Evolutionary Ethics Research Articles

All the Monkeys Aren't in the Zoo: Evolutionary Ethics and the Possibility of Moral Knowledge

The error theory of moral judgment says that moral judgments, though often believed to be objectively true, never are. The tendency to believe in the objectivity of our moral beliefs, like the beliefs themselves, is rooted in objective features of human psychology, and not in objective features of the natural world that might exist apart from human psychology. In naturalized epistemology, it is tempting to take this view as the default hypothesis. It appears to make the fewest assumptions in accounting for the fact that humans not only make moral judgments, but believe them to be, at least some of the time, objectively true. In this paper I argue that from an evolutionary perspective, the error theory is not the most parsimonious alternative. It is simpler to suppose that mental representations with moral content arose as direct cognitive and motivational responses to independent moral facts.

EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY AND HUMAN ALTRUISM: A REVIEW OF THREE BOOKS

In Unto Others,2 Elliott Sober, a noted philosopher of evolutionary biology, and David Sloan Wilson, a lifelong student of group selection, argue from evolutionary theory, philosophy, and psychology that, despite today's nearly exclusive preoccupation with self-interest, ultimately altruistic motives also influence human action. In The Origins of Virtue,3 originally published in 1996 and recently republished by Penguin, the science writer Matt Ridley likewise argues that natural selection favors trust and virtue in some human relationships. In sum, both books argue that prehistoric humans depended on fellow tribe members for survival in warfare with other tribes, and that pure egoism is utterly inconsistent with the fellowship and trust required for this interdependence. The challenges these books pose to the economists' (and many evolutionists') view that humans are egoistic whose only motive is self-interest are important and timely. Are their arguments sufficient to dethrone Madison Avenue' s dogma? Some doubt whether any argument from evolution could do so. In The Tenmptations of Evolutionary Ethics,4 recently republished in paperback, Paul Lawrence Farber, a historian of science, reviews the history of attempts to apply evolutionary biology to ethics. He finds that, so far, this history is one of failure without end. Ventures in evolutionary ethics fall into two general classes. The first seeks to demonstrate that those mental and moral qualities most peculiar to mankind (are) analogous, in their nature, to the mental and moral qualities of animals (Fisher 1958, p. 189), thus bringing the evolution of morality within the purview of natural selection. Thus Darwin (1871, p. 166) argued that, for most of human prehistory, selection among groups of human beings favored altruism among the members of a group:

Objectivity and Illusion in Evolutionary Ethics: Comments on Waller

In this paper I argue that any adequate evolutionary ethical theory needs to account for moral belief as well as for dispositions to behave altruistically. It also needs to be clear whether it is offering us an account of the motivating reasons behind human behaviour or whether it is giving justifying reasons for a particular set of behaviours or, if both, to distinguish them clearly. I also argue that, unless there are some objective moral truths, the evolutionary ethicist cannot offer justifying reasons for a set of behaviours. I use these points to refute Waller's claims that the illusion of objectivity plays a dispensable role in Ruse's theory, that my critique of Ruse's Darwinian metaethics is built on a false dilemma, that there is nothing to be distressed about if morality is not objective, and that ethical beliefs are subject to a kind of causal explanation that undermines their objectivity in a way that scientific beliefs are not.

The temptations of evolutionary ethics

Journal of the History of the Behavioral SciencesVolume 36, Issue 3 p. 294-295 Book Review The temptations of evolutionary ethics Matthew H. Nitecki, Matthew H. Nitecki Curator Emeritus of Fossil Invertebrates Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago IL 60605Search for more papers by this author Matthew H. Nitecki, Matthew H. Nitecki Curator Emeritus of Fossil Invertebrates Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago IL 60605Search for more papers by this author First published: 12 July 2000 https://doi.org/10.1002/1520-6696(200022)36:3<294::AID-JHBS24>3.0.CO;2-6AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Volume36, Issue3Summer 2000Pages 294-295 RelatedInformation

Evolutionary Ethics: Its Origin and Contemporary Face

The development of modern evolutionary ethics began shortly after the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection. Early discussions were plagued by several problems. First, evolutionary ethical explanations were dependent on group‐selection accounts of social behavior (especially the explanation of altruism). Second, they seem to violate the philosophical principle that “ought” statements cannot be derived from “is” statements alone (values cannot be derivedfrom facts alone). Third, evolutionary ethics appeared to be biologically deterministic, deemed incompatible with the free will required for ethics to be possible. Fourth, social policies based on evolutionary theory (for example, eugenics in the early part of this century) seemed patently unethical. Sociobiology (which coalesced as a field of study with Edward O. Wilson's Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, 1975) addressed several of these problems and provided a rich framework and a new impetus for evolutionary ethics. The lingering problems were the philosophical is‐ought barrier and biological determinism. After tracing the early and more recent development of evolutionary ethics, I argue that the remaining problems can be surmounted and an incipient evolutionary ethics can be defended. Thoroughgoing evolutionaryethics must await theoretical developments in neurobiology and cognitive science.

Reflections on the Evolution of Morality

In my summary lecture at the IRAS 1997 Star Island Conference on the Evolution of Morality, I reflected on the thinking of other speakers in light of my own personal experience. My remarks were organized around five questions: (1) Do worldviews matter, and how do we decide if some matter more than others? (2) What does it mean to be moral? (3) What is the relation between biology and culture? (4) How does a scientific, sociobiological description of how we have become moral fit with our own personal quest for meaning and moral guidance toward richer and fuller lives? (5) How do we test evolutionary views of the biological conditions of morality scientifically?

Evolutionary Ethics: What Can We Learn From from the Past?

In this paper I look at the question of the derivation of ethics from evolutionary biology, and I do so by considering both historical attempts to make such a derivation and contemporary work.

The Myth of Man the Hunter, Man the Killer and the Evolution of Human Morality

Since the discovery of the first man‐ape, many have assumed that the earliest humans were hunters and that this was associated with a “killer instinct.” The myth of “man the hunter” was repeated in the 1960s in anthropology texts and popular literature. In the 1970s it was adopted by sociobiologists to explain human nature. “Man the hunter” is used to explain not only human biology but also human morality. The morals described, however, often reflect ancient beliefs and appear to be new ways of justifying old morality codes. The newest version of this myth is presented in a recent book, Demonic Males. I will discuss various accounts of this myth and the evidence used to justify them, and will specifically critique the arguments presented in Demonic Males.

The Recluse of Loyang: Shao Yung and the Moral Evolution of Early Sung Thought

The Recluse of Loyang: Shao Yung and the Moral Evolution of Early Sung Thought

The Recluse of Loyang: Shao Yung and the Moral Evolution of Early Sung Thought (review)

The Recluse of Loyang: Shao Yung and the Moral Evolution of Early Sung Thought (review)

Historicism, contextualization, and the Western reception of Master Shao

Abstract Research on the relationship between life and thought of most historical personages should probably not ordinarily demand that one have to choose at every tum between the wholesale acceptance of a body of received knowledge and the full-scale adoption of an exclusively skeptical (almost eschatological) approach. But any research on an individualist so thoroughly complex, intriguing, and even ironic as Shao Yung (1011–;1077)—also known, especially after the twelfth century, as Shao-tzu or ‘Master Shao’—naturally elicits this demand. Such was the situation I confronted almost daily during my writing of The recluse of Loyang: Shao Yung and the moral evolution of early Sung thought.

Evolutionary Narratives and Ecological Ethics

We are in trouble just now because we do not have a good story. We are in between stories. The old story, the account of how the world came to be and how we fit into it, is no longer effective. Yet we have not learned the new story.... We need a story that will educate us, a story that will heal, guide, and discipline us. Thomas Berry, The Dream of the Earth

Methodological Problems in Evolutionary Biology. XII. Against Evolutionary Ethics

Evolutionary ethics has recently become popular again. Some of its representatives elaborate new attempts to derive ethics from evolutionary biology. The attempts, like previous ones, fail because they commit the naturalistic fallacy. Premises from evolutionary biology together with normative premises also do not justify ethical principles. Other representatives argue that evolutionary considerations imply that ethics cannot be justified at all. Their arguments presuppose an unacceptable form of foundationalism. In principle, evolutionary biology might explain some aspects of morality, but in practice explanations are hard to come by. All this does not imply that evolutionary theory is irrelevant in normative settings. To the contrary, it may help us devise guidelines in environmental policy and health care policy. It is to be hoped that evolutionary ethicists will divert their research efforts to the elaboration of such guidelines.

Monad to Man: The Concept of Progress in Evolutionary Biology by Michael Ruse

BOOK REVIEWS 159 human experience, could not the same be said of such notions as "community," "narrative," or even "Christian"? It is not always clear how appealing to the notion of "Christian" is much more helpful than the appeal to "rational agency" when the questions concern holy orders, the Eucharist, war, marriage, divorce, contraception, homosexuality, revelation, Scripture, and authority-in short, all of those areas of vital importance to embodied, historical Christian life. Amore extensive account of the issues of authority and the "Christian life" would be very helpful. The chapter on "obedience" offers one of the most compelling beginnings. Such questions are hardly new to scholars in these conversations. They simply affirm that Hauerwas and Pinches are to be counted among the more engaging Christian thinkers of the age. University ofSt. Thomas St. Paul, Minnesota CHRISTOPHER}. THOMPSON Monad to Man: The Concept ofProgress in Evolutionary Biology. By MICHAEL RUSE. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996. Pp. 628. $49.95 (cloth). ISBN 0-674-58220-9. No concept has caused more difficulties for the philosophy of biology than that of progress. For "progress" (from the Latin for "going toward" some direction) implies a goal, and goal conjures up the dread specter of teleology, that supposedly revanchist relic from the days of Aristotle and his medieval commentators. In fact much of the historiography of science in the West couches its narrative in terms of modern science's gradual weaning from teleology toward a more mechanical framework, as in the abandonment of Aristotle's "push" explanation of motion as motion toward a goal (that is, something falls because, as Aristotle once said, it is seeking its natural place) in favor of Newton's "pull" model of bodies moving toward other objects by virtue of their mutual gravitational attraction operating by a mechanical law that knows nothing of goals or "natural" places for objects. Inside this narratology Darwin takes pride of place, for according to the standard interpretation Darwin freed the world of biology from William Paley's (and Aristotle's) explanation for organs and organisms as obvious objects of design in favor of his theory of natural selection: a process that seems designed (as the word "selection" implies) but is in fact blind and unthinking (in contrast with the "artificial" selection of professional breeders who breed with an end in mind). 160 BOOK REVIEWS An everyone knows, Darwin's hypothesis revolutionized not just the world of biology but also that of culture at large. However, there is an irony to his wider influence: for to the extent that one denies any role for teleology in evolution, the less applicable the theory is to other philosophical issues (especially ethical ones, but also extending to other areas), whereas if evolution displays a record of increasing progress in its history of increased complexification , then one is able that much more easily to apply that record to human behavior by extrapolating that directedness into the future. This is because, however blind evolution might be, man is certainly an animal who designs things all the time (in fact, so ubiquitous is the human species' design-making habit that it misled Paley to apply it everywhere). Therefore, if evolution is as blind as many theorists hold, then it cannot by definition be of much use in helping to guide the goal-determined behavior of humans, especially in their ethics, an inherently teleologically determined form of reflecting and behaving. But if evolution does have a goal "in mind," so to say, then the way is at least open to using that extrapolated goal as an end in view for determining our own undeniably goal-driven activities. This fusion of the notion of progress with applied Darwinism is strikingly obvious in the case of the career of social Darwinism, the failed attempt to base ethics on Darwinian principles. For without the notion that evolution is going somewhere, there was no way to generate a norm for judgment out of the zigzagging that would otherwise characterize evolutionary tracks. As is well known, this initial foray of evolutionary theorists to generate an evolutionary ethic, now called social Darwinism, ended in a total failure. This collapse of social Darwinism as an influential option...

Don J. Wyatt, The Recluse of Loyang - Shao Yung and the Moral Evolution of Early Sung Thought. University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, Hawaii. 248 + 92. Notes, Glossary, Bibliography, Index.

Don J. Wyatt, The Recluse of Loyang - Shao Yung and the Moral Evolution of Early Sung Thought. University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, Hawaii. 248 + 92. Notes, Glossary, Bibliography, Index.

The Recluse of Loyang: Shao Yung and the Moral Evolution of Early Sung Thought

The Recluse of Loyang: Shao Yung and the Moral Evolution of Early Sung Thought

Don J. Wyatt, The Recluse of Loyang - Shao Yung and the Moral Evolution of Early Sung Thought. University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, Hawaii. 248 + 92. Notes, Glossary, Bibliography, Index.

Don J. Wyatt, The Recluse of Loyang - Shao Yung and the Moral Evolution of Early Sung Thought. University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, Hawaii. 248 + 92. Notes, Glossary, Bibliography, Index.

The lemming condition: Moral asynchrony and the isolated self

This article uses The Lemming Condition, a fable written by Alan Arkin, as a metaphor for the isolation of the gifted asynchronous child whose level of moral development is out of sync not only with age peers but with human culture itself. These children ask the big questions early, challenging adults to defend the way the world works; adults for the most part fail to answer the questions or even take them seriously. Struggling to make sense of the world on their own, children may doubt the integrity and intelligence of adults, and ultimately the sanity of their own species. They must then engage in an effort to define self either as part of or as separate from that species, from which they feel isolated and alienated, and yet with which they also have a powerful sense of connection. The psychic conflict at the core of the effort to define themselves may lead to giving up on life, on humanity or on self. The task of adults is to recognize the value of children whose development challenges the “world as it is” and help them make the choice in favor of their own, unique vision, a vision that can lead to spiritual growth for the child and moral evolution for humanity.

Human altruism: Group selection should not be ignored

Explaining altruism is a central theme of sociobiology, and much interest has centred on evolutionary models of cooperation based on the Prisoner's Dilemma. Furthermore, the existence of this theoretical paradigm has rekindled interest in evolutionary ethics, a field devoted to the implications of evolutionary theory for ethical and moral debates. A recent exchange of articles in the ecological literature was stimulated by a reassessment of evolutionary models of cooperation, in which the authors identified a seeming contradiction between normative ethical statements by prominent evolutionists and the results of the models they are famous for promoting. Although their logic is insightful and intuitively compelling, here I critique their conclusions, arguing that the normative statements considered are not necessarily inconsistent or misguided. Further, I suggest that such discussions of human altruism would benefit from a more serious consideration of the role of group selection, a concept currently undergoing a resurgence of credibility in the evolutionary literature. A deeper understanding of selective influences on human social behavior at all possible levels is vital if evolutionary theory is to responsibly and profitably engage social policy.

Evolutionary Ethics: An Irresistible Temptation: Some Reflections on Paul Farber‘s The Temptation of Evolutionary Ethics

In his recent The Temptation of Evolutionary Ethics, Paul Farber has given a negative assessment of the last one hundred years of attempts in Anglo-American philosophy, beginning with Darwin, to develop an evolutionary ethics. Farber identifies some version of the naturalistic fallacy as one of the central sources for the failures of evolutionary ethics. For this reason, and others, Farber urges that though it has its attraction, evolutionary ethics is a temptation to be resisted. In this discussion I identify three major, historically relevant forms of the naturalistic fallacy, the (1) the deductive, (2) genetic, and (3) open question forms and argue that none of them pose an intrinsic problem for evolutionary ethics. I conclude that on this score at least there is no reason to resist temptation.