Herbert Spencer

1820-1903 · English (Derby; London; Brighton) · Evolutionary Philosophy, Sociology, Political Philosophy, Evolutionary Ethics, Evolutionary Psychology, Philosophy of Biology

Every man has freedom to do all that he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man.

Herbert Spencer (1820 – 1903) was the son of a Derby schoolmaster, taught at home and by a clergyman uncle and never at a university, who worked as a railway engineer and then as sub-editor of *The Economist* before he published a line of philosophy. His first book, *Social Statics* (1851), derived the whole of political ethics from one law, that every man may do all that he wills provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other, and drew conclusions his later admirers found too radical: that land could not rightly be private property, that women had equal rights, that a citizen might…

Topics Herbert Spencer addresses

• law of equal freedom
• the right to ignore the state
• the social organism
• militant and industrial types of society
• the Unknowable
• reconciliation of religion and science
• persistence of force
• instability of the homogeneous
• multiplication of effects
• segregation and equilibration
• evolution as integration of matter and dissipation of motion
• from homogeneity to heterogeneity
• survival of the fittest
• inheritance of acquired characteristics
• Weismann controversy
• adaptation and the disappearance of evil
• the right to the use of the earth
• the coming slavery
• limits of state action
• evolutionary ethics of pleasure and life
• absolute and relative ethics
• inherited forms of thought
• correspondence of inner and outer relations
• ghost theory of the origin of religion

Questions to put to Herbert Spencer

Equal Freedom and the Limits of the State

• What exactly is the law of equal freedom, and how do you derive all other rights from it?
• Why do you think the state's only legitimate job is protecting rights — what goes wrong when it tries to do more?
• What's the argument behind the right to ignore the state?
• How do you respond to the worry that limiting the state to rights-protection just leaves the poor to suffer?
• You call parliamentary supremacy 'the great political superstition' — what do you mean by that?

Evolution, Force, and the Formula of Progress

• What do you mean when you say evolution moves from homogeneity to heterogeneity?
• How does the persistence of force explain why homogeneous things always break apart into more complex ones?
• You coined the phrase 'survival of the fittest' — how does it relate to what Darwin meant by natural selection?
• Why do you insist that inherited acquired characteristics are a necessary second factor in evolution, not just an optional add-on?
• If evolution ends in equilibrium and then dissolution, does progress have a natural ceiling?

The Unknowable and the Reconciliation of Religion and Science

• What is the Unknowable, and why do you think both religion and science are forced to acknowledge it?
• How can we be certain that an ultimate Power exists if, by your own account, we can know nothing about it?
• What's the error religion makes when it tries to describe that Power, and what's the corresponding error science risks?
• Why do you think the conflict between religion and science is, at its deepest level, a misunderstanding?

Evolutionary Ethics and the Conciliation of Egoism and Altruism

• How do you get from the facts of evolution to a standard of what counts as good conduct?
• What's the difference between the absolute ethics of a fully evolved society and the relative ethics we can actually practice now?
• If moral intuitions are just inherited habits of the race, why should I treat them as genuinely binding?
• How do you see egoism and altruism eventually being reconciled — is that a prediction or a hope?
• You argue that the state should not redistribute wealth to the poor — how does private charity fit into your ethics?

The Social Organism and Militant versus Industrial Society

• In what sense is society an organism, and where does the analogy break down?
• What distinguishes a militant society from an industrial one, and how does a society move from one to the other?
• Why do you think war and empire push even free societies back toward regimentation and status?
• How does your account of the social organism bear on the question of whether individuals exist for the sake of society or the other way around?
• What did you see in the expansion of the British Empire that alarmed you about the direction of your own civilization?

The Science of Society and Its Biases

• What makes sociology a genuine science, and what are the main biases that distort people's thinking about society?
• How does your ghost theory explain where religious belief originally came from?
• What knowledge do you think is most worth having, and why does that put conventional education in the wrong?
• How should a student of society guard against reading their own political preferences into the evidence?

Converse with Herbert Spencer on Simposeum. Replies are grounded in Herbert Spencer's own writing, cited to the page.