RSA - The Solitary Self

The Solitary Self

20th Sep 2010; 18:00

(full recording including audience Q&A)
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RSA Keynote

Is it time to rethink what it means to be an individual?

Mary Midgley, Britain's leading moral philosopher, visits the RSA to offer a passionate critique of the use of Darwin’s ideas in modern accounts of human nature and motivation.

Via Darwin and the latest developments in evolutionary science, she challenges the view that reduces human motivation to pure self-interest – arguing that the simple, one-sided accounts of human drives, such as the ‘selfish gene’ tendency in recent thought, may be illuminating but are always unrealistic.

Midgley will argue that the reductive individualism which is now presented as Darwinism comes, not from Darwin’s evolutionary theory but from a wider tradition in Enlightenment thinking. Moving away from the notion of heroic independence and self-directed individualism, Midgley instead suggests that we are framed to interact constantly with one another in societies and the complex ecosystems of which we are a tiny part.

Suggested hashtag for Twitter users: #rsamidgley