpretation of the Gaia theory.

Thought and writings

Midgley sees philosophy as plumbing, that is, something that nobody notices until it goes wrong. "Then suddenly we become aware of some bad smells, and we have to take up the floorboards and look at the concepts of even the most ordinary piece of thinking. The great philosophers ... noticed how badly things were going wrong, and made suggestions about how they could be dealt with." 2

Related Topics:
Plumbing - 2

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She is not a Christian, as she believes that it is impossible for educated people to subscribe to many of its central doctrines. However, she also believes that the world's religions can't simply be ignored: "It is absurd to talk as if religion consisted entirely of mindless anxiety, bad cosmology, and human sacrifice." 1

Related Topics:
Christian - Doctrine - 1

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Midgley's first book Beast and Man (published in 1978) was an examination of human nature and a reaction against both the reductionism of sociobiology and the relativism and behaviorism then prevalent in much of social science. Midgley argued that humans were more similar to animals than many social scientists then acknowledged, while animals were in many ways more sophisticated than humans. Midgley also criticised the belief that humans could be understood in terms of their genetic make-up, as popularised in Dawkins' The Selfish Gene (published in 1976). Instead, Midgley argued that humans (and their relationship to animals) could be better understood by using the qualitative methods of ethology and comparative psychology.

Related Topics:
1978 - Sociobiology - Relativism - Behaviorism - The Selfish Gene - 1976 - Qualitative - Ethology - Comparative psychology

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Writing in the 2002 Introduction to the reprint of Evolution as a Religion (first published in 1985) Midgley reports that she wrote both this book and the later Science as Salvation (1992) to counter the "quasi-scientific speculation" of "certain remarkable prophetic and metaphysical passages that appeared suddenly in scientific books.. often in their last chapters." The first book dealt with the theories of evolutionists (including Dawkins') while the second book dealt with physicists and Artificial intelligence researchers. Midgley writes that she still believes that these theories "have nothing to do with any reputable theory of evolution" and will not solve the real social and moral problems the world is facing, either through genetic engineering or using machines. She concludes: "These schemes still seem to me to be just displacement activities proposed in order to avoid facing our real difficulties."

Related Topics:
2002 - 1985 - 1992 - Prophetic - Metaphysical - Physicists - Artificial intelligence - Social - Moral - Genetic engineering

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Midgley and Dawkins

In volume 53 (1978) of Philosophy (the journal of the Royal Institute of Philosophy), J.L. Mackie published an article entitled The Law of the Jungle: Moral Alternatives and Principles of Evolution http://www.royalinstitutephilosophy.org/articles/article.php?id=11, praising Richard Dawkins' book The Selfish Gene, and indicating ways in which the ideas discussed by Dawkins' might be applied to moral philosophy. Midgley responded in volume 54 (1979) with Gene-Juggling http://www.royalinstitutephilosophy.org/articles/article.php?id=14. This article criticised Dawkins' concepts, but was written in a remarkably intemperate and personal tone, and, in turn, has been criticised by many biologists as showing a fundamental misunderstanding of both Dawkins' ideas and ethology in general. For example, for rhetorical purposes, Midgley interprets the expression "selfish gene" to literally mean that genes have a psychological dimension.

Related Topics:
1978 - Royal Institute of Philosophy - J.L. Mackie - Richard Dawkins - The Selfish Gene - 1979 - Ethology - Rhetorical - Gene - Psychological

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Mackie http://www.royalinstitutephilosophy.org/articles/article.php?id=10 and Dawkins http://www.royalinstitutephilosophy.org/articles/article.php?id=5 subsequently responded to Midgley in volume 56 (1981). Both authors criticised her rudeness and argued that Midgley had comprehensively misunderstood their arguments. In volume 58 (1983), Midgley responded to these criticisms http://www.royalinstitutephilosophy.org/articles/article.php?id=15, saying : "Apology is due, not only for the delay but for the impatient tone of my article. One should not lose one?s temper, and doing so always makes for confused argument. My basic objections remain. But I certainly ought to have expressed them more clearly and temperately".

Related Topics:
1981 - 1983

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The bad feeling between Dawkins and Midgely caused by this affair apparently remains3, while Midgley has continued to criticise Dawkins' ideas. For example, writing in The Guardian in 2005, she argued:

Related Topics:
3 - The Guardian - 2005

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:" widespread discontent with the neo-Darwinist - or Dawkinsist - orthodoxy that claims something which Darwin himself denied, namely that natural selection is the sole and exclusive cause of evolution, making the world therefore, in some important sense, entirely random. This is itself a strange faith which ought not to be taken for granted as part of science." http://www.guardian.co.uk/letters/story/0,,1563242,00.html

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Befitting her previous misunderstandings of ethology, this argument confuses the randomness of mutation for non-random selection, and caricatures neo-Darwinism as centring solely on natural selection when it openly includes processes such as sexual selection and neutral evolution. Ironically, in his 1986 book, The Blind Watchmaker, Dawkins presents a similar caricature to illustrate what neo-Darwinism is not.

Related Topics:
Mutation - Sexual selection - Neutral evolution - 1986 - The Blind Watchmaker

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