RSA - The Solitary Self

RSA - The Solitary Self: "Mary Midgley, Britain's leading moral philosopher, visits the RSA to offer a passionate critique of the use of Darwin’s ideas in modern accounts of human nature and motivation.

Via Darwin and the latest developments in evolutionary science, she challenges the view that reduces human motivation to pure self-interest – arguing that the simple, one-sided accounts of human drives, such as the ‘selfish gene’ tendency in recent thought, may be illuminating but are always unrealistic.

Midgley will argue that the reductive individualism which is now presented as Darwinism comes, not from Darwin’s evolutionary theory but from a wider tradition in Enlightenment thinking. Moving away from the notion of heroic independence and self-directed individualism, Midgley instead suggests that we are framed to interact constantly with one another in societies and the complex ecosystems of which we are a tiny part."