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 science, ethics and animal rights. 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). She was awarded an honorary D. Litt by Durham University in 1995. Her autobiography,The Owl Of Minerva, was published in 2005.

She has written extensively about what philosophers can learn from nature, particularly from 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 UK's "foremost scourge of 'scientific pretension'".^[1]

Early life and education[link]

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

Midgley was born in London to Lesley and Tom Scrutton. Her father was a curate in Dulwich, and later chaplain of King's College, Cambridge, while her mother was Jewish.^[2] She was raised in Cambridge, Greenford, and Ealing. She was educated at Downe House School in Cold Ash, Berkshire, 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. During the year before starting university, it was arranged that she would live in Austria for three months to learn German, but she had to leave after a month because of the worsening political situation. At Somerville, she studied Mods and Greats alongside Iris Murdoch, graduating with a first-class honours degree.

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 writes that her career in philosophy may also have been affected by women having a greater voice in discussion at the time, because many male undergraduates left after a year to fight in the Second World War: "I think myself that this experience has something to do with the fact that Elizabeth [Anscombe] and I and Iris [Murdoch] and Philippa Foot and Mary Warnock have all made our names in philosophy ... I do think that in normal times a lot of good female thinking is wasted because it simply doesn't get heard.^[5]

Personal life[link]

Mary Midgley was married to Geoffrey Midgley in 1950, and currently has three children (Tom, David and Martin Midgley) and three grandchildren.

Academic life[link]

After leaving Oxford, she worked for the civil service, and as a teacher at Downe School and Bedford School. She returned to Oxford in 1947 to work for Gilbert Murray. 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 moved to Newcastle and had three sons. Both she and her husband taught for many years at Newcastle University, 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 was published when she was 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]

Ideas and arguments[link]

Midgley sees philosophy as plumbing, 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 a Christian,^[1] though she also argues that the world's religions should not simply be ignored: "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 (1978), was an examination of human nature and a reaction against 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 (1976) to suggest. Instead, she argued that human beings and their relationship with 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 (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, and the second book 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 the use of machines. She concludes: "These schemes still seem to me to be just displacement activities proposed in order to avoid facing our real difficulties."^[10] "In exposing these rhetorical attempts to turn science into a comprehensive ideology," she wrote in 2003, "I am not attacking science but defending it against dangerous misconstructions."

On reductionism and materialism[link]

She argues against reductionism, or the attempt to impose any one approach to understanding the world. She suggests that there are "many maps, many windows," arguing 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." She writes that it is helpful to think of 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."^[11]

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."^[12]

Midgley–Dawkins debate[link]

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.^[13]

Midgley responded in volume 54 (1979) with "Gene-Juggling", an article arguing that The Selfish Gene was about psychological egoism, rather than evolution.^[14] 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, p. 3). 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."^[14] In a rejoinder in 1981, Dawkins retorted that the comment was "hard to match, in reputable journals, for its patronising condescension toward a fellow academic".^[15] 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."^[15]

In volume 58, "Selfish Genes and Social Darwinism" (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."^[16]

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 books 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 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.^[17]

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."^[18] In April 2009, Midgley reiterated her critical interpretation of The Selfish Gene as part of a series of articles on Hobbes in The Guardian.^[19]

In her 2010 book The Solitary Self: Darwin and the Selfish Gene she argues that "simple one-sided accounts of human motives, such as the "selfish gene" tendency in recent neo-Darwinian thought, may be illuminating but are always unrealistic".^[20]

Midgley in fiction[link]

Midgley is referred to in "The Lives of Animals", an unusual fictional work by the prominent South African novelist J. M. Coetzee. "The Lives of Animals" has been likened to a cross between a short story and a philosophical dialogue, as Coetzee's protagonist often speaks at length about philosophical ideas. Many reviewers expressed bafflement at the text, which has an enigmatic and riddling style. As one reviewer noted, "the reader is not quite sure whether he is intended to spot some confusion or contradiction or non sequitur in [the protagonist’s] arguments."^[21] Other critics however have noted many affinities between "The Lives of Animals" and Midgley's philosophy, and have used Midgley's ideas to make sense of Coetzee's famously confusing work.

Coetzee's protagonist for example is concerned with the moral status of animals, a subject Midgley addressed in Animals and Why They Matter. Coetzee's protagonist also discusses at length the idea of sympathy as an ethical concept, a subject Midgley wrote about in Beast and Man. As one critical analysis puts it, the result of these and other similarities is that Coetzee's work "evoke[s] a particular conception of ethics, one very similar to that of the philosopher Mary Midgley. Such a view affords a central role to sympathy and is fundamentally opposed to a long-standing rival view, most clearly exemplified by the social contract tradition, which prioritizes an instrumental conception of rationality."^[22]

Coetzee and Midgley additionally share a longstanding fascination with Robinson Crusoe. Coetzee retells the Crusoe story in his novel Foe, while Midgley writes about Crusoe in her essay "Duties Concerning Islands". Midgley's essay argues for the idea that human beings can have ethical obligations to non-human entities such as animals and ecosystems, an idea that is also found in "The Lives of Animals", Foe and many other works by Coetzee.^[23]

Portrait of Mary Midgley[link]

Midgley agreed to sit for sculptor Jon Edgar in Newcastle during 2006, as part of the Environment Triptych^[24] along with heads of Richard Mabey and James Lovelock.

Publications[link]

Notes[link]

References[link]

Further reading[link]

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