Evolutionary Ethics

Abstract

Evolutionary Ethics is the study of the relationship between the theory of natural selection and ethical theory and practice. This chapter discusses the implications of Darwinian evolution for the epistemological status of moral claims, the significance of our evolutionary history for an understanding of moral practices and institutions, and the relevance of information about human evolution to the formation of morally justifiable social policies and to individual decision-making. None of the arguments seem decisive against the very possibility of Evolutionary Ethics. These Ethics have adopted Darwinian views and questions more authentically. Daniel Dennett emphasizes that ethics must somehow be based on an appreciation of human nature—on a sense of what human nature is or might be like and what a human being might want to have or be. While the central assumption of evolutionary ethics is that genes direct the construction of the body and the brain, producing, maintaining, and eventually shutting down. In the end it could be concluded that Evolutionary Ethics is capable in principle of offering a third and distinct perspective, an alternative to universalist indifference, as well as to the absurdities of cosmological deductions of the roles of men and women.