Cartmill, Book Review I

Cartmill, Matt. A View to A Death in the Morning: Hunting and Nature through History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.

Cartmill challenges the use of “the hunting hypothesis” to support the claim that humans are naturally hunters.

The hunting hypothesis, an anthropological thesis, claims that humans differentiated themselves from the ape, and so from nature itself, through hunting. Our distinctive tools, weapons, physiology, and social structure all developed because we hunted and in order to hunt. Associated with this hypothesis is the additional claim that humans have a natural bloodlust and so are not naturally moral; we are “lunatic apes.” Let’s call this second claim “the immorality hypothesis.”

Cartmill debunks the hunting hypothesis on two grounds. First, he offers a fascinating history of the development and adaptation of the hypothesis itself which shows that it was adopted for cultural reasons.

Second, he demonstrates that the hypothesis cannot be scientific. Science explains by subsuming instances under general laws; entirely unique events cannot have a scientific explanation; the differentiation of humanity from nature has no parallel cases; ergo.... The hunting hypothesis is a myth. This does not mean that it is false or useless, but the hypothesis is not a candidate for the status of scientific explanation. So far, so good.