# An evolutionist who also refused to equate evolution with goodness

Commentary on Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton.

On [CH07.P002](https://glosses.org/orthodoxy/pg16769-r1/CH07.P002/#char=510,594): "Evolution is only good if it produces good; good is only good if it helps evolution."

Chesterton’s compressed exchange attacks using the same process both to define goodness and to justify itself as good. It need not be read as a refutation of biological evolution. A particularly useful contemporary comparison is T. H. Huxley’s *Evolution and Ethics*, first delivered and published as the Romanes Lecture in 1893; the inspected Clark University transcription follows *Collected Essays*, volume IX (1894), with printed page numbers and collected-edition notes.

Huxley distinguishes explaining the development of moral sentiments from establishing their authority: immoral sentiments also evolved, so an evolutionary origin cannot by itself tell us which to prefer (pp. 79–80). He also separates fitness for prevailing conditions from ethical excellence, and makes social improvement depend on restraining competitive self-assertion (pp. 80–83). His collected-edition note 20 adds an essential qualification: the ethical process is itself part of evolution, rather than a supernatural interruption of it (pp. 114–15). [Huxley, pp. 79–83 and note 20](https://mathcs.clarku.edu/huxley/CE9/E-E.html).

This places a limit on the target: Chesterton’s criticism bears on evolutionary accounts that turn natural success into moral authority, rather than every account of morality’s evolutionary origins. Huxley provides an independently documented comparison; this passage supplies no evidence that Chesterton was answering him directly.

## Sources

- [T. H. Huxley, Evolution and Ethics](https://mathcs.clarku.edu/huxley/CE9/E-E.html), Romanes Lecture (1893), in Collected Essays IX (1894), pp. 79–83, and note 20, pp. 114–15; Clark University transcription

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