自己は環境に適応すべきか

前期デューイ「進化と倫理」における非進化論的前提をめぐって

抄録

The aim of this paper is to answer the following two questions: (Q1) How valid is the widely believed proposition that each agent (i. e. an individual or a social group functioning as an agent) should adapt to its environment? and, (Q2) If this proposition needs revision, in what way should we revise it? In order to answer Q1, we trace the historical lineage of thinking about evolution-ethics from Galton through Darwin, Spencer, and Huxley to early Dewey. This survey reveals that the widely believed proposition appeared first in that lineage in the early Dewey's ‘Evolution and Ethics’ (1898), and that it depends on the following two un-evolutionary premises: first, that if X is an agent, what is desired by X is ethically good to X (P1: a familiar form of ethical naturalism), and second, that the responsibility for X's adaptation (or adjustment) to X's environment should be attributed only to X (P2: the principle of self-responsibility).
Whether P1 is valid or not is too large a question to address in this paper, so we will suppose for the sake of argument that P1 is acceptable. However, it is possible to argue, both from evolution itself and from P1, that P2 is not tenable, and that a premise more appropriate than P2 is that whether the responsibility for X's adaptation to X's environment should be attributed to X alone, or to both X and X's social environment (i. e. other agents concerned with X), should depend on whether X prefers to take the whole responsibility or to share it with the social environment (P3: the principle of the agent's choice of responsibility scope).
Thus we can say, in response to Q1, that the widely believed proposition is not valid (at least as we have it from the early Dewey) because it depends on P2. And we can say, in response to Q2, that a more appropriate version of it will be based on evolution, P1 (perhaps), and P3 (probably)-though within the confines of the present paper, P1 and P3 obviously remain conjectural.