Beast and Man by Mary Midgley
pretty, pretty, pretty good
Mary Midgley’s Beast and Man is that treasure of a thing: a jargon-free work of philosophy written for a broad audience that bears directly and helpfully on everyday life.1 Speculative and systems-building philosophies, which involve the invention of new technical vocabularies, are fun to engage in a spirit of intellectual play, and can, of course, have their own pay-offs. But the kind of grounded, empirical, down-to-earth moral philosophy that Midgley explores here is always welcome.
The overarching project of Beast and Man is to put moral philosophy in dialogue with ethology, a then-emerging new field in zoology. Midgley, who seems to stand in the kind of relation to Anglican thought that some 20th century phenomenologists stood to Catholicism2, wanted to draw out the continuity between humans and non-human animals, and place our understanding of such concepts as rationality, speech, culture, and moral choice in their evolutionary context.
In pursuing this central project Midgley argues for a number of positions: that reduction of all explanation of human and animal life to theories of “selfish genes” is philosophically confused, that non-human animals have a nature that is more continuous with all the riches of human life than was often traditionally supposed, that altruism is not an illusion but a real part of the motives of animals and humans, that human beings are shaped by their evolutionary heritage in a way that both informs what is good for us and establishes what we can do and be, that culture is natural to humans and a necessary specification of our open evolutionary programming, that facts do inform values, that moral choice begins when humans elaborate a system of priorities to navigate conflicts between given motives, that assuming that animals or humans reveal their “true nature” only in times of stress or danger is reductive, that humans and animals have a pluralistic and complex set of motives that can’t be reduced to one single overall drive, that we need the wonder and the sense of otherness that comes from grasping that all animals (including humans) are ends in themselves, that humans flourish when they see themselves as just one part (and not in all respects the best part) of the greater whole of the biosphere, and so on.
Probably no reader would be satisfied by all of Midgley’s interventions in every detail, but the basic orientation of the project, in my book, succeeds. One interest of that project is just as moral philosophy narrowly construed. Lots of people have argued for the falsity of the fact-value distinction and the tight connection between human nature and moral choice. But many moral philosophers focus less (if at all) on ethology and evolution than Midgley does, and her overall approach seems to me a successful one that improves upon less interdisciplinary approaches.
Another interest of the book is Midgley’s account of human excellence. She looks at a number of the features that are supposed to distinguish humans from animals. She doesn’t deny that humans are unique, or that we have capacities of speech and thought that exceed what other animals have. She doesn’t regard these as binary, on-off, qualitative differences—for her, we are still trace lines of continuity with certain other intelligent animals even in our higher faculties—but she does believe we are distinguished by the extent of our intellectual powers. Readers will no doubt have their own thoughts about the metaphysical details here, but Midgley points out that, whatever we think of the uniqueness of these human powers, we should be careful what kinds of value we assign them:
“What would we say about someone who had all the characteristics just mentioned [rationality, language, etc] but none of the normal human affections? These [affections], of course, are plainly very like those of many other species, so they do not get named as the differentia. But shortage of them is the commonest reason for calling people inhuman.”
A simple, but elegant, point. Any list of the most praiseworthy and central things in human life must contain many things that do not distinguish us among the animals.
The broader existential point Midgley drives home so well is that we belong in this world and we were made, in broad strokes, for the life we have. We are not an alien species dropped down into the planet and discontinuous with the life around us. We evolved on this planet and we evolved to live—again, in broad strokes—in certain ways. This may be an obvious point, but Midgley brings out well how this should reconcile us to the fact of being human. As she writes, “We are not disembodied intelligences, tentatively considering possible incarnations. We have highly particular, sharply limited needs and possibilities already—in return for which are satisfactions, such as they are, are actual.” Later, she notes:
“We are at home in this world because we were made for it.3 We have developed here, on this planet, and we were adapted to live here. Our emotional constitution is part of that adaption. We are not fit to live anywhere else…this means acknowledging our kinship with the biosphere…our dignity arises within nature, not against it.”
Nihilism, alienation, feeling alone or abandoned in the universe—for Midgley, these are attitudes that fail to appreciate or appropriate our kinship with animals. The mood of films like La Dolce Vita and L’Avventura is not the mood of Beast and Man (“Life shrinks to a few urban rooms,” Midgley notes about the attitude of existentialists who do not attend to the wider biosphere, “no wonder it becomes absurd.”)4. We do not live in a value-less or empty world that we have to fill up through our own acts of will or our own intellectual inventions (and be left with nothing if we fail). We evolved a nature, and with that nature just does come with built-in wants, needs, capacities, and motives. “It makes no sense,” Midgley writes, “to imagine choosing without already having some emotional structure.” Certain things are good for us; others are bad for us. We just are (like some other species) a social species:5
“It is no misfortune to have a specific nature…freedom, in the sense in which we really value it, does not mean total indeterminacy, still less omnipotence. It means the chance to do what each of us has it in him to do—to be oneself, not another person. Though all human ranges overlap, we each have a distinctive range of talents, tastes, and emotional possibilities. The advantage of innate individuality—the positive enjoyment of one’s own capacities—more than outweighs the drawbacks of not being infinitely pliable.”
These are consoling thoughts for those sometimes inclined to have too many feelings about life. We will one day leave this life, but, until we do, here we are. Midgley shows us that’s not really such a bad thing. The satisfactions, such as they are, are actual.
As it was first published in 1980, you may be wondering why I am talking about it now. The answer is that I just read it for the first time and this is my substack.
See her engagement, as a nonbeliever, with Joseph Butler, the Anglican bishop who was also a major influence on John Henry Newman
But, for Christians, aren’t we really just pilgrims and sojourners here, in exile from our true home? A lot could be said about this, but here’s one thought: Perhaps we have to understand how, in this age, we truly do belong here—in this world and in this life—in order to follow well the call to another shore and a greater light. Students in high school may go on to college and then older adult life. Teleologically they belong to the adult life they are being prepared to lead—and nobody feels in greater exile from their true home than a teenager— but while in high school they do also truly belong there. If they try to skip ahead, they may find themselves out of their depth later, emotionally and socially as much as intellectually.
These movies rule, to be clear
How, then, do we account for the evil we do? Midgley was aware that there is a risk of complacency in her picture in Beast and Man. In the introduction to the revised edition, she writes, “By insisting, in my discussion of animal nature, on lightning the fear of our natural motives, on showing our constitution as tolerable, I ran the risk of seeming over-optimistic, of neglecting its dark side. I needed to avoid this danger of making morals seem optional—the danger (into which Aristotle slips in his more casual moments) of suggesting that we humans, provided we are nicely brought up, don’t really need any morality at all ” (she notes that she took up this problem in a later book). It seems right to me both that Midgley is aware of the need to avoid complacency, which is a real and deadly danger, and that she approaches evil as a second problem in the context of the basic goodness of human nature. Privatio boni.