§1 Preamble - three images

I start by assembling three images, the first and third of which can be found online.

The first is a photograph of Charles Darwin’s study at his home, Downe House. It was taken by his son Leonard Darwin, probably around the time of his father’s death in 1882, and now features on the website of the charity ‘English Heritage’.Footnote ¹ Above Darwin’s desk, slips of paper are visible, pinned to the wall to the right of the fireplace. In Beast and Man, her important first book published in 1978, Midgley (1979 [Reference Midgley1978]: 148) commends Darwin: ‘Rightly did Darwin pin up a paper warning himself to be careful about using words such as “higher” and “lower”’. Downe House became a school for girls in 1907. Mary Midgley, then Scrutton, was a pupil.

The second image is contained in the question that is my title: ‘Are there no foxes in the human soul?’. Midgley raises this question, bizarre though it is, in a fragment of a doctoral thesis on Plotinus which she began in 1947, and which is currently being prepared for publication by Plotinus scholar Panayiota Vassilopoulou. Vassilopoulou notes Midgley’s apparent (but unattributed) endorsement of Inge (Reference Inge1918)’s characterization of Plotinus’ conception of the soul as the ‘wanderer of the metaphysical world’.Footnote ²

The third image is of one such wanderer. The first pictures of earth from space filled TV screens in 1969 but Midgley has said that her ‘Neil Armstrong’ was the British primatologist Jane Goodall. In an iconic National Geographic photograph taken five years earlier, Goodall is seen to reach out to touch the hand of the infant chimpanzee Flint. At first sight, it might be thought that with this analogy Midgley means to signal the respect in which, by her lights, the ethologist’s work was more transformative to our self-understanding than a moon-landing, but in this paper l develop a different reading: Armstrong could see the whole of the planet from without.Footnote ³ Goodall was encountering part of the whole of life from within.

Taken together, these three images are shortcuts to the conclusion I will draw – just how will become clear in closing. For now, they serve to place Midgley and her thinking in a broad sweep of time.Footnote ⁴ Midgley did not finish her thesis on Plotinus. Instead, she got married, moved to Newcastle in the North of England, had three children and, as she put it, generally ‘put her feet up’.Footnote ⁵ In Midgley’s case, this involved writing book reviews for the New Statesman as well as numerous philosophical articles, many of them deep and prescient (including for this journal). It also involved repeated ‘raids’ – her term - on the libraries of Newcastle so as to acquaint herself with ethology and its burgeoning development in the field of ecology. Midgley’s first book Beast and Man was the fruit of those raids.Footnote ⁶ Famously it begins: ‘We are not just rather like animals, we are animals’ (Midgley 1979 [Reference Midgley1978] xiii). I will return to this.

§2 Natural Goodness & the ‘mixed community’

The subtitle of this paper is ‘A Midgleyean Metaphysics for Mixed Communities’. The notion of ‘the mixed community’ appears in the tenth chapter of Midgley’s third book Animals and Why They Matter, published in 1983.Footnote ⁷ In it, she makes a number of striking claims:Footnote ⁸

1. 1. Human communities involve animals (112)

2. 2. Though domestication involved exploitation, it could not have occurred without personal or emotional involvement between tamers and tamed (ibid.)

3. 3. Belief in animal sentience is essential to ‘successful exploitation’ (114)

4. 4. Animals became tame, ‘not just through the fear of violence, but because they were able to form individual bonds with those who tamed them by coming to understand the social signals addressed to them’ (ibid.)

5. 5. ‘All creatures which have been successfully domesticated are ones which were originally social’ (ibid.)

6. 6. Those who succeed in training animals, do so by interacting socially with them – ‘by attending to them and coming to understand how various things appear from each animal’s point of view’ (113). Note ‘each’ here. She says ‘there is something which it is to be a horse or donkey, and to be this horse or donkey’.

7. 7. Real individual affection can arise between animals and people (116)

8. 8. Humans have a capacity, if limited, to attend to and understand the moods and reactions of other species (114)

We have here an array of descriptive, empirical, philosophical, historical, sociological and what have been called ‘natural historical’ claims. For instance, (2) and (4) and to some extent (5) combine in current work by my biosciences colleague Sean Twiss. He and his team hypothesize that subordinate individuals in wolf packs have the capacity to express a wider range of emotions so that they can pacify and engage with more dominant pack members. The working idea is that such flexible expression in subordinate individuals in wolves (whose ancestors are the same as those of the domestic dog), provided the gateway for bonding with humans, which ultimately led to domestication. (3) runs counter to certain forms behaviourism and this is the role it dialectically plays in Midgley’s chapter; the behaviourist is one who often discounts the empirical reality or significance of animal sentience. (6) is grounded in first personal testimony and experience. Likewise (7). In her chapter Midgley reflects on an Old Testament example from the prophet Nathan, lest we are inclined to denounce pet-owning as, in her words, ‘a gratuitous perversion produced by modern affluence’ (Midgley 1998 [Reference Midgley1983]: 116).

(1) and (8), finally, look to be, or at least they have the superficial grammatical appearance of what Michael Thompson calls natural historical judgements.Footnote ⁹ According to Thompson, the representation of life or living things in language or thought has a special logical form or grammar, something that is familiar to us from the narration that floats over natural history documentary footage. Such judgements typically have a ‘life-form’ term in the grammatical subject position; this may appear with the definite article or in plural form. They are formulated in the present tense and describe life activities and characteristics. Where temporal relations are expressed, they designate phases, or life-stages – as Thompson says, the temporal indicators express a B- rather than A-series in McTaggart’s sense. They are not quantified.Footnote ¹⁰

To illustrate:

But, of course, a sentence that has the superficial form of a natural historical judgment may not yet be one. In Natural Goodness, Philippa Foot gives an example. ‘The blue tit has a round blue patch on its head’ has the same superficial grammar as ‘The male peacock has a brightly coloured tail’ (Foot Reference Foot2001: 30). Yet, writes Foot, in the life of the blue tit, the colour of head plays no role. Here we should note a distinction between ascription and explanation. Foot’s thought is that, properly speaking, natural historical judgments enter into teleological explanations or hypotheses that might be expressed by way of phrases like ‘in order to’ or ‘so that’. Subordinate individuals in wolf packs have the capacity to express a wider range of emotions so that they can pacify and engage with more dominant pack members. But there may be commonly ascribable features that explain nothing about what is characteristic in the way of the life of an S. Some S not that being way then – the drab-headed bluetit in Philippa Foot’s garden for instance - would not make it any less of an S.Footnote ¹² Foot wants to show that there is an internal relation between a kind assessment that we might make of an individual living thing – the normative judgment that things are or are not with this individual as they should be - and a conception of the life-form that natural historical judgments so understood express. The prize she is after in Natural Goodness is the idea that moral evaluation involves this kind of assessment – that is, it is an assessment of natural normativity.Footnote ¹³ One who acts badly is not as they should be, qua human.

Now, it might be suggested that the ubiquity of other animals in the lives of human animals is very much like the ubiquity of blue-patches on the heads of bluetits and that (1) displays only the superficial grammar of a natural historical judgment and is not a natural historical judgment strictly speaking. We are not then committing ourselves to the (perhaps) incredible idea that any human life lived without animals is not as it should be. But I am doubtful that Foot would go this way. For one, many human practices that support the distinctive ‘life activities’ of humans have historically involved and involve labouring animals – dogs, birds, horses, camels, elephants, deer. Second, humans are a social species. If (8) is true, there is no necessity that each and every human has that capacity.

As it happens, Foot holds out another way to think about (1). Though many non-human animals peep out from the pages of Natural Goodness, contributing to the beauty of the work, in a postscript Foot is clear: it is not a work of animal ethics, she is not concerned with our lives with other animals. Still, in one place, she makes a distinction that should draw our attention. The nests of mice and burrows of voles can be said to possess a kind of secondary goodness. Natural goodness is ‘autonomous’ insofar as it depends ‘directly on the relation of an individual to the ‘life form’ of its species’ (Foot Reference Foot2001: 26). Secondary goodness is ‘derivative’; it is goodness that is relative to some need or interest that whatever possesses the goodness satisfies. To give an example of Foot’s, horses that carry us as we want to be carried are ‘good’ in this derivative or secondary way.Footnote ¹⁴

Now, granting that Foot is not really interested in our lives with other animals, this characterization of secondary goodness should nevertheless give us pause. For that horses possess secondary goodness in the sense she suggests indicates that, by her lights (and to use her idiom), some human good does or may ‘hang’ on something like (1) - it is secondary goodness after all, and it is not at all clear that it could have been brought about, historically, some other way (Foot Reference Foot2001: 16). But if so, this seems to point to a certain kind of instability or at least indeterminacy in her account. For even if it is not yet a substantive feature of her treatment, the logic of her account, together with this specific example, serves to make available the following thought: Something of the autonomous human good may turn out to depend on derivative goods that involve other animals who may or may not be living the life that is characteristic of their kind.Footnote ¹⁵ The philosopher attracted by ethical naturalism is thus confronted either with an uncomfortable ambivalence that appears internal to her favourite ethical theory on pain of discounting (1) or a theoretical gap.

So, what can be said? Well, this at the very least: the relations between humans and other animals whose lives they practically arrange is not like the relation between the harvest mice and the field grass they assemble into nests. Even where there is exploitation, there is, as Midgley urges in (2), (3), (4), (6) and (7), interaction, attention and affection – relations that are communicative and phenomenal and not wholly external and instrumental (later, I will provide a constraint which means that industrial farming is excluded from any such relational characterization, even where we can assume glimmers of interspecies recognition). In many cases, though still imperfect, we can add to this list invocation, shared interest and motivation. But if (1) is admitted as a natural historical judgment proper, might we not go further? (1) makes out that something of the specifically human good turns out to be interspecific. So, might there be a kind of natural goodness that transcends or overleaps the realm of the autonomous?

I don’t propose to answer that bold question here. My suggestion is only that Midgley’s notion of mixed community holds out a way of approaching such a possibility, and mostly imaginatively.Footnote ¹⁶

The remainder of the paper patterns as follows: In §§3–4, I centre a case that Midgley uses to illustrate the idea of mixed community and I position Midgley as a philosopher of motive so as to reflect on what that particular mixed community involves. I then circle back to Foot and Thompson. First, I suggest a way of closing the theoretical gap I have located in Foot, before making some brief remarks on Thompson’s epistemology of perception. Ultimately, I suggest that both Foot and Thompson make an argumentative move that is likely to occlude the interspecific. I close by pointing in the direction of where I think the Midgleyean metaphysician is heading (§§5–6).

§3. Another fresh start?

The notion of ‘community’ is central to many fields of study. I pick two. First ecology. In a 2020 textbook entitled Joint Species Distribution Modelling, the authors tell us that an ‘ecological community’ is ‘generally understood as the assemblage of at least two potentially interacting species at a given time and location’ (Ovaskainen & Abrego Reference Ovaskainen and Abrego2020: 4). The extreme generality of this understanding leaves space for potential interaction – species may or may not interact – as well as the nature and timescale of any potential interaction. What is crucial however is that species co-occur over some period in the same spatially delimited area.Footnote ¹⁷

Turning to sociology, it is not surprising to find that space remains key but now transfigured as those places or locales to which communities are related and in the context of which community members can feel themselves to belong through certain forms of sharing – for instance, of resources - or through shared interests, experiences and identities. As such, communities, as social realities, are grounded in relational ties like trust than rather than by contract. Either way, community is a normative ideal.Footnote ¹⁸

Midgley’s mixed community has the hallmarks of the concept as studied by both fields, but what I especially want to emphasize, at least to begin, is the historicity and particularity that (6) and (7) make visible. Consider another example Midgley gives in Animals and Why they Matter. She quotes from Emma and I, the memoirs of the author Sheila Hocken who is blind. Hocken recalls learning to walk with a guide-dog:

The dog trainer says,

Midgley homes in on the differing sensory ecologies through which Hocken as a blind woman and Emma, as a dog, are moving. She writes:

Here the achievement of some human good does indeed derivatively hang on the goodness that is derived from the dog’s capacity, through selective breeding, to be trained by humans to lead them where they want to be led, and it is true that Emma is not living a life that is characteristic of her kind. But what Midgley draws from this example perhaps allows us to say something at once more descriptively adequate and, I think, more philosophically interesting. She continues:

Return now to Thompson and reflect on the trainer’s reminder to Hocken: ‘She’s a dog’. Thompson’s analysis of the special logical form of natural historical judgment tells us something of the kind of knowledge that is folded into the species name. It is something of the life-form of the dog, including characteristic ways of filling out space and time. This is the kind of knowledge – for example, the knowledge that the dog acquires and interprets information about its environment through sniffing - that prompts the recommendation ‘Don’t stop talking, or Emma’ll think you’ve fallen asleep…. You’ve got to keep her interest’. But the trainer also assumes that it is possible that Emma’s interest can be kept by being addressed by Hocken. Or cast differently: it is a possibility for Emma that her interest can be engaged and sustained by Hocken. And of course, Midgley is not speaking metaphorically when she says that the trainer “properly” uses the word ‘think’ in imagining what Emma might suppose has happened should Hocken go silent – for having fallen asleep is one among the possibilities for humans who are not talking. Or walking.

Thompson’s work encourages us to suppose that life-forms are partly such as to fill out space and time in a specific way (whether space and time are ever filled out that way; the environment may be too degraded; the life form may be extinct). So, on this understanding, insofar as Emma’s particular path through space and time is at least partly shaped by Hocken’s practical ends, it is natural to feel that Emma’s life is distorted – and by the standards of neo-Aristotelian ethical naturalism so it is. We can put it pictorially in this way: in the Venn diagram of Hocken’s life, Emma’s life is a subset.

Midgley’s work invites us to imagine a different configuration.

Both Hocken’s and Emma’s lives are unfolding at a common place and time. They co-occur. Granted this is not happenstance – Emma is Hocken’s guide-dog. At the same time, the lifeforms that give shape to those particular trajectories through space over time intersect. Part of what is possible in the life of a dog is something that a human can reach, for something of what is possible for humans is possible for Emma. She responds to her name; what Hocken says is such as it can shape her interest. Likewise, what is possible in the life of a human is something that a dog can reach, for something of what is possible for dogs is possible for Hocken – she waits for Emma (as Emma waits for her), she greets Emma (they greet each other).

It is of course true that the intersection is imbalanced or imperfect - Hocken’s particular path through space and time has, we might assume, aspects of the dog-like pattern only in some very small respect while much of Emma’s life revolves around, for example, the fetching of shoes from under dressing-tables (notice here that Midgley refers to Emma’s activity as ‘work’, labour from which guide-dogs also ‘retire’). But though imperfect, what grounds the possibility of intersection, and sustains it in this case, is what Midgley speaks of in (2), (3), (4), (6), (7). This is what marks off the present example from forms of industrial farming and other functionally similar practical arrangements of animal bodies for human ends which, we can now say, are materially organized so as to effectively exclude life-form co-occurrence. They are such that any of the kinds of relational tie that belong to and are proper to community are practically, and by various means, extinguished.

§4 Midgley, motive & mixture

I now want to begin to develop the suggestion that in Midgley’s notion of mixed community we can begin see, albeit in outline, a picture of what interspecific natural normativity might involve. This first requires a sketch of Midgley’s distinctive moral psychology.

Midgley has been thought to be a virtue ethicistFootnote ¹⁹, but I think it more fruitful to think of her as a philosopher of motive. Motives are instinctual tendencies that, for Midgley, belong to us as animals. They are such tendencies as can be given with infinitival action descriptions: to flee, to home, to mate, to play, to explore, to dominate - we might think of them as possible vectors. They have a ‘natural pattern’. For instance, after a period of foraging - or shopping - a creature may want to rest or to share, or perhaps to gloat over her haul. That Midgley is a philosopher of motive explains why Jung and Freud receive such frequent, often surprising mention in her work.Footnote ²⁰

In Beast and Man her method is to call on ethology to excavate aspects of the structure of the motivational pattern for humans. This is both because she sees our animality as continuous with other forms of lifeFootnote ²¹, in a sense I gesture at the end of this paper, and because, as she sees it, our culture can stop us from asking the kinds of questions that would uncover patterns that we might otherwise wish to ignore or suppress – and this is where she thinks Freud’s work has proved enormously useful if reductive (viz. it’s not all about sex). Here she treats the historian and poet as ethologists alike, as archaeologists of human motive.Footnote ²² This is because, in the human case, the circumstances in which individuals are motivated to go after certain things may be enormously complex (hence the length of Russian novels). Indeed, for Midgley it is precisely from such complexity that human morality springs. Her 1994 book The Ethical Primate opens:

‘Morality’ then is envisaged as a system for enabling us to establish priorities in the face of conflicting motives. This is a necessity since each of us has only one life to lead - we can only track one path through space and time. Culture supplements and informs this capacity in various ways. Material institutions impose their own local ordering, as do social circumstances at large, especially where material needs are not met and the possibility of acting out of even very basic motives is completely foreclosed. In fact, often it is only in literature or art that we can get any sense at all of what the complete working out of a possible motive would look like. We may come to see how, in the life of an individual, motivational pattens can reify into what we might otherwise (mistakenly) take to be dispositions from which token actions (causally) spring – in her 1984 Wickedness Midgley discusses Shakespeare’s Iago at length (Midgley Reference Midgley1984: 144–147). We may come to see how a pattern of priorities may come confer an organizational structure on the life of individual, as when - to choose one of Midgley’s closer-to-home examples - an academic pervasively acts out of ambition and not curiosity. But motives (luckily) come in sets; the one who acts out of ambition may be also acting out of the need for recognition or esteem which is connected to the need for belonging (to belong) and ultimately attachment (to be loved).

In fact, there is scarcely any motive for Midgley that is worthy or vicious in itself, save perhaps the motivation to destroy. What matters rather is balance or proportionality; that one motive does not crowd out others and ‘dull’ our capacity to live as we are capable of living. ‘Reason’ plays this balancing and ordering role but ‘feeling’ is integral – the pair in this sense are one. This is because to possess a motive is to be able to act in a certain way given what is in the circumstances. For instance, the creature that possesses the motive to defend their territory may, on finding an intruder in their lair, act on that motive. Here feelings of fear or anger may be informative and make this reason or, as I would like to say, this ‘because in the circumstances’, especially salient or significant. But this ‘territorial motive’ may be only one among the possible trajectories for our imagined creature. They may also possess the motive to give assistance to the weak or helpless, a motive which of course comes with its own affective halo. And if this motive is strong, and if the intruder is wounded or very young, this consideration, in the circumstances, may be more powerful. The intruder may be not just spared but rescued.

Though the pattern of motives that is natural for a creature form a structure, or as Midgley sometimes says a ‘knot’, for some creatures – those with what she calls open instinctsFootnote ²³ - this structure can be repatterned. In the human case, this may be so by various means, both in the circumstances and over time and for better or for worse: a sudden cry (now it is surely plain that the intruder needs help and not a fight), through training and discipline (think before you act, weigh up the consequences), a conversation (remember what we did last time?), a story (Goldilocks was an intruder), or by some bit of rhetoric or philosophy (intruders are sub-rational; feelings are brutish).

That our motivational set can be unravelled and reknotted by such means explains why the ways in which we are collectively and individually driven is often hard to fathom - the power to repattern belongs to so many external sources. But we also have it within ourselves. In a highly-discussed example, including by MidgleyFootnote ²⁴, Iris Murdoch writes of a mother-in-law, M, who judges her son to have married beneath him. She behaves ‘beautifully’ to the girl, D, despite thinking her ‘vulgar’. Later, with D deceased or gone away, M reflects. Of course, D was her son’s wife – that might seem reason enough to treat her beautifully. And naturally it is proper not to have behaved other than beautifully. But that such motives took precedence over the motive that the presence of the girl herself constituted belies the operation then of a further drive: the motive to seek or preserve social status or conventional prestige (Murdoch Reference Murdoch and Conradi1998: 312–318).

The fact that we have some kind of temporal perspective on our unfolding lives demands, as Midgley puts it, that we sometimes ‘make a policy change’ or risk engaging in self-deception, something M did not, as the ‘well-intentioned’ person Murdoch says she is, persist in. But this is difficult. Midgley writes: ‘We need to be continuous beings, harmonious through time, yet we are subject to all kinds of passing impulses, and also to deeper changes of attitude’ (p.191). What this shows, importantly I think, is that motives can operate discretely even where they come in sets. That is why the structure of most of our lives is, on a hard look, and in many places, rationally inconsistent or even hypocritical. We can and probably must tolerate a bit of this, Midgley thinks, but we should not tolerate too much. This is because, in the end, though our motivations are often obscure to us, most of us do have a general idea of what matters in human life:

It is a feature of Midgley’s metaphilosophy that the motives that underpin certain forms of philosophical display are a long distance from the urge to metaphysics – a quest to make sense of ‘this deeply puzzling world’ and our place within it.

Earlier I suggested that in the particular co-occurring historical trajectories through space and time that are the lives of Emma and Hocken, there is an intersection that is framed by their interaction; by their each having some limited awareness of what is possible for the other. We can now deepen this picture.

Hocken says of Emma that she ‘took on the responsibility for her every need’. That every need of Emma’s was even partially satisfied by Hocken, of course goes some way to explaining the degree to which Emma’s motivational set is repatterned in the context of their lives together. We are motivated to go after what we need. What Emma needs to go after is shaped by her being Hocken’s guide dog. Hocken, of course, has a motive to satisfy Emma’s wants – she is blind, and Emma is her guide dog. But it would be wrong to suppose that Hocken’s motives in caring for Emma are mostly or even partly instrumental and that they don’t spring from real affection (7). We must be able to acknowledge, both that Emma is not living the life that is characteristic of her kind, that her life is disordered in this sense, but also the reality that there is something that is properly life-affirming for both of them in their life together, and that in Emma’s circumstances, though they are certainly deprived as Hocken’s circumstances are – Hocken cannot see – some freedom remains.

Though I have introduced the idea of life-form intersection, Midgley’s own exploratory metaphor is in fact more radical.

That the species barrier is porous in this way I think brings us closer towards a conception of community that has less imbalance and is more, in a chemical sense, a mixture.

Mixtures in the sense we are after might be said to be compositions of different substances, in this case life-forms. They are not combinations - for it is precisely in chemical combination that the elements combined lose their active powers and remain only as potentialities in the product. This perhaps suggests a way of acknowledging the kind of distortion that exists where there is imbalance even while insisting that since there is imbalance there is still heterogeneity. A composition, in contrast, involves heterogeneity that remains fully separable while mixed and is such that active and passive powers persist.Footnote ²⁵ Midgley’s vision of mixed community is, I want to say, primarily a vision of a composition – and where the composing substances belong to the infantile phase (as water, ice and steam are all phases of H₂O) the chemistry is greatest:

So, perhaps we can now say that the lives of Emma and Hocken involve both combination and composition. Powers that would otherwise be native to Emma, a domestic dog, have been bred out, deactivated. More specifically, in her daily life with Hocken, Emma’s motivational set has been repatterned; she fetches shoes. But though this is so, I have said that some freedom remains. Together Hocken and Emma act under descriptions that are native to each of their kind. They greet each other. They play. Such activity is interspecific, and it involves the composition of active powers.Footnote ²⁶

§5. The ‘autonomy’ of natural goodness

I now want to circle back to Foot’s thought that natural goodness is ‘autonomous’. Recall that natural goodness is ‘autonomous’ insofar as it depends ‘directly on the relation of an individual to the ‘life form’ of its species’. Secondary goodness is ‘derivative’; it is goodness that is relative to some need or interest that whatever possesses the goodness satisfies.

At the outset I staged a challenge for Foot that flows from her claim that the human use of animals may possess a kind of secondary goodness, and I said that, without constraint, this may well be consistent with those animals not living a life that it is characteristic of their kind. As such, there is a gap in her theory. We now have such a constraint. Whatever ‘secondary goodness’ may hang on the interaction of humans with other animals, the mixture that results, when a mixture results, should not be such as to necessitate the loss of the powers that belong to either or any species proper. This constraint I think allows for a Kantian response on behalf of Foot: we risk losing our powers, of empathy, virtue and hence for Foot practical rationality, in arrangements that involve the distortion of animal lives.

But with this constraint available, notice, there is, after all, a way to reject (1) as a natural historical judgment proper while yet making space for the empirical reality of mixed communities. Humans are social animals. That sociality may be expressed in mixed community. The kind of creature I am may be actualised by my interacting with other non-human animals (subject to the constraint), but it need not be. So, it does not belong to the essence of the human form of life to live in community with other animals.Footnote ²⁷

With this response the autonomy of natural goodness is preserved. Nevertheless, it remains an artefact of the logic of Foot’s account that it is apt to occlude the interspecific, and particularly as it is given to us in Midgley. Let me explain.

Foot’s opponent, as is well known, is the moral subjectivist. The moral subjectivist is one for whom a judgment’s being a moral judgment, rests on there being, in the mind or heart of the one who is judging, some attitude, feeling, some commitment or conative state, in terms of which the evaluative content of a token moral judgment – that something is good or bad - can be analysed, and in terms of which the action-guiding character of moral evaluation can be explained. For Foot, this assumption is ‘all wrong’, is a ‘mistake’ and the idea of natural goodness as autonomous is meant as a corrective.Footnote ²⁸ It is a corrective because, with this idea, moral evaluation can, as Foot puts it, ‘reach all the way to its grounds’; when we are assessing the dispositions and conduct of some individual human here and now, we evaluate them relative to the life form. Our evaluation then does not depend on the presence, here and now, of some occurrent feeling, attitude, state or commitment present in the one who is, on the scene, doing the evaluating. Note my words: here, now, ‘on the scene’, occurrent. By appealing to the life-form. Foot can, we might say, outdistance the present evaluative scene and so the threat of moral subjectivism.

Earlier I developed Midgley’s appeal to the case of Hocken and Emma so as to provide an account of mixed community. I said that Hocken and Emma act together under descriptions that are native to both. But, of those, notice, many are likely pertain to activities that are substantially composed by interaction here and now (as when the baby makes a beeline for the kitten). It is such occurrent, spontaneous composition that the logic of Foot’s account is bound to occlude. And this may lead us to wonder: might it not also foreclose too soon exploration of what mixed community could be – its shape and limits? For instance, the case of Emma and Hocken involves conscious interaction and this is what makes it particularly apt for the Footian response. But are there not forms of interspecies mixedness that don’t have this (conscious) structure and are yet communal? With what kinds of living things can we commune? Midgley says that the capacity to form mixed communities is a ‘peculiar’ human talent, but is it? At the outer limits, we might even wonder whether some forms of mixed community gesture at a kind of natural normativity that is non-autonomous. For if mixed community involves activity that is co-constituted by different species living in their characteristic ways together, it is not hard to imagine some essentially interspecific activity, ϕ, that is necessarily such as to fall under different descriptions x and y, each of which is separately intelligible in terms of the life-forms of the distinct composing substances. So, suppose ‘ϕ’ is at once a case of ‘feeding’ (x) by life-form a and ‘grooming’ (y) by life-form b. In such cases, evaluating an individual in relation to its species kind would also be to evaluate it in relation to some other, given that this other must at least play its part in ϕ.Footnote ²⁹

I can’t develop this thought here. Instead, I will register the respect in which Thompson’s fecund work makes it available. At the same time, I show why interspecifity doesn’t sit so easily with his account either. This will finally help make plain what, by comparison, is distinctive about Midgley.

Thompson’s analysis of natural historical judgements is avowedly Fregean – he is concerned with the logical forms in which life is represented. But Frege’s own system ‘enforces a restricted interpretation of being’ (Thompson Reference Thompson2008: 17). Thompson’s innovation is to insist that existentially-quantified object-bound forms of predication – forms that represent actuality - are not apt for a representation of organic life.Footnote ³⁰ We see this in the fact that space and time – adverbial phrases of place and phase – are emphatically part of the life-form descriptions that natural historical judgments express. We are not to conceive of organisms as bundles of causally inter-connected properties that exist at places and move through space and time.

But though Thompson makes this Fregean innovation, his epistemology of perception remains moored to a conception of experience wherein what can be seen is primarily a matter of what is present in the perceptual array – which features and properties. We can detect something of this assumption in his reading of Elizabeth Anscombe’s paper ‘You Can Have Sex Without Children’.Footnote ³¹ Anscombe’s concern is with what distinguishes what she elsewhere calls ‘contraceptive intercourse’Footnote ³² from sexual acts that are generative insofar as they do not involve contraception. She writes:

It is this invocation of the ‘wider context’ that is taken up by Thompson. He writes:

He imagines the genesis of a novel kind of shark, who can sometimes be observed to ‘chase after small fish and incorporate them’, but where ‘[n]o part of this flesh ever enters the blood-stream’. Instead, it makes a ‘hideous brew’ which it occasionally spews out to frighten predators. So, what looks like eating is not eating, just as, by Anscombe’s lights, what looks like sex in the case of ‘contraceptive intercourse’, is not sex, since it is not generative. Thompson comments:

I want to say that there is something important here in the idiom of the spectacular, where to go beyond or outdistance the merely spectacular – beyond what can be presented to a spectator – is thought to involve an appeal to ‘more’ than is available ‘here and now’. In a way, it is surprising that Thompson should conceive of experience as so spectacular. One of Thompson’s key insights is that self-consciousness involves life-form consciousness. ‘Eating’ is a so-called vital description that picks out an activity that has its home in the conception of a certain form of life, such as ours is. To take oneself to be apprehending what turns out to be merely the appearance of ‘eating’ then involves, by Thompson’s lights, life-form consciousness. But since Thompson treats natural normativity as autonomous, this seems to imply that, on his account, any self-conscious sensible apprehension of activities that appear to fall under such vital descriptions implicitly and always involve consciousness of the human life-form. So, unexpectedly, it falls out of Thompson’s view that no human apprehension of non-human life activities can be anything other than anthropomorphic.Footnote ³³

Again Midgley’s epistemology is different.Footnote ³⁴

Midgley would agree with Thompson that calling something an acorn involves relating it to a wider context – to non-present oak trees. She thinks that we sometimes need the ethologist to tell us what is going on here and now with some individual thing or with some trace of that thing - its burrows or spherical nests – and this is especially so with species who are remote from us. But she does not think that this is because of a general sceptical difficulty that we face when we are presented with the spectacle of some living thing here and now such that we need to go beyond or outdistance what is here and now. Rather, in many cases, for Midgley, we should not be surprised to find the understanding in ourselves, and not only because we are in possession of the form of representation that is the representation of life, but simply because, to recall the first line of Beast and Man, ‘we are not just rather like animals: we are animals’ and, what’s more, what is really ‘more’, we are on the scene. Because we are animals, we are typically not completely alienated from what we see before us when we encounter some other living thing. Nor are we destined to apprehend what is vital activity in some other creature specifically in terms of the human life form, as Thompson’s view seems to entail. This is because the form of understanding that we have is in our being, in the loosely patterned motivational knot that structures our complex ways of going on, a knot which can be loosened and repatterned. Whatever ‘more’ is needed beyond the spectacular is (to some extent and in some indeterminate way) in us.

§5 Metaphysics: analogical and concrete

I am now in a position to recall, somehow now in synchrony I hope, the three images with which I began.

There is a way of thinking of likeness as resemblance, where a high level of resemblance may reasonably justify inferring identity. Midgley no doubt has this notion of resemblance in mind when she says ‘we are not rather just like animals’. But, as we have seen, two things or events that look to have the same properties may not yet be the same.

I have said that Midgley’s strategy of argumentation in Beast and Man is, like Foot and Thompson’s, to also look to the wider context. But instead of looking to a species-relative wider context to disable the threat of moral subjectivism or to unsettle a property-based conception of organic life that may be apt to generate scepticism, Midgley looks instead for different kinds of likenesses between us and other animals. Analogical likenesses.

Homology is likeness due to kinship – birds are akin, and their wings are homologous. But analogical similarities are functional similarities which are not based on kinship.Footnote ³⁵ Recalling Darwin’s note-to-self, analogical likenesses need not discriminate between ‘higher’ or ‘lower’ life-forms and, as Midgley writes, they may even yoke the organic to the inorganic – ‘if we are studying the penguin’s flippers’, she says, ‘we should look at the flippers of seals and whales, the fins of fish, and quite possibly the propellers of submarines’ (Midgley 1979 [Reference Midgley1978]: 335). Here the emphasis is on the parts of animals and their function in some medium – sea or air. What Beast and Man explores however is less the parts of animals and their functionFootnote ³⁶ than what might be called behavioural and motivational analogies.Footnote ³⁷ For instance, pair-bonding is a behaviour in which humans are analogically related not only to wolves, lemurs and gibbons, but to birds, mites and most surprisingly, in Midgley’s tally: ‘the painted shrimp’ (Midgley 1979 [Reference Midgley1978]). In our capacity to form and sustain social bonds, to forge friendships, we are analogically related to jackdaws, wild dogs, and dolphins, all of which display these social motivational patterns. These analogies exist in nature. And what the ethologist excavates, the moral philosopher can learn from (and the poet play with – the bird swims through the air). In acknowledging that ‘we are not just rather like animals, we are animals’, the question then becomes: which animals are we like. And here, as Midgley insists, homology does not win out over analogy.

Human life is analogous in many of its aspects then to the lives of many other animals. To discover an analogical relation between us and some other living creature is to encounter an aspect of ourselves realized in some other life form. So understood, the human life form can be seen as at least partially unified in a manifold of other forms of life that are not human – those of the horse, wolf, elephant, lemur and shrimp - and we in turn may come to view ourselves as part of a manifold in which other forms of life are unified analogically through us. But though the discovery of such analogical relations is the work of the ethologist, because we ourselves are animals, such analogies are also apt to be experienced (perhaps felt) and known, as when a likeness is discovered in an encounter here and now. This, then, is what I meant when I said that Jane Goodall was encountering part of the whole of life from within when she reached out to touch the infant Flint, and this is why, in this sense, Goodall is like the metaphysician, a wanderer or an explorer. The movement of discovery is at once outward and inward. The wider context is within (‘are there no foxes in the human soul?’).Footnote ³⁸

Earlier, in speaking of composition, I underlined separability. I can now say that the separability I had in mind was external, here underlining the independence and autonomy, in the life-form sense, which is also a kind or class sense, of the individuals forming the composing substances in mixed community.Footnote ³⁹ But, on this Midgleyean view, it remains the case that the very possibility of composition must, at some deeper level, lie in a kind of internal interrelatedness, along multiple dimensions, that goes beyond the class sense and that belongs to diverse living things in a unitary living world. Even as early as Animals and Why They Matter then, we can begin to see Midgley on the journey towards holism that ends with her appeal to Gaia.Footnote ⁴⁰

Iris Murdoch writes that ‘metaphysics sets up a picture which it then offers as an appeal to us all to see if we cannot find just this in our deepest experience’ (Murdoch 2003 [Reference Murdoch1992]: 507). That is to say, metaphysics gives us a framework in which we can try to seek out some parts of ourselves – those that it makes intelligible and that it relates. I have given some underdeveloped hints of where I think the Midgleyean metaphysician is heading, though it remains an open scholarly question how best to conceive, reconstruct and develop the picture that Midgley sketches across her large corpus – for instance, what neo-Platonic elements join with those that are Aristotelian? But for Murdoch, metaphysics is also a matter of imagination, and it is practical as well as theoretical. So taken, the real metaphysical test of the picture of ‘mixed community’ might be seen to lie ‘the appeal it issues to us all’; in the connections it illuminates, the powers it may help us find.Footnote ⁴¹