Page 199 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

176 Communication and Evolution of Society

tion of all healthy states not to the observer but to the living
systems themselves. In living, the organisms themselves make
an evaluation to the effect that self-maintenance is preferable to
the destruction of the system, reproduction of life to death, health
to the risks of sickness. The theorist of evolution feels himself
relieved of value judgments; he seems to be merely repeating the
“value judgment’’ that is given with the form of reproduction of
organic life. This of, course, a logical error; from the descriptive
statement that living systems prefer certain states to others there
in no way follows a positive evaluation by the observer.
Can one say perhaps that the theorist of evolution, because he
is himself a living being, is spontaneously inclined not merely to
observe the normative distinction of the avoidance of death as a
natural phenomena, but also to agree with it? In any case, only
this agreement justifies the attitude of many biologists, who regard
the direction of evolution as something good, and not only dis-
tinguish but evaluate the species according to the place they hold
in the evolutionary rank order. Only under this presupposition,
at any rate, are the attempts to develop an evolutionary ethics
comprehensible.%¢
In C. H. Waddington’s version, evolutionary ethics is based
)
on the metaethical insight of the biologist (“biological wisdom”
“that the function of ethical beliefs is to mediate human evolu-
tion, and that evolution exhibits some recognizable direction of
progress.” 87 Waddington believes he can avoid a naturalistic
fallacy:
I argue that if we investigate by normal scientific methods the way in
which the existence of ethical beliefs is involved in the causal nexus of
the world’s happenings, we shall be forced to conclude that the func-
tion of ethicizing is to mediate the progress of human evolution, a
progress which now takes place mainly in the social and psychological
sphere. We shall also find that this progress, in the world as a whole,
exhibits a direction which is as well or ill defined as the concept of
physiological health. Putting these two points together we can define
a criterion, which does not depend for its validity on any recognition
by a preexisting ethical belief.88
But if the biological wisdom of any ethics singled out by evolu-
tion is expressed in the fact that it promotes the evolution and
the learning ability of social systems, then we have to presuppose