Michael Ruse

In the first issue of _Mind_, Henry Sidgwick considered the relevance of evolutionary thinking to philosophical problems of ethics. His conclusion was unambiguous. Having agreed that the claim of the evolutionist is that organisms have developed naturally from simpler forms, he said ‘the theory of Evolution, this widely understood, has little or no bearing upon ethics’. Continuing that ‘when it is all admitted, I cannot see that any argument is gained for or against any particular ethical doctrine’. Thus was set the tone for the rest of the century, culminating in _Principia Ethica_ (1903) by Sidgwick’s student G. E. Moore. This essay will focus on Sidgwick’s contributions to _Mind_, showing that there are two very different approaches to evolution and ethics, that of Darwin and that of Herbert Spencer, that Sidgwick focused on Spencer rather than Darwin, and that he therefore missed an insightful approach to moral non-realism, an approach that was revived only as the twentieth century drew to an end.