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Biologists' current habit of explaining each feature of human life separately through its evolutionary function – its assumed tendency to enhance each individual's reproductive prospects – is unworkable. It also sits oddly with these scientists' official rejection of teleology, since it treats all life as a process which does have an aim, namely, to perpetuate itself. But that aim is empty because it is circular.If we want to understand the behaviour of living things (including humans) we have to treat them seriously as subjects, creatures with needs, tendencies and directions of their own. The supposedly objective idea of a world of objects without subjects is an unprofitable fantasy.

Researchers report that people who are asked to give their reason for converting to Creationism often say that they have done so because they see it as the only possible alternative to ‘Darwinism’ – something which they find intolerable and equate with scientific atheism.

Mary Midgley asks, ‘What do we mean when we say that things are real or illusory?’

Has science shown that people are, in some sense, an illusion? According to Mary Midgley, that is precisely what some scientists now preach. Focusing particularly on a claim made by Richard Dawkins, she explains why she believes these scientists are making a serious mistake.

Are human beings in some sense central to the cosmos? It used to seem obvious that they were. It seems less obvious now. But the idea is still powerful in our thinking, and it may be worth while asking just what it has meant.

Is philosophy like plumbing? I have made this comparison a number of times when I have wanted to stress that philosophising is not just grand and elegant and difficult, but is also needed. It is not optional. The idea has caused mild surprise, and has sometimes been thought rather undignified. The question of dignity is a very interesting one, and I shall come back to it at the end of this article. But first, I would like to work the comparison out a bit more fully.

The idea of Gaia—of life on earth as a self-sustaining natural system—is not a gratuitous, semi-mystical fantasy. It is a really useful idea, a cure for distortions that spoil our current world-view. Its most obvious use is, of course, in suggesting practical solutions to environmental problems. But, more widely, it also attacks deeper tangles which now block our thinking. Some of these are puzzles about the reasons why the fate of our planet should concern us. We are bewildered by the thought that we might have a duty to something so clearly non-human. But more centrally, too, we are puzzled about how we should view ourselves. Current ways of thought still tend to trap us in the narrow, atomistic, seventeenth-century image of social life which grounds today's crude and arid individualism, though there are currently signs that we are beginning to move away from it. A more realistic view of the earth can give us a more realistic view of ourselves as its inhabitants.

What does it mean to say that we have got a mind-body problem? Do we need to think of our inner and outer lives as two separate items between which business must somehow be transacted, rather than as aspects of a whole person?

Complete determinism is, as Karl Popper said, “a daydream of omniscience.” Determinism is usually conceived as linked with a particular science whose explanations are deemed fundamental. As Rose rightly points out, biological enquiry includes many different kinds of question. Genetic determinism, making genes central to biology, is therefore biased and misguided. The crucial unit must be the whole organism.

Matthew Arnold, writing sadly of the receding Sea of Faith, gave his image a vast and deadly application —… The world, which seemsTo lie before us like a land of dreamsSo various, so beautiful, so new,Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain—(emphasis mine)

The view that our feelings do not concern morality, that we have no duties about them, that it does not matter what we feel, so long as we act correctly, is often attributed to Kant. I am sure he did not hold it, and shall argue as much presently. Certainly it is not surprising that people have credited Kant with such a view. He did lay himself open to that suspicion, because he was too busy shooting at contrary errors to resist it. What is much more surprising, however, is that this view has, seriously and unmistakably, been put forward and prevailed in the central British Empiricist tradition. I call this surprising, because one might hope that Empiricists would be more careful than Rationalists over questions about Feeling. G. E. Moore ruled that our feelings were outside our control almost always.' (He did not discuss the rare exceptions, and his followers have paid no attention to them, so I shall ignore them here.) We can normally control nothing but our outward actions, he said, so our normal duties can only require these actions. So precepts like 'love your neighbour' or 'thou shalt not covet' cannot possibly be understood literally and seriously as commands meant to be carried out. He concluded that they are just hypothetical commands, saying what would have been our duty if we had been able to do it. This is odd. Why should such hypothetical commands concern us at all-any more than, say, the instructions in a book on athletic training concern the paraplegic who leafs through it for amusement? Moore did not explain. Like Mill, no doubt, he simply took it for granted that a sharp line divided all judgments about action, logically, from judgments about any sort of motive, including feeling. 'The motive has nothing to do with the morality of the action, though much with the worth of the agent.'2 For he too, like Mill, believed that the rightness or wrongness of actions

G. E. Moore said that ethics was concerned with only two questions, the question what goodness meant, and the question what things were good. But there is an immense gap between these questions, and most of ethics lies between them. It deals with the various kinds of goodness. (Similarly, science does not deal only with the question what it is to be a thing, and the question what things there are. It deals with the kinds of thing.) Good is nearly as general a term as thing, lumping together many kinds of praise. The main business of ethics is to distinguish these kinds (and also the kinds of dispraise) and relate them properly. This involves studying, comparing, criticizing and deepening the various half-formed priority systems within which each kind of praise gets its sense. The disputes out of which ethics arises are not usually about whether something is good, but about conflicts between admitted goods (or evils). To arbitrate them, as we constantly must, we have to have a priority system of goods. And we get it by attending to the system of needs which those goods satisfy. Some, we argue, are more central than others. For instance-beauty, and the contemplation of beauty, would not be good at all except for a being that needed them. And since that being also has other needs, that contemplation cannot-as Moore suggestedi-have a walkover into a central and predominant place. If it is to go there, reasons must be given. Moore, unlike Plato,2 would not produce such reasons. But they can be given, and also answered. To understand the system of goods is to understand the system of needs which they satisfy-namely, in the human case, human nature. This line of thought, which is reckoned as naturalistic, causes alarm. I would like to explain it a little more in response to criticisms made by various moral philosophers, notably by Dr Christine Battersby in reviewing my book Beast and Man3 and by Dr Stephen Clark in replying to my paper 'The Absence of a Gap Between Facts and Values' at the i980 Joint Session.4 Both suggest that the notion of a structure of deep, central human needs is too obscure to be helpful. I quote some remarks from Dr Battersby

Genes cannot be selfish or unselfish, any more than atoms can be jealous, elephants abstract or biscuits teleological. This should not need mentioning, but Richard Dawkins's bookThe Selfish Genehas succeeded in confusing a number of people about it, including Mr J. L. Mackie. What Mackie welcomes in Dawkins is a new, biological-looking kind of support for philosophic egoism. If this support came from Dawkins's producing important new facts, or good new interpretations of old facts, about animal life, this could be very interesting. Dawkins, however, simply has a weakness for the old game of Brocken-spectre moralizing—the one where the player strikes attitudes on a peak at sunrise, gazes awe-struck at his gigantic shadow on the clouds, and reports his observations as cosmic truths. He is an uncritical philosophic egoist in the first place, and merely feeds the egoist assumption into hisa prioribiological speculations, only rarely glancing at the relevant facts of animal behaviour and genetics, and ignoring their failure to support him. There is nothing empirical about Dawkins. Critics have repeatedly pointed out that his notions of genetics are unworkable. I shall come to this point later, but I shall not begin with it, because, damning though it is, it may seem to some people irrelevant to his main contention. It is natural for a reader to suppose that his over-simplified drama about genes is just a convenient stylistic device, because it seems obvious that the personification of them must be just a metaphor. Indeed he himself sometimes says that it is so. But in fact this personification, in its literal sense, is essential for his whole contention; without it he is bankrupt. His central point is that the emotional nature of man is exclusively self-interested, and he argues this by claiming that all emotional nature is so. Since the emotional nature of animals clearly is not exclusively selfinterested, nor based on any long-term calculation at all, he resorts to arguing from speculations about the emotional nature of genes, which he treats as the source and archetype of all emotional nature. This strange convoluted drama must be untwisted before the full force of the objections from genetics can be understood.

Exchanging views in Philosophy with a two-year time-lag is getting rather like conversation with the Andromeda Nebula. I am distressed that my reply to Messrs Mackie and Dawkins, explaining what made me write so crossly about The Selfish Gene, has been so long delayed. Mr Mackie's sudden death in December 1981 adds a further dimension to this distress.

Some time ago, an Innocent Bystander, after glancing through a copy of Mind, asked me, ‘Why do philosophers talk so much about Games? Do they play them a lot or something?’

It is just over eighty years since G. E. Moore published Principia Ethica, thereby changing English-speaking moral philosophy for the rest of the century. Just why and how was that book so important?

The notion that concern for the feelings of animals is as such sentimental is rather a common one. I shall suggest that, in general, the charge of sentimentality can never be made to stick in this way merely because concern is directed towards one class of sentient beings rather than another. It rests on the motives and reasons for being concerned, not on the objects to which concern is directed. About animals, however, a special point arises which I must deal with first. Objectors may say that it is sentimental to attribute feelings to them at all, or at least to attribute specific feelings, to suppose ourselves well enough informed about their states of consciousness for concern to be appropriate. The charge of sentimentality here is close to that of anthropomorphism.

We will start with a fable—There was once a creator who wanted to create free beings.The other creators, it seems, didn't share this ambition, indeed they thought his project was philosophically confused. They were well satisfied with their own worlds. But our creator (we will call him C) sat down to work it out.‘How will you even start?’ asked his friend D, the Doubter.‘Well, I know what I won't do’, answered C. ‘I won't just give them an empty faculty named Desire, and tell them to invent values and want what they choose. Unless they want something definite for a start, they won't even be able to start choosing.’‘Exactly’, said D.‘So what I think I must do,’ C went on, ‘is to give them a lot of desires which conflict, and make them bright enough to see they have got to do something about it.’

The word moral and its derivatives are showing signs of strain. Like a small carpet, designed to fit a room which has been enlarged, they are wrenched this way and that to cover the bare spaces. Perhaps in the end we shall be forced to abandon them altogether, as Nietzsche suggested. But this would be wasteful, and it seems a good idea to examine first the various spaces they can cover, and try to fix them to the one where they are needed most. I shall approach this problem by making very full quotations. It is not an isolated verbal puzzle which can be settled by showing that a particular usage exists; we need to know as well just what it is doing. There are real muddles here, within common-sense, about the relation of thought to life. There is no simple plain-man's usage prepared for us to follow. Anyone who uses moral in anything beyond the Daily Mirror sense is no longer a quite plain man anyway, and we had better follow careful writers than casual ones, real ones than imaginary ones. Philosophers, unlike the Erewhonians, do not have to study a hypothetical language. I am sure both that quotations are necessary and that mine are inadequate; I hope other people will supplement them. As for my choice, I can only say that I have tried very hard not to be tendentious. Certainly I have quoted authors who are capable of being silly and perverse, but as far as I can see the remarks I have taken from them are sober and normal. Anyone may disagree with them, but not, I hope, think them oddly worded. My point affects all the derivatives of moral and to some extent those of ethical too, so I have drawn my illustrations from all of them.

Every age has its pet contradictions. Thirty years ago, we used to accept Marx and Freud together, and then wonder, like the chameleon on the tartan, why life was so confusing. Today there is similar trouble over the question whether there is, or is not, something called Human Nature. On the one hand, there has been an explosion of animal behaviour studies, and comparisons between animals and men have become immensely popular. People use evidence from animals to decide whether man is naturally aggressive, or naturally territorial; even whether he has an Aggressive or Territorial Instinct. On the other hand, many sociologists and psychologists still seem to hold the Behaviourist view that man is a creature entirely without instincts, and so do existentialist philosophers. If so, all comparison with animals must be irrelevant. (To save space, I have had to simplify both these party lines here, but if anyone thinks I am oversimplifying the behaviourist one, I can only ask him to keep on reading New Society). On that view, man is entirely the product of his culture. He starts off infinitely plastic, and is formed completely by the society in which he grows up.

Can I toss a small but important and oddly neglected point into the debate between Roger Trigg and the Social Anthropologists like Professor Beattie whom it may or may not be right to call Relativists?

Your correspondents protesting in April 1979 against the all-female issue of Philosophy in April 1978 mystify me somewhat, first by making so much fuss about it, and second by their unrealistic attitude to the force of prejudice.