Julian Huxley's Evolutionary Ethics

Abstract

IN I943, in celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the delivery by his grandfather, T. H. Huxley, of his famous Romanes lecture, Evolution and Ethics, Julian Huxley was invited to deliver a Romanes lecture on the same subject. The honorable occasion, the fame of the lectureship, and the distinction of the lecturer as scientist and publicist give Julian Huxley's essay an external claim to our attention which ethical essays do not always possess. But Huxley makes intrinsic claim on our attention since in the lecture itself and in the essay that introduces the published text' Huxley argues that the criticisms to which older versions of evolutionary ethics were open do not apply to his own. These criticisms have recently been restated with exemplary thoroughness and freshness by Wi]liam S. Quillian, Jr., in The Moral Theory of Evolutionary Naturalism,2 and it is this study that Huxley has particularly in mind. Huxley does not try to defend the older theories from Quillian's attacks but points out that the critic does not consider contemporary developments in evolutionary ethics, and that these are free from the old errors. In these notes I shall try to show that Julian Huxley's version of evolutionary ethics is open to radical objections which render it unacceptable. But in passing it should be noted that at least some of the fallacies that will be analyzed are formally identical with those committed by the nineteenth-century evolutionary ethicists which Quillian has so effectively criticized.