スペンサーの進化倫理学の検討

Abstract

Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) was one of the most influential thinkers in the late nineteenth century in Britain and beyond. Today, however, he is rarely mentioned in the history of ethics. His evolutionary ethics, constituting a part of his “system of synthetic philosophy, ” is now understood as only deserving one paragraph or two in the literature of the history of evolution. It is as if he was eliminated from the intellectual history altogether. One interpretation of Spencer's evolutionary ethics claims that he was only a hedonistic utilitarian and that the theory of evolution did not play a significant role in his theory of ethics. As I try to argue in this paper, however, Spencer was and should be understood as a utilitarian moralist who based his ethics upon the idea of evolution. Indeed, one can regard him as a missing link that connects utilitarianism and the theory of evolution in the history of ethics. This paper will examine how Spencer understood the theory of evolution, how he conceived it as a theory that can be applied to human society and ethics, and to what extent he can be described as a utilitarian. This paper will conclude that Spencer was one of the earliest thinkers who, to provide a foundation for utilitarianism, applied the idea of evolution to ethics in a full-fledged manner. His teleological assertion that evolution works in a way to increase human happiness provided the picture of a society which utilitarians should aim for and his idea that moral sentiments are inherited made it possible to reconcile intuitionism and utilitarianism by showing that one can become a utilitarian by following inherited intuitions instead of doing hedonistic calculus. His theory of ethics, however, was soon to be forgotten, partly because it was based on the erroneous theory of evolution, particularly the teleological nature of his theory and the use and disuse theory of evolution.