Midgley's response to such views is to suggest, first, that they depend on a one-dimensional view of science, assuming that all phenomena are to be understood in terms of what they start from, rather than what they become. Second, that they falsify the human condition by reducing it to something far simpler than it is. We are all familiar with one example of this: the reduction of human charity to the thing called "altruism" by the ethologists, and explained by evolutionary psychology as an adaptation that promotes the reproductive strategies of our "selfish" genes. This explanation can be generalised to cover 1,000 forms of animal behaviour, from the soldier ant marching into the flames that threaten the ant-heap, to the she-bear fighting to protect her cubs. And by assimilating human charity to those things, the evolutionary psychologist both reduces it to something less than itself, and also "disenchants" it, so that it loses its character as a free and sacrificial act. As Midgley points out, the evolutionary explanation leaves out all such facts as the following: the moral motive which tells us to do as we would be done by; the amplification of that motive by Christ, who commanded us to love those that hate us; a person's conscious decision to overcome fear, to put another's interest before his own, and to "lay down his life for his friend". All those are sufficient to generate charitable behaviour, so that the evolutionary "explanation" fails to identify a necessary condition. It seems to provide a sufficient condition only because that conduct has been described in language which leaves out all that is distinctive of the charitable motive, including the concepts of self and other. A condition that is neither necessary nor sufficient is a pretty poor shot at an explanation.

Midgley's confrontation with evolutionary "scientism" is the negative aspect of a philosophy which is far more interesting in its positive aspect. Believing that philosophy has been wrongly described as the handmaiden of the sciences, she seeks instead to approximate it to art, poetry and religion, as part of a systematic attempt to make sense of the human condition and to show the place in the natural world of beings like us. We are animals certainly, but animals with self-consciousness, freedom, morality, religion and culture. We live not merely as organisms, but as persons, in conscious relation with our kind. All our emotions take their sense from this goal, which can only be misrepresented by the language of biological science.

Midgley has courageously ploughed her furrow and has never tried to be fashionable. In one matter, however, she coincided with fashion, and that was the disastrous attack on hunting with hounds which, to my dismay, she joined with a passion that was not matched by any understanding of the subject. However, I take it as proof of human frailty, that a philosopher who has done more than most to stress the distinction between humans and other animals, should in this instance make common cause with the sentimentalists for whom that distinction is imperceptible.