QuestionsAre humans good by nature?Mutual aid: sociability is a fact of nature and the foundation of morality
Are humans good by nature?Good by nature

Mutual aid: sociability is a fact of nature and the foundation of morality

Mutual aid; the struggle for life; Kropotkin against Huxley

Pierre Kropotkine 1842 · 1921Mutual aid, as much as struggle, is a factor of evolution: sociability lies at the root of morality.
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What it claims

Man carries within him an instinct of mutual aid, inherited from animal life, which is the real foundation of our ethical conceptions: the war of each against all is not the law of nature.

Why

Species with the most developed mutual aid are the most prosperous, and humans have always lived in mutual-aid groups.

The same idea through history
Charles Darwin1871In The Descent of Man, Darwin already writes that man is a social being, and makes the moral sense an extension of the social instincts of animals. Kropotkin says his thesis is only a development of these ideas of Darwin.
Pierre Kropotkine1902Kropotkin (1842-1921), a Russian geographer and naturalist who became an anarchist thinker, observed the fauna of Siberia and Manchuria in his youth. He published his articles from 1890 to 1896 in the review The Nineteenth Century, in reply to an article by Huxley, then collected them in a book in 1902.
In short

"Mutual aid: sociability is a fact of nature and the foundation of morality" is an argument by Pierre Kropotkine (Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, 1902 (Introduction and Conclusion), 1902) on the question "Are humans good by nature?" (answer: good by nature). Its claim: Man carries within him an instinct of mutual aid, inherited from animal life, which is the real foundation of our ethical conceptions: the war of each against all is not the law of nature. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P5). AskPhilosophy presents 3 objections, 3 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, 1902 (Introduction and Conclusion)
Valid with an implicit premise

For many Darwinists of his time, nature is "red in tooth and claw": life is a struggle of each against each, and morality must come against it. Kropotkin, who had travelled through Siberia, did not see this struggle between individuals of the same species there. He saw the harshness of the climate, and wherever life abounded, animals helping each other. From this he draws a thesis about nature, human nature included: mutual aid is a factor of evolution, more important than competition, and our ideas of morality come from it. The title of this camp is "Good by nature": Kropotkin does not claim that man is never aggressive, he claims that sociability is, in him, the deepest current. The P1 to P5 form is our reconstruction, from the Introduction and the Conclusion.

P1In Siberia and Manchuria, Kropotkin sees great severity in the struggle against the climate, but does not find, among individuals of the same species, the bitter struggle for the means of existence that Darwinists held to be the dominant feature of life.
P2Wherever life abounds, on the contrary, he sees mutual aid and mutual support carried to a degree that makes him think they matter greatly for the maintenance of life, of each species and of its evolution.
P3The animal species in which individual struggle has been reduced to its narrowest limits and mutual aid has attained the greatest development are invariably the most numerous, the most prosperous and the most open to further progress.
P4Man too lives in clans and tribes from the dawn of the stone age, and his institutions of mutual aid (clan, village, city, guilds, associations) go with him up to our own day.
P5 · implicit premiseIf a tendency has been present since the beginnings of animal life, favoured because it makes species prosper, and is found throughout human history, then it belongs to the nature of man, and not to a veneer of civilization.
Therefore man carries within him an instinct of mutual aid, inherited from animal life, which is the real foundation of our ethical conceptions: the war of each against all is not the law of nature.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P5, the computer finds a case where mutual aid is widespread, advantageous for species, present in human history, but is only a means serving deeper tendencies such as rivalry or defence of the group: the conclusion "foundation of morality" no longer follows.
With its five premises, the conclusion follows. Three points are fragile. First, P3 reasons at the level of the species ("cooperative species prosper"), whereas biologists today ask how a trait can spread when it costs the individual. Second, P5: an instinct of mutual aid does not by itself make a "good" bent, since mutual aid may stop at the group's border. Finally, Kropotkin himself recognises a second current, self-assertion, and that a single war may do more harm than centuries of mutual aid do good.
Analogy. A forest seen by a walker who notices only the trees that fall and those that fight for light. Kropotkin tells him to look also at the birds that nest together and the ants that share their food. Both see the same forest. Only the attention differs.

Objections

3

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

Thomas H. Huxley 1888 · attacks premise 1

Huxley writes that, from the point of view of the moralist, the animal world is on about the same level as a gladiator's show: the creatures are fairly well treated and set to fight, and the strongest, the swiftest and the cunningest live to fight another day. Among primitive men too, the weakest and stupidest went to the wall, and beyond the limited and temporary relations of the family, the Hobbesian war of each against all was the normal state of existence.

Kropotkine replies
Kropotkine Kropotkin's reply (chapter I)
Summary: Kropotkin replies that Huxley's view had as little claim to be taken as a scientific deduction as the opposite view of Rousseau. Rousseau had committed the error of excluding the beak-and-claw fight from his thoughts, and Huxley the opposite error. Neither Rousseau's optimism nor Huxley's pessimism can be accepted as an impartial interpretation of nature.
Thomas H. Huxley 1893 · Huxley, in the Romanes Lecture (1893) and its notes (1894), while Kropotkin was publishing his articles
Summary: in the Romanes Lecture, Huxley writes that the ethical progress of society depends not on imitating the cosmic process, nor on running away from it, but on combating it. In a note, he specifies that social life and the ethical process are, strictly speaking, part of the general process of evolution, like the gregarious habit of many animals. For him there is a rudimentary ethical process in such forms of society.
Where the debate stands (our summary)The two men agree more than is supposed: Huxley admits that life in society is part of evolution, and Kropotkin admits that self-assertion exists. The disagreement is about the order of factors: struggle is the base and ethics fights it (Huxley), or sociability is the base of morality (Kropotkin). Each accuses the other of seeing only half of nature.
George C. Williams 1966 · attacks premise 3

Summary: in Adaptation and Natural Selection, Williams criticises explanations that invoke the good of the group or species. According to him, natural selection acts on individuals (or their genes), and a trait that benefits the species but costs the individual does not spread easily. Cooperative behaviour must therefore be explained by an advantage to the individual or to relatives. The reasoning "cooperative species prosper" is not enough.

a defender replies
No reply possible: objection raised in 1966, after the author's death (1921).
E
Elliott Sober and David Sloan Wilson defender of the argument · 1998
Summary: in Unto Others, Sober and Wilson argue that selection can act at several levels at once, including the group. A trait costly to the individual can spread if groups having it outcompete others. They see in this a basis for real altruism in animals and in humans.
Where the debate stands (our summary)An active debate in evolutionary biology: many biologists remain wary of group selection, others defend it. Is group selection a real force (Sober and Wilson), or are its effects explained by selection of genes and kin (Williams and his heirs)? Both camps admit that mutual aid exists; they differ on its cause.
Sigmund Freud 1930 · attacks the conclusion

Summary: Freud says it is always possible to bind a large crowd of people together in love, provided others remain to receive their aggression. For him the cohesion of a group relies on hostility turned toward outsiders, which makes aggression a base anterior to mutual aid.

Kropotkine replies
see the argument
Kropotkine What Kropotkin himself admits (Conclusion)
Summary: Kropotkin recognises that beside the current of mutual aid there has always been the other current, self-assertion, by which the individual or the group seeks superiority. He also admits that a single war may produce more evil, immediate and subsequent, than hundreds of years of the action of mutual aid produce good. He maintains, however, that mutual aid goes hand in hand with progress in the animal world and that even success in war is proportionate to the development of mutual aid in each side.
The debate goes on (our summary) Freud writes twenty-eight years after Kropotkin's book and does not cite it; the reply is therefore that of an earlier text. The two men see the same facts: groups bound by mutual aid and wars between groups. For Kropotkin, mutual aid is what makes groups capable of fighting; for Freud, the group needs an enemy to bind itself. Both orders are possible.
Where the debate stands (our summary)An open question, studied today in psychology and anthropology: is mutual aid within the group accompanied by hostility to the outside by necessity, or because the two developed together? The results are mixed.