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Bangladesh Journal of Bioethics 2020; 11 (3): 43-48 
 

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Ethics after Darwin: Completing the Revolution 

 

Rainer Ebert 

 

PhD. Visiting Research Fellow 

Centre de recherche en éthique 
2910 Boulevard Édouard-Montpetit 
Montréal, QC H3T 1J7, Canada 
Email: rainerebert@gmail.com       Web: www.rainerebert.com 
 

DOI: https://doi.org/10.3329/bioethics.v11i3.51221  

 

Abstract: This is a big-picture discussion of an important implication of Darwinism for ethics. I argue 
that there is a misfit between our scientific view of the natural world and the view, still dominant in 
academic philosophy and wider society alike, that there is a discrete hierarchy of moral status among 
conscious beings. I will suggest that the clear line of traditional morality – between human beings and 
other animals – is a remnant of an obsolete moral outlook, not least because it has no counterpart in 
empirical reality, and I will invite the reader to think, with me, about tenable alternatives. 
 
Keywords: evolution, speciesism, human dignity, moral status, moral equality 
 
Introduction: There is a great deal of 
disagreement about matters of morality 
across social, cultural, and religious 
boundaries. And yet, there are some moral 
beliefs that are shared by a great majority of 
people in most societies and cultures, and 
across religious traditions. One such belief, 
perhaps the most consequential of all, is the 
belief that there is something morally 
special about being human. The fact that 
someone is a human being, rather than a 
dog or a cow or a rat, is thought to make a 
big difference in how he or she may be 
treated. People of faith sometimes say that 
human lives, and human lives only, are 
sacred, as humans, and humans only, are 
created in the image and likeness of God.1 
The German philosopher Immanuel Kant 
expressed a similar idea in secular terms. 
He argued that humans, but no other 
animals, have an intrinsic worth – “dignity” 
– which makes them valuable “above all 
price.”2 In stark contrast, he held that non-
human animals are valuable only insofar as 

they are useful in advancing human 
interests. They “exist only as means, and 
not for their own sakes […], whereas man 
is the end.”3 This type of thinking defines 
much of our current relationship with non-
human animals, and has grave practical 
implications. If human life is priceless, 
humans may not be killed, even if doing so 
would promote the greater good, whereas 
other animals, having a much lesser moral 
status, can be sacrificed for minor and 
sometimes even the most trivial human 
pleasures. In particular, people generally 
believe that we are justified in killing non-
human animals simply because we prefer 
the taste of their bodies over plant-based 
alternatives, yet would be horrified at the 
idea of killing an innocent human being for 
the same purpose, or even if necessary to 
achieve something as important as saving 
the lives of other humans. 
 
For convenience of expression, I will 
subsume under the term “traditional 



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morality” a spectrum of diverse moral 
worldviews that have the idea of equal 
human worth or dignity at their core, and I 
will sketch an evolutionary argument that 
casts serious doubt on all of them. I will 
focus on the big picture, at the expense of 
some of the rigor that is ordinarily expected 
from a philosophy paper. My hope is to 
spark your curiosity, enough to read my 
lengthier publications in which I develop 
the argument in more detail. 
 
Discussion: If all humans are to count the 
same, and more than other animals, that 
must be true in virtue of some feature that 
all humans have in common, but other 
animals lack. A philosophical defense of 
traditional morality must identify that 
feature. An obvious candidate, of course, is 
species membership. We are all 
biologically humans, members of the 
species Homo sapiens, and other animals 
are not. If we in fact deserve special 
treatment, could that be the reason why? 
 
James Rachels calls the view that grounds 
our full moral status in the fact that we are 
members of the human species “unqualified 
speciesism.” According to unqualified 
speciesism, “mere species alone is morally 
important. […] [T]he bare fact that an 
individual is a member of a certain species, 
unsupplemented by any other 
consideration, is enough to make a 
difference in how that individual should be 
treated.”4 As quickly as our membership in 
the human species comes to mind as a 
candidate for the ground of our supposed 
superiority, as implausible it seems after 
just a moment’s reflection. 
 
Imagine we came across a hitherto 
undiscovered species on a remote island in 
the Pacific. The members of that species are 

intelligent. They have institutions of 
government and learning very much like we 
do, and rich emotional and cultural lives. 
They have been aware of our existence for 
a while, and they have studied our societies 
and languages from afar, but they chose not 
to reveal themselves, seeking to avoid 
possible conflict. We can converse about 
science and philosophy with them, and 
agree with them to engage in joint projects. 
Surely, if one of us were to injure or kill one 
of them for a small personal gain, as we do 
in the case of non-human animals without 
much thought or hesitation, the rest of us 
would be morally outraged – and rightly so. 
Just because they belong to a species that is 
not our own does not make it acceptable to 
treat them as if they were less than us. 
Otherwise, how could we credibly object to 
someone who treats people of different 
races or the opposite sex as inferior? There 
is no reason to believe that species 
membership, in itself, is more relevant to 
morality than race or sex, which is why 
unqualified speciesism is deeply 
implausible and philosophers who defend it 
are few and far between. 
 
A much more promising variety of 
speciesism is qualified speciesism. “On this 
view, species alone is not regarded as 
morally significant. However, species-
membership is correlated with other 
differences that are significant.”5 Within 
qualified speciesism, I think it is helpful to 
distinguish between views that are 
committed to moral individualism and 
views that instead appeal to kind 
membership. Views of the first sort hold 
that there is an intrinsic feature, typically a 
potential or genetic disposition for some 
specific kind of mental life, that is 
necessary for membership in the human 
species and at the same time sufficient for 



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full moral status.6 In contrast, views of the 
second sort hold that, rather than each 
having an intrinsic feature that confers full 
moral status, humans are special because 
they belong to a kind that is characterized 
by the fact that its members normally, albeit 
not universally, have certain intrinsic 
features, such as the advanced cognitive 
capacities we have in common with the 
intelligent beings on the newly-discovered 
Pacific island in our thought experiment.7 
 
Traditional morality, regardless of which of 
these two forms of qualified speciesism it 
takes, fits well with the Aristotelian idea of 
a hierarchy of being, according to which 
each species is a static group of organisms 
with a distinct essence. The philosophical 
line of traditional morality that morally 
distinguishes humans from other animals 
finds its match in the empirical line that 
Aristotle thought distinguishes the human 
species from other animal species.8 Since 
the publication of Charles Darwin’s The 

Origin of Species in 1859, however, we 
know that there is no such line on the 
empirical side of things.9 We now 
understand that all life is interrelated, and 
that biological characteristics come in 
degree and continually evolve as a result of 
natural selection. That is particularly true 
for the psychological capacities that are 
commonly associated with the special 
moral status of human beings, such as 
autonomy, rationality, self-consciousness, 
language ability, and moral agency. As the 
principle of evolutionary continuity 
informs us, any differences between species 
are differences in degree, and not in kind, 
and I will argue that this change in scientific 
perspective has important moral 
implications. 
 

Before presenting my argument, however, I 
should make a disclaimer. In the decades 
after the publication of The Origin of 

Species, there was considerable debate over 
what, if anything, Darwinism can tell us 
about issues in moral philosophy, and much 
of that debate has to do with the old 
philosophical question of the relation 
between fact and value, the so-called is-

ought problem. Henry Sidgwick wrote in 
1876 that the theory of evolution “has little 
or no bearing upon ethics,”10 and Ludwig 
Wittgenstein similarly remarked in the 
1920s that the “Darwinian theory has no 
more to do with philosophy than has any 
other hypothesis of natural science.”11 In a 
sense, they are right. The connection 
between Darwinism and moral philosophy 
is more subtle than straightforward logical 
implication. What I will argue then, to put 
it more carefully, is that Darwinism 
undermines traditional morality, chipping 
away at its credibility, rather than outright 
disproving it. That being said, let us get 
back to our comparison between the 
Aristotelian and the Darwinian perspective 
on nature. 
 
Darwin has replaced the Aristotelian 
picture of life on earth as an assortment of 
neatly separated boxes, one for each 
species, with what we now know to be the 
real picture, that of a vast and complex tree 
of life, with branches so numerous that 
most are likely still unknown to us. 
According to traditional morality, only a 
small number of the individuals represented 
in that tree, us, have a special moral status, 
and constitute the community of moral 
equals, from which all non-human life is 
excluded. If that is to be true, we should be 
able to draw a line between us and them. 
But where should we draw that line? There 
is no recognizable discontinuity in the 



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spectra of degrees of capacity, potential, or 
genetic disposition for the psychological 
capacities that are commonly associated 
with the special moral status of humans. 
Being autonomous, rational, self-
conscious, able to use language, and so on 
all are scalar properties – i.e., they come in 
degrees –, which makes line-drawing 
problematic, for at least two reasons. 
 
First, wherever we choose to draw the line, 
our choice will be arbitrary, at least to some 
degree. For the moral individualist, who as 
we recall ties full moral status to having the 
potential or genetic disposition for a certain 
degree of mental capacity, drawing the line 
is tantamount to specifying that degree, and 
how could there be a principled reason to 
pick one degree over another that is only 
slightly different from it? The qualified 
speciesist arguing from kind membership 
too must specify a degree of mental 
capacity that must be normal for a kind in 
order for the members of that kind to 
qualify for full moral status, and he or she 
must further explain what it takes for a 
capacity to become the norm for a given 
kind. Again, there seems to be no principled 
way to do that. 
 
Second, even if we somehow find a non-
arbitrary way to draw the line, doing so 
implausibly opens a moral gulf between 
individuals whose difference from one 
another in terms of empirical reality is 
entirely unremarkable. Wherever we cut 
through the tree of evolution, those facing 
each other along the cut will be strikingly 
similar in their bodily and mental nature, 
yet traditional morality would have us treat 
them in fundamentally different ways. 
 
To further illustrate my argument, I am 
borrowing a thought experiment from 

English evolutionary biologist Richard 
Dawkins: 
 

Imagine you take “a picture of 
yourself. Now take a picture of your 
father and place it on top. Then find 
a picture of his father, your 
grandfather. Then place on top of 
that a picture of your grandfather’s 
father, your great-grandfather. […] 
Now do the same thing with his 
father, your great-great-
grandfather. And just carry on 
piling the pictures on top of each 
other, going back through more and 
more and more great-great-greats. 
[…] How many greats do we need 
for our thought experiment? Oh, a 
mere 185 million or so will do 
nicely! […] It isn’t easy to imagine 
a pile of 185 million pictures. How 
high would it be? Well, if each 
picture was printed as a normal 
picture postcard, 185 million 
pictures would form a tower about 
220,000 feet high: that’s more than 
180 New York skyscrapers standing 
on top of each other. […] What did 
[your 185-million-greats-
grandfather] look like? An old man 
with wispy hair and white side-
whiskers? A caveman in a leopard 
skin? Forget any such thought. […] 
Your 185-million-greats-
grandfather was a fish. So was your 
185-million-greats-grandmother, 
which is just as well or they 
couldn’t have mated with each other 
and you wouldn’t be here.”12 

 
If traditional morality is to be believed and 
there is to be a community of moral equals, 
one of your great-great-greats must have 
been the first to be a member of that 



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community. Let us call him Adam. Which 
picture in the pile shows Adam? It is hard 
to tell! In fact, there seems to be no 
principled way to determine who among 
your ancestors was Adam. Note that this is 
not an innocuous case of vagueness, as in 
the case of the concept of baldness, but a 
serious shortcoming, as much depends, in 
terms of morality, on where we draw the 
line that separates equals from unequals. It 
makes a great difference in the way your 
(great)n+1-grandfather would have deserved 
to be treated whether we decide that he is 
Adam, or instead decide that your (great)n-
grandfather gets to be Adam, and yet there 
seems to be no more or less reason to go one 
way rather than the other. For example, 
who among the two gets to be Adam 
matters greatly for the morality of killing 
them. It is much more seriously wrong to 
kill someone with full moral status than it is 
to kill someone with a lesser moral status, 
and it is implausible, and moreover morally 
unacceptable, that there could be 
individuals for whom it depends on an 
arbitrary, unprincipled choice whether they 
are entitled to the protection enjoyed by 
moral equals. 
 
Further, whichever picture we pick, the 
intrinsic difference between the individual 
on that picture, Adam, and his father will be 
unnoticeable. If the two of them were to 
stand in front of us today, we would most 
likely not be able to tell who among them is 
more similar to us in terms of autonomy, 
rationality, self-consciousness, language 
ability, and all the other capacities we 
commonly associate with our heightened 
moral status. In stark contrast to whatever 
minor differences in biological reality there 
may be, the way traditional morality would 
have us treat Adam, who has full moral 
status, is radically different from the way it 

would have us treat his father, who does not 
have full moral status. That is implausible. 
It is implausible that a small difference in 
genetics or capacity makes a momentous 
difference in terms of moral status. 
 
Conclusion: What can we take away from 
all this? We have seen that there is a tension 
between the biological fact that all life is 
interrelated, through evolution, and 
biological characteristics come in degree 
and the philosophical idea of a discrete 
hierarchy of moral status. Consequently, 
traditional morality seems to be in serious 
trouble. It simply does not fit our modern 
scientific view of the natural world. The 
line posited by traditional morality, 
between humans and other animals, turns 
out to be a remnant of an obsolete moral 
outlook, with no counterpart in empirical 
reality. As I see it, there are two ways we 
can go from here. We can abandon the idea 
that there is a special class of morally 
considerable beings who have an equal 
moral status higher than that of all others, 
and instead endorse some sort of 
consequentialism, or perhaps a 
deontological moral theory that 
accommodates gradual moral status. Or we 
can attempt to find an alternative basis for 
full and equal moral status, which would 
have to be a non-threshold property that is 
both binary and ethically relevant, hence 
allowing us to carve out of the natural world 
of organisms the community of moral 
equals along a non-arbitrary line that carries 
empirical significance. If you, like me, 
believe that human equality is a great 
achievement that we should not give up 
easily, I hope you will agree that it is well 
worth to try to go the second way. In my 
doctoral dissertation13 and recent papers in 
Social Theory and Practice14 and 
Philosophia,15 I hint at an alternative to 



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traditional morality that upholds the ideal of 
equality, and provide a more detailed 
version of the argument sketched in this 
article. In a nutshell, I argue that 
phenomenal consciousness, a deeply 
mysterious phenomenon that scientists and 
philosophers have hardly begun to 
understand, might have occurred in 
evolution from one generation of animals to 
the next, and hence can serve as a plausible 
and non-arbitrary cut-off point – separating 
“someones” from “somethings.” If the 
community of moral equals in fact 
coincides with the community of conscious 
beings, the implications for our way of life 
would be far-reaching. Most importantly, 
we would be under a moral obligation to 
 

References 
1 Cf., for example, Richard Harries, Norman 

Solomon & Timothy Winter, Abraham's 

Children: Jews, Christians and Muslims in 

Conversation (London/New York: T&T Clark, 
2006), Part II, Chapter 5. 

2 Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics 

of Morals, transl. and ed. by Mary Gregor 
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 
1997), p. 42, 4:434. 

3 Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Ethics, ed. by P. 
Heath & J. B. Schneewind, transl. by P. Heath 
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 
1997), p. 212, 27:458-459. 

4 James Rachels, Created from Animals: The Moral 

Implications of Darwinism (Oxford: Oxford 
University Press, 1990), p. 183. 

5 Rachels 1990, p. 184. 
6 For recent examples of such views, see Massimo 

Reichlin, “The Argument from Potential: A 
Reappraisal,” Bioethics 11 (1997), pp. 1-23, 
Patrick Lee & Robert P. George, “The Nature 
and Basis of Human Dignity,” Ratio Juris 21 
(2008), pp. 173-193, and S. Matthew Liao, 
“The Basis of Human Moral Status,” Journal of 

Moral Philosophy 7 (2010), pp. 159-179. 
7 Examples are Carl Cohen, “The Case for the Use 

of Animals in Biomedical Research,” New 

England Journal of Medicine 315 (1986), pp. 
865-870, and Michael Allen Fox, The Case for 

Animal Experimentation: An Evolutionary and 

Ethical Perspective (Berkeley: University of 
California Press, 1986). 

move away from consuming conscious 
animals and towards a plant-based diet. 
 

Acknowledgments: I would like to thank François 
Jaquet, C. E. Abbate, and audiences at Lagos State 
University, the Twentieth Asian Bioethics 
Conference in Bangladesh, the University of 
Nairobi, the University of Dar es Salaam, Jagannath 
University, and Rice University for helpful feedback 
on various versions of this paper. 
 
Author contribution: The author developed the 
conceptual idea and wrote the manuscript. 
 
Conflict of interest: The author declares no conflict 
of interest. 

 
 

8 Cf. Marc Ereshefsky, “Species,” The Stanford 

Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2017 
Edition), ed. by Edward N. Zalta, URL = 
<https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2017/ent
ries/species/>. 

9 A line from a later book by Darwin usefully 
illustrates the departure from Aristotle’s claim 
that humans are separate in kind from other 
animals in virtue of their rationality, and is 
often quoted in the animal ethics literature: “the 
difference in mind between man and the higher 
animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree 
and not of kind” (Charles Darwin, The Descent 

of Man, Part One (New York: American Home 
Library, 1902), p. 170). 

10 Henry Sidgwick, Essays on Ethics and Method 
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 11. 

11 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-

Philosophicus (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and 
Company, 1922), p. 77, 4.1122. 

12 Richard Dawkins, The Illustrated Magic of 

Reality (New York: Free Press, 2012), pp. 38-
40. 

13 Rainer Ebert, “The Wrongness of Killing,” PhD 

dissertation, Rice University (2016), URL = 
<http://hdl.handle.net/1911/96270>. 

14 Rainer Ebert, “Mental-Threshold Egalitarianism: 
How not to ground full moral status,” Social 

Theory and Practice 44 (2018), pp. 75-93. 
15 Rainer Ebert, “Are Humans More Equal Than 

Other Animals? An Evolutionary Argument 
Against Exclusively Human Dignity,” 
Philosophia 48 (2020), pp. 1807-1823. 


