פורום ארץ הצבי

I was surprised by finding the following remarks (written in October, 1838) in his Notebooks [Q8]:

Two classes of moralists: one says our rule of life is what will produce the greatest happiness.---The other says we have a moral sense.---But my view unites both & shows them to be almost identical. What has produced the greatest good or rather what was necessary for good at all is the instinctive moral senses: (& this alone explains why our moral sense points to revenge). In judging of the rule of happiness we must look far forward & to the general action---certainly because it is the result of what has generally been best for our good far back.---(much further than we can look forward: hence our rule may sometimes be hard to tell). Society could not go on except for the moral sense, any more than a hive of Bees without their instincts. (Old & Useless Notes 30, Barrett et al., 1987, 609.) [→Darwin in 1840, drawing by the author]

We may recall that the moral philosophers who emphasize the moral sense are called 'Intuitionists' and those who emphasize the greatest happiness are called 'Utilitarians'. Thus the young Darwin here is claiming that he can synthesize these two major schools of moral philosophy! I will add, for your curiosity, that Henry Sidgwick, a great utilitarian and who claimed that Intuitionism and Utilitarianism can coincide, was born in the same year, 1838. And we have to notice also that Darwin's idea of the genesis of morality is already sketched in rough outline in the last sentence.

Society could not go on except for the moral sense, any more than a hive of Bees without their instincts.