The Ethical Consequences of Competition

If all nature is at war, with the creatures struggling for existence with each other, and if human life is another form of natural life, then humans must also be caught up in this struggle for survival.

If so, then it follows that, rather than be charitable, compassionate, or altruisitic, humans should be brutal, ruthless, and murderous.

This has presented an problem for the advocates of Darwinism, because such an ethical code runs entirely counter to Christian ( and Buddhist, Islamic, Judaic ) religious teachings, as well as moral theories developed by subsequent thinkers. Either Darwinians had to accept the moral implications of Darwinism for human life, or else refuse. The other option was simply to deny the importance or the reality of Darwin's war of nature.

Acceptance

Darwin himself appears to have always accepted the murderous implications of his idea in human life:

When two races of men meet they act precisely like two species of animals - they fight, eat each other, bring diseases to each other &c, but then comes the more deadly struggle, namely which have the best fitted organisation, or instincts (ie. intellect in man) to gain the day.
(Darwin. 1839 notebooks)

At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked, will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.
(Darwin. The Descent of Man. Chapter VI)

The more civilised so-called Caucasian races have beaten the Turks hollow in the struggle for existence. Looking at the world at no very distant date, what an endless number of lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilised races throughout the world.
(Darwin. Letter to W. Graham. 3 July 1881)
(from Darwinian Impacts. Ch.16 D.R.Oldroyd. Open University. 1980)

Sociobiologists, it appears, also accept:

The economy of nature is competitive from beginning to end. Understand that economy, and how it works, and the underlying reasons for social phenomena are manifest. They are the means by which one organism gains some advantage to the detriment of another. No hint of genuine charity ameliorates our vision of society, once sentimentalism has been laid aside. What passes for cooperation turns out to be a mixture of opportunism and exploitation... Scratch an altruist, and watch a hypocrite bleed.
(Sociobiologist M.T. Ghiselin. The Economy of Nature and the Evolution of Sex. 1974)

Nobody can doubt that this world will one day be the scene of dreadful struggles for existence on the part of mankind. In the end the instinct of self-preservation alone will triumph. Before its consuming fire this so-called humanitarianism, which connotes only a mixture of fatuous timidity and self-conceit, will melt away as under the March sunshine. Man has become great through perpetual struggle. In perpetual peace his greatness must decline.
(Hitler. Mein Kampf. Chapter 4.)

If we do not respect the law of nature, imposing our will by the might of the stronger, a day would come when the wild animals would again devour us, and the insects would eat the wild animals, and finally nothing would exist except the microbes... The law of selection justifies this incessant struggle by allowing the survival of the fittest. Christianity is a rebellion against natural law, a protest against nature.
(Hitler. Table Talk.)

In Mein Kampf Hitler had written years before, 'A stronger race will drive out the weaker ones, for the vital urge in its ultimate form will break down the absurd barriers of the so-called humanity of individuals to make way for the humanity of Nature which destroys the weak to give their place to the strong.' That is the law of the jungle: little wonder that it brought in its train so much misery, agony, destruction and death.
(Russell. The Scourge of the Swastika.)

A great deal has been written to put distance between Hitler and the Darwinian theory of evolution. Hitler, it is said, employed a crude blending theory of evolution. But then, so did Darwin, who knew nothing of Mendelian genetics. Hitler's eugenic ideas, his ideas of higher and lower races, were the common currency of his age. What was remarkable about Hitler was not what he believed, but that he acted on those beliefs. Hitler acted upon Darwin's logic of intense intra-specific competition, by setting out to systematically eliminate competitors - Jews, Gypsies, Slavs. Hitler behaved as an exemplary Darwinian competitor.

And indeed a process of "natural selection" was suggested during the Wannsee Conference of 1942 in which the transport and elimination of European Jews was discussed.

Able-bodied Jews, separated according to sex, will be taken in large work columns to these areas for work on roads, in the course of which action doubtless a large portion will be eliminated by natural causes. The possible final remnant will, since it will undoubtedly consist of the most resistant portion, have to be treated accordingly, because it is the product of natural selection and would, if released, act as a the seed of a new Jewish revival
(Adolf Eichmann. Wannsee Conferences minutes. January 1942)

Refusal

A. R. Wallace, co-founder with Darwin of the theory of evolution by natural selection, could never bring himself to consent to this brutalisation. For him, human beings were distinguished form brute nature through being spiritual beings, and in his later years Wallace turned to mysticism.

Thomas Huxley - Darwin's 'bulldog' - also refused to accept that natural selection by competitive exclusion was applicable to humans.

No one is more strongly convinced than I am of the vastness of the gulf between civilised man and the brutes, or is more certain that whether from them or not, he is assuredly not of them.
(T.H.Huxley from Nature's Economy. Ch. 9. Donald Worster. Cambridge 1985)

For Huxley, morality was a human invention. Nature was the model of depravity, and "the headquarters of the enemy of ethical virtue."

In more recent times, Richard Dawkins has also set out to separate humanity from the natural world:

We [humans] have at least the mental equipment to foster our long-term selfish interests rather than merely our short-term selfish interests. We can see the long-term benefits of participating in a 'conspiracy of doves', and we can sit down together to discuss ways of making the conspiracy work. We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth and, if necessary, the selfish memes of our indoctrination. We can even discuss ways of deliberately cultivating and nurturing pure, disinterested altruism - something that has no place in nature, something that has never existed before in the whole history of the world. We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.
(Richard Dawkins. The Selfish Gene. Ch. 11. Oxford 1989)

Brave words, but how come "we alone" can rebel against our selfish genes? What special dispensation does human life have, which has been denied to all previous forms of life? And for every Richard Dawkins and Thomas Huxley who deny the continuity of human life with all preceding natural life, surely there will be one or two men who will accept that continuity, deny any special dispensation for human life, and draw quite different conclusions?

Denial

Another line of argument simply downplays competition and the struggle for existence, and replaces it with reproductive success as the measure of fitness. Darwin's war of nature is gently ushered offstage. The competitive imperative is replaced by a reproductive imperative.

Whenever one organism leaves more successful offspring than another, in time its genes will come to dominate the population gene pool. Eventually the genotype leaving fewer offspring must become extinct in a stable population, unless there are concomitant changes conferring an advantage on it as it becomes rarer. Thus ultimately, natural selection operates only by differential reproductive success. Differential mortality can be selective but only to the degree that it creates differences between individuals in the number of reproductive progeny they leave.
Hence Darwin's choice of words, such as "struggle for existence" and "survival of the fittest," have had a most unfortunate consequence. They have tended to make people think in terms of a dog-eat-dog world and to consider such things as predation and fighting over food as the prevalent means of selection. All too often natural selection is couched in terms of differential death rates, and the strongest and fastest individuals are considered to have a selective advantage over weaker and slower individuals. But if this were the case, every species would continually gain in strength and speed.
(Evolutionary Ecology. 3rd Ed. Eric R. Pianka. Harper and Row 1983 Original emphases.)

Competition becomes occasional, as the reproductive imperative takes over.

The phrase "struggle for existence" is unfortunate. It carries too many overtones of "Nature red in tooth and claw." True, predatory animals do play a part in reducing the number of surviving members of a population, and hence in determining which members will contribute most to the next generation. But competition for available food supply is also a factor, operating principally in times of exceptional stringency, as, for example, during droughts, floods, exceptionally severe or prolonged winters, or as a result of extreme overpopulation of a given territory...

"Individuals having most offspring are the fittest ones (Lerner, 1959). It is well to remember that this is what "fittest" means in natural selection theory, and all that it means. Much mistaken thinking to the contrary notwithstanding, "fittest" does not mean "strongest" or "fastest" or "healthiest" or "most intelligent."
(Paul Moody. Introduction to Evolution. 2nd Ed. Harper. 1962)

Another approach is to deny that the fact of a struggle for existence in the natural world has any ethical consequences for humans. The attempt to draw moral lessons from natural facts is often called the 'naturalistic fallacy', which asserts that it is not possible to derive a prescriptive conclusion from a descriptive premise: one cannot derive an "ought" from an "is". Just because there is a struggle for existence in the natural world, it does not follow that humans ought to behave like animals.

Since the middle of the nineteenth century, repeated attempts have been made - and sociobiology represents the most recent one - to ground morals on ethologico-evolutionary considerations. The ability to adopt a moral code may indeed be viewed as an aspect of human behaviour. It must, therefore, have been shaped by selective, evolutionary forces in the same way as, for instance, the ability to speak, what Noam Chomsky calls a 'deep structure'. In this perspective, it is the task of biologists to explain how human beings have evolved their capacity to hold ethical beliefs. This, however, does not apply to the content of these beliefs. It is not because something is 'natural' that it is 'right'...
In fact, the search for biological answers to questions of ethics represents a confusion between what Kant considered to be two quite distinct categories. It is driven by the ideology of scientism, the belief that the methods and insights of the natural sciences will account for all aspects of human activity. Such a belief underlies the equivocal terminology used by many sociobiologists, as well as some of their unwarranted suppositions and extrapolations from animal to human behaviour.
(Francois Jacob. The Possible and the Actual. 1982)

Christian Creationism may not be so much an objection to the idea of evolution itself, but to the ethical consequences of accepting the Darwinian idea of evolution by competitive exclusion. Rather than accept the all-too-obvious moral consequences of this version of evolution, some Christians have preferred to throw out the whole idea of evolution, lock, stock, and barrel.

Conclusion

Some 150 years on, the Darwinian struggle for existence still has its adherents. For them, life is the war of all against all, and some of them have fully adopted its competitive imperative. Others, while accepting the Darwinian struggle, have exempted human life from this struggle.

But, more recently, a reproductive imperative has begun to edge out the competitive imperative. Once reproduction becomes the central imperative of life, the moral problem of Darwinian competition simply fades away.

This shift oddly coincides with a wider shift in social mentality. The Victorians admired mastery, strength, pugnacity, toughness and determination. Such qualities, in the late 20th Century, are not admired so highly, if at all. Sexual liberation from Victorian prudery, assisted by psychologists such as Freud, has given sex a new primacy in human life. The advocates of a reproductive imperative may thus have encountered a receptiveness to their ideas which would have been absent a century earlier.

But perhaps more generally, those scientists who see their task as describing the natural world, stating what is the case, regularly deny that it is any business of theirs, as scientists, to state what ought to be the case.