Mary Midgley, Moral Philosopher
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Mary Midgley.
The biologist Stephen Rose called her “a philosopher with what many have come to admire, and some to fear, as one of the sharpest critical pens in the West.”
CreditLeon Harris/eyevine, via Redux
Mary Midgley is a leading moral philosopher who became an accessible, persistent and sometimes witty critic of the view that modern science should be the sole arbiter of reality.
Midgley, who taught at the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne for years, wrote more than a dozen essays for a general audience.
Her last essay, “What Is Philosophy For?,” was published by Bloomsbury Academic.
The publisher said in a statement: “Its quality and remarkable insights do not fall short of the brilliant mind that penned it.”
The biologist Stephen Rose, writing in The Times Literary Supplement called Midgley “a philosopher with what many have come to admire, and some to fear, as one of the sharpest critical pens in the West.”
Andrew Brown, writing in The Guardian, called her “the foremost scourge of scientific pretension in this country.”
Midgley unhesitatingly challenged scientists like the entomologist Edward O. Wilson and the biologist, and noted atheist, Richard Dawkins.
By her lights they practiced a rigid “academic imperialism” when they tried to extend scientific findings to the social sciences and the humanities.
In place of what she saw as their constricted, “reductionistic” worldview, she proposed a holistic approach in which “many maps” — that is, varied ways of looking at life — are used to get to the nub of what is real.
One challenge came in her first essay, “Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature,” based on a conference she had organized on that slippery, perennial subject at Cornell.
She was later asked to revise her original manuscript to reflect her critical reaction to Wilson’s best-selling book, “Sociobiology: The New Synthesis” (“a volume the size of a paving stone,” she wrote later in a well-received autobiography, “The Owl of Minerva”).
She described the field of sociobiology as a kind of reactionary “biological Thatcherism.”
Sociobiology — the application of gene-centered theories of natural selection to the social life of organisms — was not itself overly controversial, especially, as Wilson originally used it, in the study of ants and insects.
Midgley, given her own interest in emphasizing humans’ animal nature — that “we are not, and do not need to be, disembodied intellects” — praised parts of Wilson’s essay.
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Midgley’s first essay, “Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature,” was well-received.
What provoked her and others was his hypothesis that the tenets of sociobiology could be applied to humans.
That idea, according to scholars, threatened to radically revise generally accepted notions of human nature.
“The term ‘human nature’ is suspect because it does suggest cure-all explanations, sweeping theories that man is basically sexual, basically selfish or acquisitive, basically evil or basically good,” Midgley wrote in “Beast and Man.”
In “The Owl of Minerva,” she wrote that the need to address Wilson’s concepts had distracted readers from her crucial topic:
“the meaning of rationality itself — the fact that reason cannot mean just deductive logic but must cover what makes sense for beings who have a certain sort of emotional nature.”
She adds that “Beast and Man” remains “the trunk out of which all my various ideas branched.”
Midgley took pains to distinguish between the important contributions of science and the philosophy of “scientism,” in which “prophets,” she writes, decree that science is “not just omnicompetent but unchallenged, the sole form of rational thinking.”
“We do not need to esteem science less,” she continued.
“We need to stop isolating it artificially from the rest of our mental life.”
Midgley did not align herself with any specific school of thought.
She wrote that moral philosophy and plain “common sense” often covered the same ground.
She targeted what she saw as some of the basic errors of modern scientific orthodoxy, including misplaced objectivity, the exclusion of purpose and motive, and the propensity to depersonalize nature.
The very titles of her essays — among them “Science as Salvation: A Modern Myth and Its Meaning” and “Evolution as a Religion” — and even irreverent chapter headings, like “Knowledge Considered as a Weed Killer,” conveyed her stance against what she called the “parsimonious” worldview of science.
In The Journal of Philosophy, she issues a scathing critique of Dawkins’s widely popular essay “The Selfish Gene,” taking issue with what she called his “crude, cheap, blurred genetics.”
In that essay, Dawkins suggests that evolution is a product of an innate drive in genes to perpetuate themselves, “selfishly,” through the vehicle of a given species, and that the behavior of living things is in service to their genes.
Midgley explains her disagreement years later in The Guardian, writing:
“‘Selfish’ is an odd word because its meaning is almost entirely negative.”
“It does not mean ‘prudent, promoting one’s own interest.’”
“It means ‘not promoting other people’s’ or, as the dictionary puts it, ‘devoted to or concerned with one’s own advantage to the exclusion of regard for others.’”
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She refutes the notion that selfishness underpinned all life.
“Just as there would be no word for white if everything was white, there could surely be no word for selfish if everyone was always selfish,” she writes, adding, “Selfishness cannot, then, be a universal condition.”
In a career as a philosopher, Midgley addressed a great number of subjects.
Evolution, the importance of animals, the role of science in society, cognitive science, feminism and human nature all came under her scrutiny.
She ranged more widely in “Science and Poetry,” in which she considered the place of the imagination in human life.
She found excesses of materialism and fatalism in human life, discussed the unusual compatibility of physics and religion, and approved of philosophical and metaphorical aspects of the Gaia hypothesis, which looks at the earth as a living system.
“With this essay,” Brian Appleyard writes in The Sunday Times of London, “Midgley establishes herself as the most cool, coherent and sane critic of contemporary superstition that we have.”
She was born Mary Scrutton in Dulwich, England, to Lesley Hay and Tom Scrutton.
Her father, a church curate, became a chaplain of King’s, Cambridge, before the family moved to Greenford, where he became vicar and where Mary and her brother, Hugh (later a prominent art gallery director), grew up.
When she was 12 Mary attended Downe, a boarding school that had begun in Charles Darwin’s home, though it later moved to Ash Green, near Newbury.
She began classes at Oxford and quickly found herself in a heady academic environment.
Her fellow philosophy students included Iris Murdoch, who became a good friend and eventually a Booker Prize-winning novelist; Philippa Foot, who became a leading moral philosopher; and Elizabeth Anscombe, who later went by G. E. M. Anscombe as a published philosopher and was a prominent disciple of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s.
Scrutton married the philosopher Geoffrey Midgley, whom she had met at Oxford.
The couple had three sons, during which time she reviewed novels for The New Statesman.
In addition to her son Tom Midgley, she is survived by two other sons, David and Martin, and three grandchildren.
David Midgley edited the book “The Essential Mary Midgley.”
Midgley returned to teaching philosophy as a lecturer at Newcastle.
She later became senior lecturer.
It was while teaching there that she began publishing the work for which she would be acclaimed.
Not that she envisioned a long career of expounding on her philosophical views in a succession of books.
She wrote more as a critic, she suggested, responding to what she heard or read.
“I keep thinking that I shall have no more to say,” she told The Guardian, “and then finding some wonderfully idiotic doctrine which I can contradict.”
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