Peter Kropotkin, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
Morality does not descend from heaven, and it is not imposed by the state, and it is not a bargain struck by calculating egoists who would cheat if they dared. It grows from below, out of the same soil as the rest of life. The social animals — and man is among the most social — carry in them an instinct of mutual aid and sympathy, bred by evolution because the sociable species survive; and out of this instinct, elaborated by reason and by the long experience of living together, grow the sense of justice (the recognition of the equal worth of others, the demand for equity) and, beyond justice, the impulse of magnanimity, the free overflowing of energy that gives without counting.1
This is the whole natural history of the moral sense, and it needs no God to command it, no sovereign to enforce it, no contract to justify it. The command moralities have it exactly backward: they suppose that without an authority above us we should have no reason to be good, when in truth the authority came late and merely codified — and often corrupted — the mutual aid that was already there.
Nietzsche, who would have the strong trample the instinct of solidarity as a slave's virtue, mistakes the disease of a competitive society for strength; real vigour is the overflowing life that expresses itself in aid, not in domination. An ethics for free people is one that asks no obedience and needs none: be strong, overflow, and give.234
The foundation of this last ethics was laid by Darwin; he at- tempted to derive the primary supports of the moral sentiment from the social instinct, which is deeply ingrained in all social animals.Ethics, Origin and Development
P. Tiele, Geschichte der Religion in AUertum, German translation by G Gehrich Gotha, 1903, vol. H pp. 163 sq. [Trans, from the Dutch of Cornelius Petrus Tiele, Gotha, 3 vols" 1896-1W3,] — ^Trans. Note. 29 ETHICS: ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT well as from the narrow conceptions of philistine utilitarianism. The elements for such a new conception of morality are already at hand.Ethics, Origin and Development
Mutml Aid— Justice— Morality are thus the consecutive steps of an ascending series, revealed to us by the study of the animal world and man.Ethics, Origin and Development
He saw in it, as is known, the rudiments of the moral conscience, which consideration is, unfortunately, too often for- gotten by the Darwinists. ® See remarks in this connection by Lloyd Morgan and ray reply to them, [Qrawy L. Morgan, Animal Behaviour, Lond. 1900, pp. 227 IT. The reply is found in one of the notes to Mutual Aid.} — ^Trans. Note. 15 ETHICS: ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT But this is not all.Ethics, Origin and Development
Kropotkin's naturalistic ethics anticipates the contemporary evolutionary account of the moral sense (Frans de Waal's work on the biological roots of morality in Primates and Philosophers, and the broader moral-sentiments and moral-psychology literature) by grounding morality in evolved sociability rather than in reason, God, or contract. The standing philosophical objection is the Humean is/ought gap and the naturalistic fallacy: that even if mutual aid is a natural fact, no descriptive fact about our instincts can by itself establish that we ought to act on it. The ethics also stands against Kantian rational-command morality, against divine-command theory, and against the Nietzschean and Stirnerite egoism that Kropotkin explicitly attacked. The late Ethics was left unfinished at his death.