Russell as prophet

Though out of step with the intellectual legions of the era, Bertrand Russell's 1910 essay, The Elements of Ethics, was prescient in its scorn for social Darwinism. World War I, which saw him imprisoned for espousing pacifism, and World War II, which he viewed as necessary, were yet to come. Though when Russell wrote his essay, he may have been thinking of the racist social Darwinism implicit in Britain's Boer wars, the ugliest outcome of that doctrine, Nazism, was not yet on the horizon.

I have a feeling that Russell's intellectual atheism may have been mitigated by his Christian upbringing, despite what he thought of religiously overbearing family members.

In any case, though Russell years later repudiated his 1910 belief in "objective ethical values," nevertheless his remarks on social Darwinism remain relevant:

We cannot, then, infer any results as to what is good or bad from a study of the things that exist. This conclusion needs chiefly, at the present time, to be applied against evolutionary ethics. The phrase survival of the fittest seems to have given rise to the belief that those who survive are the fittest in some ethical sense, and that the course of evolution gives evidence that the later type is better than the earlier. On this basis, a worship of force is easily set up, and the mitigation of struggle by civilization comes to be deprecated. It is thought that what fights most successfully is most admirable, and that what does not help in fighting is worthless. Such a view is wholly destitute of logical foundation. The course of nature, as we have seen, is irrelevant to deciding as to what is good or bad. A priori, it would be as probable that evolution should go from bad to worse, as that it should go from good to better. What makes the view plausible is the fact that the lower animals existed earlier than the higher, and that among men the civilized races are able to defeat and often exterminate the uncivilized. But here the ethical preference of the higher to the lower animals, and of the exterminators to the exterminated, is not based upon evolution, but exists independently, and unconsciously intrudes into our judgment of the evolutionary process. If evolutionary ethics were sound, we ought to be entirely indifferent as to what the course of evolution may be, since whatever it is is thereby proved to be the best. Yet if it should turn out that the Negro or Chinaman were able to oust the European, we should cease to have any admiration of evolution; for as a matter of fact our preference of the European to the Negro is wholly independent of the European’s greater prowess with the Maxim gun.

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