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Mary Midgley RIP

Mary Midgley.JPG

Mary Midgley passed away this month. I'm told she was a renowned ethicist, active in discussions of animal rights, I don't know any of her work in that field. I am familiar with her chiefly as a nemesis of Richard Dawkins. She forcefully criticized his use of the word "selfish" as an adjective that could coherently modify "gene."

This is, as it happens, the headline of the Telegraph's obituary of her: "Mary Midgley, moral philosopher who took on Richard Dawkins."  

Genes, she wrote, "cannot be selfish or unselfish, any more than atoms can be jealous, elephants abstract or biscuits teleological."

[I agree on the atoms, though I'm not sure about the elephants. Was she saying elephants cannot think abstractly? or just that any given elephant we might meet is an individual creature, not the abstraction ELEPHANT?]

That first review was part of a long feud, and Midgley eventually apologized (to readers, not to Dawkins) for what seemed a preoccupation with Dawkins, explaining that it was a tribute to his skill as a writer: "Clear expressions of important mistakes are very useful things."


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  1. HenryOctober 25, 2018 at 6:55 AM

    I have never read Midgley, and I doubt that her error is as simplistic as it appears. But it certainly appears simplistic. "Selfish" in "selfish gene" is obviously a metaphor, just as is "selection" in "natural selection." To be selfish or to select, one must be conscious, and no one believes that genes or nature are conscious. What Dawkins and Darwin meant, respectively, is that genes act as IF they were selfish, and nature acts as IF it were selecting. But neither actually does these things.

    I also find it clear that Midgley did not mean that elephants cannot think abstractly. In her phrase, the "be" before selfish implicitly appears again before "abstract" (and before "teleological"). She uses "abstract" in that phrase as an adjective (abstract elephants), not as a verb (elephants abstract). Your second interpretation is correct.

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    1. ChristopherOctober 25, 2018 at 8:48 AM

      Midgley was concerned about political historical baggage and thought that granting even metaphorical emotions to a gene line was a way of insinuating an immoral premise -- that we OUGHT to be concerned about our gene lines. That in turn could suggest pride (ours, not our genes!) in racial purity, abhorrence of race mixing, etc.

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