Recent Work on Evolution and Social Contract Ethics

Abstract

Peter Singer has claimed that what we know about evolution today discredits a social contract understanding of ethics, because the notion of an original or natural condition is a fantasy, and a social contract theory relies on a ‘‘distant Foundation Day.’’ Yet when writing about ethics many evolutionists such as E.O. Wilson, Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Dawkins, Robert Axelrod, and Matt Ridley employ the concepts of reciprocity and cooperation, and the logic of the prisoner’s dilemma, all of which are part and parcel of social contract ethics. Furthermore, the evolutionists E.O. Wilson, Christopher Boehm, and Frans de Waal explain that agreements need not be egalitarian, since hierarchies of dominance can work well in both the human and non-human realm of mammalian societies. These kinds of evolutionary