Mary Midgley

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Mary Midgley, née Scrutton (born September 13, 1919), is an English moral philosopher. She was a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Newcastle University and is known for her work on religion, science, ethics and humankind's relationship with animals. She wrote her first book, Beast And Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1978), when she was in her fifties. It was followed by several others, including Heart and Mind: The Varieties of Moral Experience (1981), Animals And Why They Matter (1983); Wickedness (1984); and The Ethical Primate: Humans, Freedom and Morality (1994).

Midgley strongly opposes reductionist and scientistic philosophies, and is particularly concerned with attempts to make science a substitute for the humanities, a role for which she claims it is wholly inadequate. She has written extensively about what philosophers can learn from nature, particularly animals. A number of her books and articles have discussed philosophical ideas appearing in popular science, including those of Richard Dawkins. She has also written in favour of a moral interpretation of the Gaia hypothesis.

The Guardian has described her as a "fiercely combative philosopher" and the "foremost scourge of scientific pretension" in the United Kingdom.^[1]

[edit] Early life and education

Midgley's father was a King's College chaplain.

Midgley was born in London to Lesley and Tom Scrutton, a curate in Dulwich and later chaplain of King's College Chapel, and was raised in Cambridge, Greenford, and Ealing. She was educated at Downe House School in Cold Ash, Berkshire, (until 1922 based in Down House, the former home of Charles Darwin) where she developed her interest in classics and philosophy:

She read Greats at Oxford, going up to Somerville in 1938.

She took the Oxford entrance exam in the autumn of 1937, gaining a place at Somerville College. In the year prior to attending college, it was arranged that she would live in Austria for three months in order to learn German. However, this was cut short after just a month due to the worsening political situation.

At Somerville, she studied Mods and Greats alongside Iris Murdoch. She studied philosophy as a part of the Greats course, along with Greek and Roman history. Although she passed with a First, she commented that the course had difficulties with students like herself who were stronger in some parts of the course than others. However, she does advocate teaching philosophy alongside other disciplines:

Several of her lasting friendships that began at Oxford were with scientists, and she credits them with having educated her in a number of scientific disciplines.^[4] After a split in the Labour club at Oxford over the Soviet Union’s actions, she was on the committee of the newly formed Democratic Socialist Club alongside Tony Crosland and Roy Jenkins. She has speculated that her career in philosophy may also have been affected by women having a greater voice in discussion at the time due to many male undergraduates leaving after a year because of the Second World War.

[edit] Academic life

Midgley's first book, Beast and Man, was published when she was in her late fifties.

After leaving Oxford, she worked for the Civil Service and as a teacher at Downe School and at Bedford School. She returned to Oxford in 1947 to work for Gilbert Murray and, later, for academic employment and research. In 1949, she went to Reading University, teaching in the philosophy department there. She married Geoffrey Midgley in 1950 (he died in 1997), and they relocated to Newcastle and had three sons. Both she and her husband taught for many years at the University of Newcastle, and she still lives in the city.

During this time, she began studying ethology and this led to her first book, Beast and Man, which she had published at the age of 59. "I wrote no books until I was a good 50, and I'm jolly glad because I didn't know what I thought before then."^[1] Since then, she has written a series of books and other publications, which have led to her being described as "fiercely combative," "the most frightening philosopher in the country," and "the foremost scourge of scientific pretension in this country: someone whose wit is admired even by those who feel she sometimes oversteps the mark."^[1]

Midgley was awarded an honorary D. Litt by Durham University in 1995. Her autobiography,The Owl Of Minerva, was published in 2005.

[edit] 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."^[6]

Despite her Christian upbringing, Midgley is not religious. However, she also believes that the world's religions can't simply be ignored or dismissed: "It is absurd to talk as if religion consisted entirely of mindless anxiety, bad cosmology, and human sacrifice."^[1]

It turns out that the evils which have infested religion are not confined to it, but are ones that can accompany any successful human institution. Nor is it even clear that religion itself is something that the human race either can or should be cured of.^[7]

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

Writing in the 2002 introduction to the reprint of her 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"^[8] of "certain remarkable prophetic and metaphysical passages that appeared suddenly in scientific books.. often in their last chapters."^[9] The first book dealt with the theories of evolutionary biologists, 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,"^[10] 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."^[10] Her first two books were available as free articles on the Internet for two years, before being published, and removed from the web.

In exposing these rhetorical attempts to turn science into a comprehensive ideology, I am not attacking science but defending it against dangerous misconstructions.^[11]

Her most recent publication is a philosophical autobiography The Owl of Minerva. In it, Midgley writes of her family history, her personal development, her observation of her own family and its internal moral dilemmas (such as the debate over vegetarianism) along with her analysis and reflection on the issues of humanity.

[edit] On reductionism and materialism

She argues against reductionism or the attempt to impose any one approach to understanding the world as the only right way to see things. She suggests that there are "many maps, many windows"^[12] on reality and argues that "we need scientific pluralism - the recognition that there are many independent forms and sources of knowledge - rather than reductivism, the conviction that one fundamental form underlies them all and settles everything,"^[13] and that it is helpful to think about the world as "a huge aquarium. We cannot see it as a whole from above, so we peer in at it through a number of small windows ... We can eventually make quite a lot of sense of this habitat if we patiently put together the data from different angles. but if we insist that our own window is the only one worth looking through, we shall not get very far."^[13]

She argues that "acknowledging matter as somehow akin to and penetrated by mind is not adding a new...assumption...it is becoming aware of something we are doing already." She suggests that "this topic is essentially the one which caused Einstein often to remark that the really surprising thing about science is that it works at all...the simple observation that the laws of thought turn out to be the laws of things."^[14]

[edit] Midgley–Dawkins debate

Midgley famously wrote of Richard Dawkins in 1979 that she had previously "not attended to [him], thinking it unnecessary to "break a butterfly upon a wheel,"^[15]

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, praising Richard Dawkins' book The Selfish Gene, and discussing how its ideas might be applied to moral philosophy.^[16]

Midgley responded in volume 54 (1979) with "Gene-Juggling," an article arguing that The Selfish Gene was about psychological egoism, rather than evolution.^[18] The paper criticized Dawkins' concepts, but was judged by its targets to be intemperate and personal in tone, and as having misunderstood Dawkins' ideas. However, Midgley has disputed this view, pointing out that while Dawkins purports to be talking about genes - that is chemical arrangements , he nonetheless slides over to saying that 'we are born selfish' (The Selfish Gene, p3). As Midgley points out, there is a major difference between 'us' and 'our genes'.

She wrote that she had previously "not attended to Dawkins, thinking it unnecessary to "break a butterfly upon a wheel. But Mr Mackie’s article is not the only indication I have lately met of serious attention being paid to his fantasies."^[19] In a rejoinder in 1981, Dawkins complained that the comment was "hard to match, in reputable journals, for its patronising condescension toward a fellow academic."^[20] He wrote that she "raises the art of misunderstanding to dizzy heights. My central point had no connection with what she alleges. I am not even very directly interested in man, or at least not in his emotional nature. My book is about the evolution of life, not the ethics of one particular, rather aberrant, species."^[21]

In volume 58 (1983), Midgley replied again, 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...[but] My basic objections remain."^[22]

The bad feeling between Dawkins and Midgley caused by this affair apparently remains. In a note to page 55 in the 2nd edition of The Selfish Gene (1989), Dawkins refers to Midgley's "highly intemperate and vicious paper." Midgley, meanwhile, has continued to criticize Dawkins' ideas. In her recent writings, Evolution as a Religion: Strange Hopes and Stranger Fears (2002) and The Myths We Live By (2003), she writes about what she sees as his confused use of language — the sleight of hand involved in using terms such as "selfish" in different ways without alerting the reader to the change in meaning — and some of what she regards as his rhetoric ("genes exert ultimate power over behaviour"), which she argues is more akin to religion than science. She wrote in a letter to the The Guardian in 2005:

[There is] 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.^[23]

In an interview with The Independent in September 2007, she argued that Dawkins' views on evolution are ideologically driven: "The ideology Dawkins is selling is the worship of competition. It is projecting a Thatcherite take on economics on to evolution. It's not an impartial scientific view; it's a political drama."^[24] On the other hand, Dawkins, in the second part of his documentary The Genius of Charles Darwin (2008) labels his views as liberal and asserts that right-wing economics are Social Darwinist in nature.

In April 2009, Mary reiterated her critical interpretation of The Selfish Gene as part of a series of articles on Hobbes published in The Guardian^[25].

[edit] Publications

[edit] Notes

[edit] Further reading