Mary Midgley quotes - page 2

Mary Midgley was a British philosopher best known for her work on science, ethics, and animal rights. Her writings frequently critiqued reductionism and questioned the dominance of scientific materialism in modern thought. She became a prominent voice in moral philosophy and public debates about the relationships between humans, animals, and the natural world. Here are 49 of her quotes:

Let us start by considering why the attempt to glorify science on its own cannot work.

Mary Midgley

The symbolism of meat-eating is never neutral. To himself, the meat-eater seems to be eating life. To the vegetarian, he seems to be eating death.

Mary Midgley

Selection does not work by cutthroat competition between individuals, but by favouring whatever behavior is useful to the group.

Mary Midgley

The main trouble is, I think, best explained in the analogy of coffee. Natural selection is only a filter, and filters do not provide the taste of coffee that pours through them. Similarly, the range of evolutionary alternatives between which selection takes place has to be already in matter. How it comes to be present there is the real mystery about creation.

Mary Midgley

They refuse the mere fact of competing, that is, of needing to share out a resource with the motive of competitiveness or readiness to quarrel.

Mary Midgley

Animals are not machines; one of my main concerns is to combat this notion. Actually only machines are machines.

Mary Midgley

Everybody, including himself is partial in the sense of starting somewhere, of selecting something for emphasis. The fatal thing is not this. It is being confused about ones reasons for doing so.

Mary Midgley

Do we find ourselves a species naturally free from conflict? We do not.

Mary Midgley

An obsessive creature, constantly dominated by one kind of motive, would not survive.

Mary Midgley

The trouble with words like "fit" in these discussions is that, if taken in a wide sense they are liable to become vacuous, and if taken more narrowly they easily become tendentious.

Mary Midgley

In a species as emotionally interdependent as man this view of marriage is nonsense. Pair-formation could never have entered anybody's head as a device deliberately designated to promote utility.

Mary Midgley

The illumination that follows does not, of course, flow simply from their being smaller but from the wider scientific picture into which they can now be fitted. That picture gives them a new kind of context, a wider whole within which they can be differently understood. And finding that kind of context is an essential part of what "understanding” means.

Mary Midgley

This would again be like saying that the carburetor had won the race, instead of the car of the driver. Carburators do not even know how to enter races, let alone win them.

Mary Midgley

Quantification, like surgery, is an excellent thing in the right place, but a very bad topic for obsession. Unless you know just what you are counting--unless you are sure that the things counted are standard units--and unless you understand what is proved by results of your counting, quantifying provide you only with the outward show of science, a mirage, never the oasis.

Mary Midgley

But if it only means "likely to have many descendants," then there is no reason for treating it as an advantage at all.

Mary Midgley

The symbolism of meat-eating is never neutral. To himself, the meat-eater seems to be eating life. To the vegetarian, he seems to be eating death. There is a kind of gestalt-shift between the two positions which makes it hard to change, and hard to raise questions on the matter at all without becoming embattled.

Mary Midgley

Still, people have a lot of obvious and important things that other species do not–speech, rationality, culture and the rest. Comparison must deal with these. I have tried to discuss some of the most important of them, not attempting at all to deny their uniqueness, but merely to grasp how they occur in what is, after a primate species, not a brand of machine or a type of disembodied spirit. I have tried to show these capabilites as continuous with our animal nature, connected with our basic structure of motives.

Mary Midgley

The issue is not between bad guys who use and "adversary" approach and good guys who are scientific and impartial...Everybody, including himself is partial in the sense of starting somewhere, of selecting something for emphasis. The fatal thing is not this. It is being confused about ones reasons for doing so. Particular insights and principles of inquiry must be set in the context of other possible alternatives.

Mary Midgley

We must face unconsidered possibilities and ask ourselves alarming questions–for instance, must we perhaps let the self-destroyer go if he really wants to? Trying to answer this by collecting information about our own neurones would be no more use than doing it, like the Roman augur, by inspecting the entrails of a goat.

Mary Midgley

Speaking of an institution such as marriage as natural is, of course, paying it a compliment, the compliment of saying that it meets a fairly central human need. The fact that it is found in some form in every human society is in a way enough to show. But it might be thought that marriage became thus widespread only because it was, like adequate sanitation, a means to an end. This is pretty certainly what Hume thought, as evidenced by his very confused contrast of natural with artificial virtues. He regarded human sagacity simply as the power to calculate consequences, and counted chastity and fidelity, with justice, as artificial virtues, devices designed merely to produce safety and promote utility. In a species as emotionally interdependent as man this view of marriage is nonsense. Pair-formation could never have entered anybody's head as a device deliberately designated to promote utility.

Mary Midgley

About all these things physics can tell us nothing. The idea of natural selection, which, as we shall see, is uaully called in to account for this vast creative surge, is already looking increasingly inadequate to explain evolution. The main trouble is, I think, best explained in the analogy of coffee. Natural selection is only a filter, and filters do not provide the taste of coffee that pours through them. Similarly, the range of evolutionary alternatives between which selection takes place has to be already in matter. How it comes to be present there is the real mystery about creation.

Mary Midgley