One bit of evidence given by those who see Spencer as a social Darwinist is his use of the phrase "survival of the fittest." The phrase does indeed occur in his writings, two times at least. But what Spencer meant by it needs to be examined. Weinstein points out that Spencer stated that "fittest" and "best" are not equivalent. This is one bit of distance, then, between Spencer and social Darwinism. Spencer wrote:
The beneficial results of the survival of the fittest, prove to be immeasurably greater than those above indicated. The process of "natural selection," as Mr. Darwin called it, cooperating with a tendency to variation and to inheritance of variations, he has shown to be a chief cause (though not, I believe, the sole cause) of that evolution through which all living things, beginning with the lowest and diverging and rediverging as they evolved, have reached their present degrees of organization and adaptation to their modes of life. So familiar has this truth become that some apology seems needed for naming it. And yet, strange to say, now that this truth is recognized by most cultivated people — now that the beneficent working of the survival of the fittest has been so impressed on them that, much more than people in past times, they might be expected to hesitate before neutralizing its action — now more than ever before in the history of the world, are they doing all they can to further survival of the unfittest!
Passages such as the one above can make Spencer seem like a social Darwinist. But some careful reading might prevent us from leaping to that conclusion. Spencer takes the concept of evolution from the biological to the sociological, but in this way: that it is not individuals who compete in the "survival of the fittest," but rather competing social structures - competing societies. In this, then, he parts ways from the typical social Darwinist. This is clear also in the following passage:
Thus by survival of the fittest, the militant type of society becomes characterized by profound confidence in the governing power, joined with a loyalty causing submission to it in all matters whatever. And there must tend to be established among those who speculate about political affairs in a militant society, a theory giving form to the needful ideas and feelings; accompanied by assertions that the law-giver if not divine in nature is divinely directed, and that unlimited obedience to him is divinely ordered.
We see both that Spencer is writing of competition between societies, not individuals, and that he is not asserting that "fittest" means "best" - in some cases, the survivor is a society with which Spencer finds fault.
Spencer certainly does dabble in Darwinism and evolution. He sees various forms of society developing over time. But this does not automatically place him among the hard-hearted social Darwinists. Spencer also dabbled in utilitarianism. David Weinstein writes:
One should not underestimate what “rational” utilitarianism implied for Spencer metaethically. In identifying himself as a “rational” utilitarian, Spencer distanced himself decidedly from social Darwinism, showing why Moore's infamous judgment was misplaced. Responding to T.H. Huxley's accusation that he conflated good with “survival of the fittest,” Spencer insisted that “fittest” and “best” were not equivalent. He agreed with Huxley that though ethics can be evolutionarily explained, ethics nevertheless preempts normal struggle for existence with the arrival of humans. Humans invest evolution with an “ethical check,” making human evolution qualitatively different from non-human evolution. “Rational” utilitarianism constitutes the most advanced form of “ethical check[ing]” insofar as it specifies the “equitable limits to his [the individual's] activities, and of the restraints which must be imposed upon him” in his interactions with others (Spencer, vol. I, 1901: 125–28). In short, once we begin systematizing our inchoate utilitarian intuitions with the principle of equal freedom and its derivative moral rights, we begin “check[ing]” evolutionary struggle for survival with unprecedented skill and subtlety. We self-consciously invest our utilitarianism with stringent liberal principles in order to advance our well-being as never before.
For Spencer, then, his utilitarianism and his liberalism mean that humans intervene in the Darwinist process and override it. Society is precisely where Darwinism stops and is replaced by deliberate and conscious human decision. Weinstein continues:
Not only was Spencer less than a “social Darwinist” as we have come to understand social Darwinism, but he was also less unambiguously libertarian as some, such as Eric Mack and Tibor Machan, have made him out to be. Not only his underlying utilitarianism but also the distinction, which he never forswears, between “rights properly so-called” and “political” rights, makes it problematic to read him as what we would call a ‘libertarian’.
Both utilitarianism and libertarianism can be, but are not necessarily, fertile ground for social Darwinism. This is perhaps one reason that readers have understood Spencer to be a social Darwinist when maybe he is not. It is easy to lose sight of the fact that some of Spencer's "survival of the fittest" rhetoric is not about individuals competing with each other for existence, and not even about societies competing with each other, but rather about forms of society competing with each other. He writes about one or more primitive types of society, but more central to his thought is a later phase of development in which a "military" society gives way to an "industrial" society. His use of these words is peculiar and we need to understand what me meant by them; it is easy to misunderstand Spencer on this point if we proceed with our everyday definitions of 'military' and 'industrial' which are not quite the same as his definitions.
By a military society, Spencer seems to mean a highly-structured society - even more, an authoritarian one, which exerts relatively more control over the individual - and this, of course, is that against which Spenser's libertarian instincts arise. To be sure, Weinstein's caution about labeling Spencer as a libertarian is well-noted; but if not a libertarian, than a classical liberal will react against the authoritarian control which Spencer calls a 'military' society. Such a society need not, for Spencer, take the form of arms and war; it could be a peacetime society with little or no organized army. Frederick Copleston writes about Spencer:
Spencer does not deny that the militant type of society had an essential role to play in the process of evolution considered as a struggle for existence in which the fittest survive. But he maintains that though inter-social conflict was necessary for the formation and growth of societies, the development of civilization renders war increasingly unnecessary. The militant type of society thus becomes an anachronism, and a transition is required to what Spencer calls the industrial type of society. This does not mean that the struggle for existence ceases. But it changes its form, becoming 'the industrial struggle for existence', in which that society is best fitted to survive which produces 'the largest number of the best individuals — individuals best adapted for life in the industrial state'. In this way Spencer tries to avoid the accusation that when he has arrived at the concept of the industrial type of society, he abandons the ideas of the struggle for existence and of the survival of the fittest.
By an industrial society, Spencer is thinking not of factories, labor unions, and eight-hour shifts on assembly lines. Rather he is thinking of being 'industrious' and creative. He emphasizes the notion of liberty - the freedom to create, invent, or produce. Copleston continues:
It would be a great mistake to suppose that by the industrial type of society Spencer means simply a society in which the citizens are occupied, exclusively or predominantly, in the economic life of production and distribution. For an industrial society in this narrow sense would be compatible with a thoroughgoing regulation of labour by the State. And it is precisely this element of compulsion which Spencer is concerned to exclude. On the economic level, he is referring to a society dominated by the principle of laissez-faire. Hence in his view socialist and communist States would be very far from exemplifying the essence of the industrial type of society. The function of the State is to maintain individual freedom and rights, and to adjudicate, when necessary, between conflicting claims. It is not the business of the State to interfere positively with the lives and conduct of the citizens, except when interference is required for the maintenance of internal peace.
His emphasis on freedom, in the sense of not only an economic free market, but a more generalized attitude of laissez-faire in the non-economic aspects of society, can leave Spencer seeming like a libertarian or social Darwinist. But his understanding of freedom also includes an active role for society to defend the freedom of the individual. This would seem a departure from Darwinism, inasmuch as those who might not survive, or whose freedom might not survive, without intervention are rescued by intervention. As Copleston writes:
In other words, in the ideal type of industrial society, as Spencer interprets the term, emphasis is shifted from the totality, the society as a whole, to its members considered as individuals. 'Under the industrial regime the citizen's individuality, instead of being sacrificed by the society, has to be defended by the society. Defence of his individuality becomes the society's essential duty.' That is to say, the cardinal function of the State becomes that of equitably adjusting conflicting claims between individual citizens and preventing the infringement of one man's liberty by another.
While Spencer's condemnation of labor laws (designed to protect workers), governmental poor relief, government schools, and government sanitation can make him seem like the most miserly of hard-hearted social Darwinists, this perception of him must be moderated in view of his belief that such benefits can not only be achieved, but better achieved, by voluntary associations in the private sector.
Obviously, in this resolute attack on 'the coming slavery' Spencer could not appeal simply to the automatic working-out of any law of evolution. His words are clearly inspired by a passionate conviction in the value of individual liberty and initiative, a conviction which reflected the character and temperament of a man who had never at any period of his life been inclined to bow before constituted authority simply because it was authority. And it is a notorious fact that Spencer carried his attack on what he regarded as encroachments by the State on private liberty to the extent of condemning factory legislation, sanitary inspection by government officials, State management of the Post Office, poor relief by the State and State education. Needless to say, he did not condemn reform as such or charitable relief work or the running of hospitals and schools. But his insistence was always on voluntary organization of such projects, as opposed to State action, management and control. In short, his ideal was that of a society in which, as he put it, the individual would be everything and the State nothing, in contrast with the militant type of society in which the State is everything and the individual nothing.
If the reader refers to Spencer's detailed and stinging critique of legislation, it will be remembered that Spenser demonstrated that legislation is not only useless, but harmful. Legislation designed to make travel safer caused more deaths on passenger ships. Regulation intended to improve public sanitation increased total fatalities from contagious disease. So what seems prima facie as humane legislation is in reality harmful to the vulnerable, to the ones whom it is intended to help: the poor, the physically disabled, the widows, orphans, foreigners, etc. Spencer is highlighting the sometimes counterintuitive reality of legislation: regulations enacted to help the poor often actually hurt the poor. Far from heartless, Spencer is ensuring that the individual will not "be ruthlessly sacrificed" to some abstract socialist formulation of "the common good," as Copleston formulates it:
At the same time Spencer's hostility to social legislation which nowadays is taken for granted by the vast majority of citizens in Great Britain should not blind us to the fact that he, like Mill, saw the dangers of bureaucracy and of any exaltation of the power and functions of the State which tends to stifle individual liberty and originality. To the present writer at any rate it seems that concern with the common good leads to an approval of State action to a degree far beyond what Spencer was prepared to endorse. But it should never be forgotten that the common good is not something entirely different from the good of the individual. And Spencer was doubtless quite right in thinking that it is for the good both of individuals and of society in general that citizens should be able to develop themselves freely and show initiative. We may well think that it is the business of the State to create and maintain the conditions in which individuals can develop themselves, and that this demands, for example, that the State should provide for all the means of education according to the individual's capacity for profiting by it. But once we accept the principle that the State should concern itself with positively creating and maintaining the conditions which will make it possible for every individual to lead a decent human life in accordance with his or her capacities, we expose ourselves to the danger of subsequently forgetting that the common good is not an abstract entity to which the concrete interests of individuals have to be ruthlessly sacrificed. And Spencer's attitude, in spite of its eccentric exaggerations, can serve to remind us that the State exists for man and not man for the State. Further, the State is but one form of social organization: it is not the only legitimate form of society. And Spencer certainly understood this fact.
Spencer seems to moderate his Darwinistic tendencies, at least in Copleston's formulation. Survival of the fittest is moderated by survival of the deserving. Human intervention overrides the raw Darwinistic process.
As has already been indicated, Spencer's political views were partly the expression of factual judgments, connected with his interpretation of the general movement of evolution, and partly an expression of judgments of value. For example, his assertion that what he calls the industrial type of society possesses a greater survival value than other types was partly equivalent to a prediction that it would in fact survive, in virtue of the trend of evolution. But it was also partly a judgment that the industrial type of society deserved to survive, because of its intrinsic value. Indeed, it is dear enough that with Spencer a positive evaluation of personal liberty was the really determining factor in his view of modern society. It is also clear that if a man is resolved that, as far as depends on him, the type of society which respects individual freedom and initiative will survive, this resolution is based primarily on a judgment of value rather than on any theory about the automatic working-out of a law of evolution.
Writing at a time before informed doubts had been formulated against Darwinism, Spencer embraced his own nuanced version of evolution. In so doing, he took biological evolution as a foundational fact, while seeing that significantly different interpretations of evolution a subject for serious inquiry. Thus, while he spent energy fine-tuning the details of evolutionary process, he considered it unnecessary to take pains examining the foundation of evolution itself. Had he lived a century later - he died in 1903 - he might have answered some of the questions posed by the Miller-Urey experiment's failure to generate signs of life, or discoveries made by Francis Collins in the course of the Human Genome Project. In any case, Spencer was unaware of the arguments which would erode faith in Darwinism.
Believing as he did, Spencer's confidence in Darwinism in general allowed him to assume that only the details of evolution needed to be worked out, given that the broad principle of it was, in his mind, solidly established. He noted the difference between individual beings competing existence for existence, versus species completing with each other for existence. Like the complexities which arise when one attempts to calculate utility, competing calculations regarding survival arise if Darwinism is taken as foundational. Conflicts between the survival of the individual being and the survival of the species are but one form of these complexities. Spencer hoped, however, to find in this tangle of intricacies a route which would allow compassion and humane action to find a home within an evolutionary process. As Copleston puts it,
Conduct in general, including that of animals, consists of acts adjusted to ends. And the higher we proceed in the scale of evolution, the clearer evidence do we find of purposeful actions directed to the good either of the individual or of the species. But we also find that teleological activity of this kind forms part of the struggle for existence between different individuals of the same species and between different species. That is to say, one creature tries to preserve itself at the expense of another, and one species maintains itself by preying on another.
Far from social Darwinism, Spencer thought that a evolutionary process would finally lead to a society in which altruism was normative. Instead of survival of the fittest, Spencer hoped to see the fittest working to ensure the survival of everyone else.
This type of purposeful conduct, in which the weaker goes to the wall, is for Spencer imperfectly evolved conduct. In perfectly evolved conduct, ethical conduct in the proper sense, antagonisms between rival groups and between individual members of one group will have been replaced by co-operation and mutual aid. Perfectly evolved conduct, however, can be achieved only in proportion as militant societies give place to permanently peaceful societies. In other words it cannot be achieved in a stable manner except in the perfectly evolved society, in which alone can the clash between egoism and altruism be overcome and transcended.
One of Spencer's flaws is his failure to anticipate more precisely the objection which would arise when some readers attempted to accuse him of social Darwinism. Although he seems to have anticipated this objection to a small extent, perhaps the ad hominem features of the times and places in which he did his writing prevented him from foreseeing such counterargument.
On the way toward a final society - and here Spencer, who otherwise seems soberly realistic, sounds a bit utopian - in which the competition for survival ceases and in which each individual is ultimately in secure situation with no need to struggle for existence, society develops sympathy, empathy, and cooperation. Jack Kaminsky summarizes Spencer thus:
Similarly, feelings of sociality and sympathy developed in human beings because in the struggle for survival men came to recognize that human cooperation is necessary, and the pleasures that accrue to the feeling of sociality were the rewards that guaranteed the continuation of such cooperation.
Spencer's version of evolution takes a turn which is either a brilliant intellectual move, or a self-destructive internal contradiction: he makes the engine of evolution - competition for survival, struggle for existence - into the force which will dismantle itself, when the end of the Darwinistic process is reached and there is no more competition or struggle. The midpoint in this development is precisely society's introduction of sympathy, empathy, and cooperation. Kamisky puts it this way:
The development of the feelings of sociality and sympathy led to the emergence of a new kind on entity, society, which is the subject of sociology and ethics.
Spencer thought that conscious deliberation occurred only in individuals and is not to be attributed to a group. He also thought that society existed for the benefit of its members, not the other way around.
For this reason, Spencer opposed all forms of socialism and was a firm believer in laissez-faire. In fact, he argued that if socialism were ever to arise in a state, it would lead to a very strict despotism.
Although one form of society replaced another in a form of "survival of the fittest," this struggle for existence, in Spencer's thought, did not apply in the same way to the individual. This may be a feature of his thought which protects him from the allegation of social Darwinism. Jack Kaminsky continues:
Even though Spencer believed that all societies must eventually die because of some external or internal disturbance, he was not a pessimist. He maintained that Western civilization, at least, was just entering its most mature stage of development. Sympathy and understanding were increasing. Nations were becoming less prone to resort to war in order to settle their differences. Freedom of speech, religion, and the press were being guaranteed. Society was no longer as rigidly stratified, and men could more easily move up the social ladder. Even representative government was gradual becoming universal. In fact, Spencer believed that with the proper indoctrination a society of the very highest order could continue for a long time.
In Spencer's version of utilitarianism, the concept of 'duty' is used to combine long-run utility with short-run utility in calculating the total utility, or pleasure, of any contemplated act. Spencer thought that short-run calculations came naturally to primitive man, while long-run duties were an artifact of society which represents progress. Kaminsky writes:
This account of duty also gives Spencer what he believes is a means of eliminating the traditional contradiction between egoism and altruism. At first men were primarily interested in themselves, as was necessary in a world where men could scarcely keep themselves alive. In fact, even in a more advance society, egoism serves some good, since the person who is very often healthier than others, and is, therefore, better able to care for others. But, in any case, egoism became modified by the recognition, that, if we wish to attain the objects that can afford us pleasure, we ought to help others because they in turn, will help us. Thus, according to Spencer, egoism and altruism are mutually compatible. We are concerned with the welfare of others because their welfare affects our own.
Spencer believed that the evolution of forms of society would result in a structure in which the interests of each member were protected by the other members. He may have been wrong, but again, this belief can be offered in the course of defending him against the accusation of social Darwinism. Kaminsky concludes:
Spencer’s social and ethical theories have also been challenged. His laissez-faire doctrines are simply not defensible in a world as highly industrialized as ours. Spencer believed that an industrial society would foster self-reliant, humane, and individualistic human beings, but he ignored the brutalities and injustices that could arise in such societies unless appropriate controls were introduced.
While Herbert Spencer's critique of legislative government is brilliant - and devastating - , his thought also contains serious flaws. One of his failures was his naive and enthusiastic acceptance of Darwinism, without seeing any of the serious objections which would eventually be raised against evolution. Another failure was an overly optimistic assessment of human nature: that the imperfections in human nature could be worked out by means of societal evolution. Finally, Spencer failed to anticipate the stinging assertion by his critics that he might be a social Darwinist; Spencer could have easily defended himself preemptively against such charges, by merely shifting emphasis and tone in his writing: we have shown that the elements are already present in his thought - it required merely balance to accentuate them.
