Daily Archives: December 25, 2022

survival of the fittest, term made famous in the fifth edition (published in 1869) of On the Origin of Species by British naturalist Charles Darwin, which suggested that organisms best adjusted to their environment are the most successful in surviving and reproducing. Darwin borrowed the term from English sociologist and philosopher Herbert Spencer, who first used it in his 1864 book Principles of Biology. (Spencer came up with the phrase only after reading Darwins work.)

Darwin did not consider the process of evolution as the survival of the fittest; he regarded it as survival of the fitter, because the struggle for existence (a term he took from English economist and demographer Thomas Malthus) is relative and thus not absolute. Instead, the winners with respect to species within ecosystems could become losers with a change of circumstances. For example, fossil evidence supports the notion that the mammoth (Mammuthus) was more fit during the most recent ice age (which ended roughly 11,700 years ago), but it became less fit as humans hunted it and the worlds climate warmed; fossil evidence suggests that the mammoth succumbed to extinction a few thousand years later.

Darwins theory of evolution by natural selection entailed three crucial elements: variation, reproduction, and heritability. Variations in the physical features of organisms that tend to benefit an individual (or a species) in the struggle for existence are preserved and passed on (or selected), because the individuals (or species) that have them tend to survive. The success or failure of a given variation is not known when it emerges; it is known only retrospectively, after organisms that possess it either grow and mature and pass it to their own offspring or fail to mature and reproduce.

Importantly, Darwin was influenced by the thinking of English physicist and mathematician Isaac Newton, whose system emphasized experimentation, mathematics, and logic over subjective sense experience. During Darwins time, his evolutionary theory was an attempt to construct a similar system for the living world, a frontier not yet crossed in the biological sciences.

Some philosophers and scientists have suggested that the notion of survival of the fittest is an example of circular reasoningthat is, a tautology (a statement framed in such a way that it cannot be falsified without inconsistency). In tautologies, any true statements that follow are a matter of definition. Indeed, describing those that survive as the fittest is similar to stating that those that survive survive. British philosopher Karl Popper considered survival of the fittest self-evident at first; however, he changed his mind after realizing that Darwin posited variation axiomatically; that is, Darwin noted that all individuals did not start with the same set of characters (or traits). Therefore, the forces affecting survival did not weigh on individuals and species equally; there were always variations, some of which would prove favourable and confer fitness over others.

Darwin was also influenced by Scottish philosopher Adam Smith, whose An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations was published in 1776. In this work, Smith venerated self-interest: It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. Such self-interest was based on a philosophical view of the world that posited that only individuals, and not groups, were the important elements. In so doing, Smith was aligning himself with a nominalist worldview (which held that reality is only made up of concrete and individual items). According to Smith, what he termed the invisible handa metaphor in which beneficial social and economic outcomes arose from the accumulated self-interested actions of individualswould settle matters between people, bringing a sense of balance to their performance. Smiths worldview was associated with the doctrine of laissez-faire economics (the policy of minimum governmental interference in the economic affairs of individuals and society), and it is reflected in Darwins own account of evolution by natural selection:

It may be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life.

The logic of survival of the fittest and natural selection was thought to be transferable to humanity. Within the context of the ascendancy of Victorian England (18201914), a perspective arose that the more intelligent would rule the less intelligent, or those who were less fit. To realize this perspective, Darwins cousin, British scientist Francis Galton, who coined the term eugenics (derived from the Greek for well-born), established the Eugenics Education Society of London in 1907. Galton, along with many others among the educated classes, hoped to actively discourage the overbreeding of the less fit and so preserve what was best in Victorian society.

As it related to the concept of survival of the fittest, eugenics was divided into positive and negative forms, with positive eugenics actively encouraging good breeding and negative eugenics preventing bad breeding. A pertinent example of negative eugenics appeared in the work of American psychologist Robert Yerkes. During World War I Yerkes analyzed the intelligence of U.S. Army recruits, and he concluded that heritable traits accounted for differences in intelligence between races, despite his use of culturally biased intelligence tests. U.S. Pres. Calvin Coolidge, who was influenced by Yerkess findings, signed the 1924 Immigration Act, a law that prevented people from immigrating to the United States by virtue of their nationality or race. In 1907 Indiana became the first U.S. state to pass laws that allowed for compulsory sterilization of those who had been classified as unfit. More than 29 other states would follow, passing their own compulsory sterilization laws; however, the eugenics movement in the U.S. declined in popularity after the 1920s.

The eugenics movement burgeoned in Europe during the 1920s and 1930s. German politician Adolf Hitler wrote, in Mein Kampf (1925), that positive steps should be taken to encourage the flourishing of the fitter, because the system itself often worked against them. In this passage Hitler appears to twist the tenets of Darwinism to support his fascist worldview. Eugenics lost much of its appeal in Europe and elsewhere after World War II, due to its association with Nazi Germany.

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Survival of the fittest | Definition, Applications, & Examples

Argument asserting that it is fallacious to explain something good reductively

In philosophical ethics, the naturalistic fallacy is the claim that any reductive explanation of good, in terms of natural properties such as pleasant or desirable, is false. The term was introduced by British philosopher G. E. Moore in his 1903 book Principia Ethica.[1]

Moore's naturalistic fallacy is closely related to the isought problem, which comes from David Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature (173840). However, unlike Hume's view of the isought problem, Moore (and other proponents of ethical non-naturalism) did not consider the naturalistic fallacy to be at odds with moral realism.

The naturalistic fallacy should not be confused with the appeal to nature, which is exemplified by forms of reasoning such as "Something is natural; therefore, it is morally acceptable" or "This property is unnatural; therefore, this property is undesirable." Such inferences are common in discussions of medicine, sexuality, environmentalism, gender roles, race, and carnism.

The term naturalistic fallacy is sometimes used to describe the deduction of an ought from an is (the isought problem).[2] This usually takes the form of saying that If people do something (e.g., eat three times a day, smoke cigarettes, dress warmly in cold weather), then people ought to do that thing. It becomes a naturalistic fallacy when the isought problem ("People eat three times a day, so it is morally good for people to eat three times a day") is justified by claiming that whatever practice exists is a natural one ("because eating three times a day is pleasant and desirable").

In using his categorical imperative, Kant deduced that experience was necessary for their application. But experience on its own or the imperative on its own could not possibly identify an act as being moral or immoral. We can have no certain knowledge of morality from them, being incapable of deducing how things ought to be from the fact that they happen to be arranged in a particular manner in experience.

Bentham, in discussing the relations of law and morality, found that when people discuss problems and issues they talk about how they wish it would be, instead of how it actually is. This can be seen in discussions of natural law and positive law. Bentham criticized natural law theory because in his view it was a naturalistic fallacy, claiming that it described how things ought to be instead of how things are.

According to G. E. Moore's Principia Ethica, when philosophers try to define good reductively, in terms of natural properties like pleasant or desirable, they are committing the naturalistic fallacy.

...the assumption that because some quality or combination of qualities invariably and necessarily accompanies the quality of goodness, or is invariably and necessarily accompanied by it, or both, this quality or combination of qualities is identical with goodness. If, for example, it is believed that whatever is pleasant is and must be good, or that whatever is good is and must be pleasant, or both, it is committing the naturalistic fallacy to infer from this that goodness and pleasantness are one and the same quality. The naturalistic fallacy is the assumption that because the words 'good' and, say, 'pleasant' necessarily describe the same objects, they must attribute the same quality to them.[3]

In defense of ethical non-naturalism, Moore's argument is concerned with the semantic and metaphysical underpinnings of ethics. In general, opponents of ethical naturalism reject ethical conclusions drawn from natural facts.

Moore argues that good, in the sense of intrinsic value, is simply ineffable: it cannot be defined because it is not a natural property, being "one of those innumerable objects of thought which are themselves incapable of definition, because they are the ultimate terms by reference to which whatever 'is' capable of definition must be defined".[4] On the other hand, ethical naturalists eschew such principles in favor of a more empirically accessible analysis of what it means to be good: for example, in terms of pleasure in the context of hedonism.

That "pleased" does not mean "having the sensation of red", or anything else whatever, does not prevent us from understanding what it does mean. It is enough for us to know that "pleased" does mean "having the sensation of pleasure", and though pleasure is absolutely indefinable, though pleasure is pleasure and nothing else whatever, yet we feel no difficulty in saying that we are pleased. The reason is, of course, that when I say "I am pleased", I do not mean that "I" am the same thing as "having pleasure". And similarly no difficulty need be found in my saying that "pleasure is good" and yet not meaning that "pleasure" is the same thing as "good", that pleasure means good, and that good means pleasure. If I were to imagine that when I said "I am pleased", I meant that I was exactly the same thing as "pleased", I should not indeed call that a naturalistic fallacy, although it would be the same fallacy as I have called naturalistic with reference to Ethics.

In 7, Moore argues that a property is either a complex of simple properties, or else it is irreducibly simple. Complex properties can be defined in terms of their constituent parts but a simple property has no parts. In addition to good and pleasure, Moore suggests that colour qualia are undefined: if one wants to understand yellow, one must see examples of it. It will do no good to read the dictionary and learn that yellow names the colour of egg yolks and ripe lemons, or that yellow names the primary colour between green and orange on the spectrum, or that the perception of yellow is stimulated by electromagnetic radiation with a wavelength of between 570 and 590 nanometers, because yellow is all that and more, by the open question argument.

Bernard Williams called Moore's use of the term naturalistic fallacy, a "spectacular misnomer", the question being metaphysical, as opposed to rational.[5]

Some people use the phrase, naturalistic fallacy or appeal to nature, in a different sense, to characterize inferences of the form "Something is natural; therefore, it is morally acceptable" or "This property is unnatural; therefore, this property is undesirable." Such inferences are common in discussions of medicine, homosexuality, environmentalism, and veganism.

The naturalistic fallacy is the idea that what is found in nature is good. It was the basis for social Darwinism, the belief that helping the poor and sick would get in the way of evolution, which depends on the survival of the fittest. Today, biologists denounce the naturalistic fallacy because they want to describe the natural world honestly, without people deriving morals about how we ought to behave (as in: If birds and beasts engage in adultery, infanticide, cannibalism, it must be OK).

Some philosophers reject the naturalistic fallacy and/or suggest solutions for the proposed isought problem.

Ralph McInerny suggests that ought is already bound up in is, insofar as the very nature of things have ends/goals within them. For example, a clock is a device used to keep time. When one understands the function of a clock, then a standard of evaluation is implicit in the very description of the clock, i.e., because it is a clock, it ought to keep the time. Thus, if one cannot pick a good clock from a bad clock, then one does not really know what a clock is. In like manner, if one cannot determine good human action from bad, then one does not really know what the human person is.[7][pageneeded]

Certain uses of the naturalistic fallacy refutation (a scheme of reasoning that declares an inference invalid because it incorporates an instance of the naturalistic fallacy) have been criticized as lacking rational bases, and labelled anti-naturalistic fallacy.[8][pageneeded] For instance, Alex Walter wrote:

The refutations from naturalistic fallacy defined as inferring evaluative conclusions from purely factual premises[10] do assert, implicitly, that there is no connection between the facts and the norms (in particular, between the facts and the mental process that led to adoption of the norms).

The effect of beliefs about dangers on behaviors intended to protect what is considered valuable is pointed at as an example of total decoupling of ought from is being impossible. A very basic example is that if the value is that rescuing people is good, different beliefs on whether or not there is a human being in a flotsam box leads to different assessments of whether or not it is a moral imperative to salvage said box from the ocean. For wider-ranging examples, if two people share the value that preservation of a civilized humanity is good, and one believes that a certain ethnic group of humans have a population level statistical hereditary predisposition to destroy civilization while the other person does not believe that such is the case, that difference in beliefs about factual matters will make the first person conclude that persecution of said ethnic group is an excusable "necessary evil" while the second person will conclude that it is a totally unjustifiable evil. The same is also applicable to beliefs about individual differences in predispositions, not necessarily ethnic. In a similar way, two people who both think it is evil to keep people working extremely hard in extreme poverty will draw different conclusions on de facto rights (as opposed to purely semantic rights) of property owners depending on whether or not they believe that humans make up justifications for maximizing their profit, one who believes that people do concluding it necessary to persecute property owners to prevent justification of extreme poverty while the other person concludes that it would be evil to persecute property owners. Such instances are mentioned as examples of beliefs about reality having effects on ethical considerations.[11][12]

Some critics of the assumption that is-ought conclusions are fallacies point at observations of people who purport to consider such conclusions as fallacies do not do so consistently. Examples mentioned are that evolutionary psychologists who gripe about "the naturalistic fallacy" do make is-ought conclusions themselves when, for instance, alleging that the notion of the blank slate would lead to totalitarian social engineering or that certain views on sexuality would lead to attempts to convert homosexuals to heterosexuals. Critics point at this as a sign that charges of the naturalistic fallacy are inconsistent rhetorical tactics rather than detection of a fallacy.[13][14]

A criticism of the concept of the naturalistic fallacy is that while "descriptive" statements (used here in the broad sense about statements that purport to be about facts regardless of whether they are true or false, used simply as opposed to normative statements) about specific differences in effects can be inverted depending on values (such as the statement "people X are predisposed to eating babies" being normative against group X only in the context of protecting children while the statement "individual or group X is predisposed to emit greenhouse gases" is normative against individual/group X only in the context of protecting the environment), the statement "individual/group X is predisposed to harm whatever values others have" is universally normative against individual/group X. This refers to individual/group X being "descriptively" alleged to detect what other entities capable of valuing are protecting and then destroying it without individual/group X having any values of its own. For example, in the context of one philosophy advocating child protection considering eating babies the worst evil and advocating industries that emit greenhouse gases to finance a safe short term environment for children while another philosophy considers long term damage to the environment the worst evil and advocates eating babies to reduce overpopulation and with it consumption that emits greenhouse gases, such an individual/group X could be alleged to advocate both eating babies and building autonomous industries to maximize greenhouse gas emissions, making the two otherwise enemy philosophies become allies against individual/group X as a "common enemy". The principle, that of allegations of an individual or group being predisposed to adapt their harm to damage any values including combined harm of apparently opposite values inevitably making normative implications regardless of which the specific values are, is argued to extend to any other situations with any other values as well due to the allegation being of the individual or group adapting their destruction to different values. This is mentioned as an example of at least one type of "descriptive" allegation being bound to make universally normative implications, as well as the allegation not being scientifically self-correcting due to individual or group X being alleged to manipulate others to support their alleged all-destructive agenda which dismisses any scientific criticism of the allegation as "part of the agenda that destroys everything", and that the objection that some values may condemn some specific ways to persecute individual/group X is irrelevant since different values would also have various ways to do things against individuals or groups that they would consider acceptable to do. This is pointed out as a falsifying counterexample to the claim that "no descriptive statement can in itself become normative".[15][16]

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Naturalistic fallacy - Wikipedia