Darwinism is a theory of biological inception and change over time. Yet some advocates, bent on destroying Judeo/Christian moral philosophy that focuses on intrinsic human dignity, abuse the theory by using it as a justification to promote dangerous cultural and societal shifts. The latest example: Darwinism requires support of some suicides. From the blog post by Steve Stewart-Williams:
…Thus, the injunction against assisted suicide – like that against unassisted suicide – is commonly underwritten by the doctrine of human dignity. But the whole edifice starts to crumble once we bring Darwin into the picture. With the corrective lens of evolutionary theory, the view that human life is infinitely valuable suddenly seems like a vast and unjustified over-valuation of human life. This is because Darwin’s theory undermines the traditional reasons for thinking human life might have infinite value: the image-of-God thesis and the rationality thesis (see my last post).
But if human life is not supremely valuable after all, then there is no longer any reason to think that suicide or voluntary euthanasia is necessarily wrong under any or all circumstances. In fact, it starts to seem decidedly odd that we have elevated human life – i.e., pure biological continuation – so far above the quality of the life in question for the person living it. Why should life be considered valuable in and of itself, independently of the happiness of the individual living that life?
Note the potential for tremendous harm here. A publication involved with mental health is the forum for pushing an anti-anti suicide meme. That’s dangerous to despairing people and could very well undermine the important work of suicide prevention.
June 21st, 2010 | 3:40 pm
“In my next post, I’ll consider how evolutionary theory impacts the issue of animal rights and the proper treatment of nonhuman animals.”
I’ll be interested to see if “nonhuman” dignity is out the window too…but for some reason I foresee a “kill yourself but don’t kick the dog” line of reasoning coming our way…
June 21st, 2010 | 4:03 pm
Andrew: Ya think?
June 21st, 2010 | 4:19 pm
I don’t think he’s taking his Darwinism far enough. Once your kids have become self-sufficient, you’re pretty much dead weight to the food supply and should be offed immediately. Where does he get the silly idea that Darwinism has anything to say about such nonsense as “quality of life” and “happiness” (however defined)? I smell a bait and switch…
June 21st, 2010 | 5:07 pm
Oh dear, poor Mr Darwin. All he wanted to do was to attempt some sort of explanation for the uniformity and diversity of living creatures that he observed in the world around him.
But now he has become this atheistic monster who would advocate euthanasia as well as the elimination of the societally ‘unfit’.
Methinks I detect a desperate attempt to maintain Judeo/Christian prescriptive directives as the cornerstone of what must be a more all-embracing moral philosophy
June 21st, 2010 | 5:09 pm
Whats next? Eugenics?
June 21st, 2010 | 5:51 pm
Andy: That’s what Darwin did alright. Others are abusing his biological theory are taking his name in vain to achieve an ideological end.
June 21st, 2010 | 10:12 pm
Darwin was a eugenicist. Read his “Descent of Man.”
June 22nd, 2010 | 2:39 am
Darwin was a eugenicist. Read his “Descent of Man.”
The intellectual founder of the eugenics movement was not Darwin but his cousin Francis Galton (who made some rather glaring errors in empirical analysis of genes and inherited traits). Herbert Spencer was also a significant influence for eugenics. Darwin really had very little to do with the eugenics movement.
The intellectual inspiration for Nazi racial theories on the other hand was the reactionary Frenchman Arthur de Gobineau. Gobineau’s “An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races” was published in the 1850s before either “On the Origin of Species” or “The Descent of Man.” Gobineau in turn was probably influenced by the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus who had already written about theories of racial superiority a century earlier.
All this is to say that the scientific methodology or theories of Darwin have nothing to do with political or social movements to have government tell people who can or cannot reproduce. In any case, that kind of coercion would have horrified a Victorian liberal like Darwin.
June 22nd, 2010 | 2:59 am
Another way to make Darwin’s contribution to science clear is that by Darwin’s time, people already had a pretty good idea that organisms inherit some traits from their parents and that one could alter the population distribution of certain traits by controlling who reproduces. As Darwin pointed out, people who breed dogs and horses have known this for ages. And it did not escape anyone’s attention that a human child tends to look like a mix of both parents.
Darwin’s research was on natural selection: the idea that nature itself can control who does or does not reproduce through the natural environment itself. This naturally leads to a species changing over time. A physical separation or barrier of some kind (like a rise in the sea level that creates islands where before there was one land mass) can split the species in two and cause the two populations to wildly diverge over time.
Again, Darwin was a natural historian, not a political polemicist. His interest was in the natural mechanisms that cause a species to evolve and change over time. This has nothing to do with eugenics.
June 22nd, 2010 | 2:22 pm
As CS Lewis noted, evolution is just a tellurian ripple in an entropic universe, unless there is something outside the universe that gives it meaning. A few religions other than the Jewish and Christian do point outside the world into some eternity or eternal standard for morality. As that is the minimum requirement for meaning, we might grant they have at least grasped the point.
Drawing morality from an evolutionary or other developmental point looks attractive to those who wish to deal a blow to Christian morality. And it is indeed a severe blow – but it is a death blow to all other moralities. There is nothing left but an abyss, and wriggling on the hook doesn’t change that. (See Lewis, The Abolition of Man, for this in more detail, and better written.)
June 23rd, 2010 | 12:44 am
Mark: Agreed, but that’s not nearly good enough. It is up to Darwinists to dispute when the theory is abused, as it was in eugenics. Too often Darwinsits supported that pernicious movement, and today we see Darwin invoked as a reason to support other bad notions, such as the idea discussed in this post that Darwinsim requires support for some suicides because natural selection proves human exceptionalism wrong.
June 25th, 2010 | 2:46 pm
Darwin:
“If, for instance… men were reared under precisely the same conditions as hive-bees, there can hardly be a doubt that our unmarried females would, like the worker-bees, think it a sacred duty to kill their brothers, and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters; and no one would think of interfering.”
In other words, according to Darwin, morality is purely subjective, and moral precepts the unintended result of contingent circumstance, just as are humans themselves. There are no objectively evil acts. Presumably if this applies to murdering your own siblings and progeny, it applies to assisted suicide as well.
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