Review of Mary Midgley's Beast and Man: the Roots of Human 
Nature, Revised Edition, London, Routledge, 1995.

John Black
Malaspina University College

Mary Midgley published the original version of Beast and Man 
sixteen years ago.  In the Introduction which is the only real 
distinguishing feature of the revised edition, she supports issuing it 
because her salutary advice to biology, psychology and the social 
sciences has gone unheard, with desperate consequences for political 
life in the West.  While she is surely right to claim that "biological 
Thatcherism" - the neo-conservative descendant of social Darwinism 
- continues to hold sway, it is difficult to agree that the major causes 
of corporate hegemony  include the popularity of sociobiology - her 
prime antagonist in this book - and therefore that the book had any 
chance of counteracting them.  It is, nevertheless, in the quieter 
terms of academic inquiry, a success.

Beast and Man is a punchy, insightful, essentially Wittgensteinian 
examination of the notion of human nature and its r“le in ethics and 
psychology.  According to Midgley, humans are rather more like 
other animals than we have hitherto allowed ourselves to believe.  
The evidence involves a series of reminders of how primitive we are 
and of how sophisticated animals  are.  Central to the understanding 
of both terms in this assimilation are the notions of nature, instinct 
and purpose.  To accommodate it, science must prefer the methods of 
ethology and comparative psychology to those of neurobiology, 
physiology, behavioural zoology and sociobiology.  Eschew 
quantification, restrict mechanism to its proper limits, embrace 
functionalism and one will understand the behavioural and 
psychological characteristics we share with other animals.  
Furthermore, since it makes crucial reference to language, 
rationality and culture, wrongly thought to be exclusively distinctive 
of humans, it is this ethological understanding which alone can 
inform ethics.

Midgley's digressive style is annoying when her otherwise 
methodologically sound tracing of the conceptual map gives way to 
unjustified asides: thus Aristotle is called an Egoist without any hint 
that his altruistically-loaded concept of eudaimonia makes this at 
least controversial; Wittgenstein is upbraided as animalically 
incorrect for using an example in which someone says "You're 
behaving like a beast . . . " without any admission that an author is 
distinct from his or her characters.  It sometimes appears that 
Midgley has not learned her own lessons: despite a sophisticated 
dispositional account of  motivation, a robin is said to twitter 
territorially on account of its current feeling; morality is described as 
a brake upon instinct, despite an account of instincts which is broad 
enough to include moral sentiments; although Midgley argues that 
explanations at different levels may be compatible, she repeatedly 
dismisses evolutionary explanations of behaviour because they 
cannot be applied literally at the level of individual motivation.

However, these flaws do not obliterate the overall strengths of the 
book.  The case is fundamentally compelling, the refutation of the 
worst pretensions of sociobiology is, interestingly, both charitable 
and devastating, and the redrawing of our outdated pictures of the 
conceptual landscape is insightful and thorough.  It won't precipitate 
the great social revolution; it will contribute to a better way of 
understanding animals of all kinds.