Beast and Man

Introduction

Mary Midgley, who studied at Oxford in the same generation as Iris Murdoch, Philippa Foot and Elizabeth Anscombe, published her first book in her late fifties while teaching at Newcastle. Beast and Man draws on ethology – the study of animal behaviour developed by Konrad Lorenz, Niko Tinbergen and others – to argue that humans have a nature, a structure of inborn tendencies and needs, which is not a threat to freedom but its precondition. She criticises both the view that humans are blank slates and the reductive sociobiology that emerged in the 1970s. The book also questions the sharp line moral philosophy has drawn between human beings and other animals.

More works by Mary Midgley

• 1984Wickedness