In this remarkable book, the first of three volumes, Celia Deane-Drummond examines “the roots of our own individual and collective moral sense and capacities for wisdom” (1) in order to discover indicators of a morality that is less mono-anthropic and more fluid and social than typically assumed. Indeed, Deane-Drummond prefers the term “wisdom” over morality “because wisdom is itself about making connections, and is sufficiently fluid as a term to be flexible in what it can encompass” (viii).
As the first step in her project, this volume focuses on wisdom's “origin story”—that is, “its appearance in the evolutionary record, its links with all the different virtues and morally relevant capacities, and its role in shaping morally relevant structures and institutions” (96). This leads Deane-Drummond to examine an extensive range of natural behaviors and moral practices, along with the contested theories that try to make sense of them: contemporary evolution theory, the interplay between culture and evolution, interspecies encounters, the emergence of sociality, nonhuman agency as integrated within a human/nonhuman commons, evolutionary appearances of cognates to the virtues (e.g., justice, compassion, wisdom), divine image bearing, systems theory and the moral life, and human distinctiveness. Her arguments build on an interdisciplinary array of anthropological, cultural, evolutionary, philosophical, and theological studies. With her dual background in theology and the biological sciences, Deane-Drummond is distinctively qualified for such interdisciplinary work and for drawing out the theological implications of it.
Faced with the book's detailed explorations, readers might find themselves wanting more specifics regarding the comprehensive theory that will link together all these descents into the details—a description of the systematic form that Deane-Drummond's theological ethics will take. But that is not the project of this volume. Rather, it repeatedly and through different disciplinary lenses returns to the foundational building blocks of morality in order to consider what insights might scientific evolutionary studies bring to them. Taken together, her numerous investigations are an invitation to deepen our appreciation of other (nonhuman) agents, recognize our entanglements with them, and acknowledge the complex and shared cultural and evolutionary stories that have led us to this point.
The nature of the book's project does not allow an easy summary. Nonetheless, I note Deane-Drummond's appeals to anthropologist Timothy Ingold (one of the most referenced scholars in the book) as a good entry point for beginning to understand her larger project. Ingold's view, as she describes it, is that life emerges “as bounded entities that are constituted through perpetual interchange with their environment” (137), and this relational view of how creaturely identity is formed provides Deane-Drummond a scientific basis for approaching ethics within multispecies framework. Moral wisdom in such a framework is expressed in sound practices that respect the innately inter-relational and interspecies reality of life in a multispecies commons, while also supporting the emergent flourishing of the entangled species and individual creatures composing it.
In other scholarly hands, the sustained focus on scientific studies as fonts for ethical wisdom might veer toward some form of ethical naturalism. But Deane-Drummond is alert to the issue, and thus regularly tacks to the normative and theological to guide her examinations. Nonetheless, if this were a self-standing book, I would want to see a more significant constructive role given to the author's theological commitments. Fortunately, this book is just the beginning: the second volume promises to be “more explicitly theological in its framing”; there Deane-Drummond will focus on sin and the “deeper roots” of evil (xi).
The book's serves as a stunningly rich, bibliographic resource (with a helpful index for locating discussions of interest), and that in itself makes the book quite valuable and noteworthy. But more importantly, it is an auspicious beginning to a much-needed project: to challenge the disincarnate assumptions and anthropocentric isolationism that too often shape moral reflections.
