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Darwin, Marx and Freud

Their Influence on Moral Theory

  • Book
  • © 1984

Overview

Editors:
  1. Arthur L. Caplan

    1. The Hastings Center, Ethics, and the Life Sciences, Institute of Society, Hastings-on-Hudson, USA

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  2. Bruce Jennings

    1. The Hastings Center, Ethics, and the Life Sciences, Institute of Society, Hastings-on-Hudson, USA

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    You can also search for this editor in PubMed   Google Scholar

Part of the book series: The Hastings Center Series in Ethics (HCSE)

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Table of contents (9 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xxvii
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  2. Darwin

    1. Front Matter

      Pages 1-1
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    2. The Philosophical Implications of Darwinism

      • Antony G. N. Flew
      Pages 3-33

    3. Evolution and Ethics

      • Ernst Mayr
      Pages 35-46

    4. Darwinism and Ethics

      • Leon R. Kass
      Pages 47-69

  3. Marx

    1. Front Matter

      Pages 71-71
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    2. Preliminary Thoughts for a Prolegomena to a Future Analysis of Marxism and Ethics

      • Michael Harrington
      Pages 73-111

    3. Marxism and Ethics Today

      • Elizabeth Rapaport
      Pages 113-130

    4. Marx and Morality

      • Allen W. Wood
      Pages 131-144

  4. Freud

    1. Front Matter

      Pages 145-145
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    2. Freud’s Impact on Modern Morality and Our World View

      • Robert R. Holt
      Pages 147-200

    3. Ethics and Excuses

      • Gerald N. Izenberg
      Pages 201-208

    4. Freud’s Influence on the Moral Aspects of the Physician-Patient Relationship

      • Eugene B. Brody
      Pages 209-220

  5. Back Matter

    Pages 221-230
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Keywords

About this book

hope of obtaining a comprehensive and coherent understand­ ing of the human condition, we must somehow weave together the biological, sociological, and psychological components of human nature and experience. And this cannot be done­ indeed, it is difficult to even make sense of an attempt to do it-without first settling our accounts with Darwin, Marx, and Freud. The legacy of these three thinkers continues to haunt us in other ways as well. Whatever their substantive philosophical differences in other respects, Darwin, Marx, and Freud shared a common, overriding intellectual orientation: they taught us to see human things in historical, developmental terms. Phil­ osophically, questions of being were displaced in their works by questions of becoming. Methodologically, genesis replaced teleological and essentialist considerations in the explanatory logic of their theories. Darwin, Marx, and Freud were, above all, theorists of conflict, dynamism, and change. They em­ phasized the fragility of order, and their abiding concern was always to discover and to explicate the myriad ways in which order grows out of disorder. For these reasons their theories constantly confront and challenge the cardinal tenet of our modern secular faith: the notion of progress. To be sure, their emphasis on conflict and the flux of change within the flow of time was not unprecedented; its origins in Western thought can be traced back at least as far as Heraclitus.

Editors and Affiliations

  • The Hastings Center, Ethics, and the Life Sciences, Institute of Society, Hastings-on-Hudson, USA

    Arthur L. Caplan, Bruce Jennings

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