Moral relativism and evolutionary psychology

Philosophical Studies, 1998

We are moral apes, a difference between humans and our relatives that has received significant recent attention in the evolutionary literature. Evolutionary accounts of morality have often been recruited in support of error theory: moral language is truth-apt, but substantive moral claims are never true (or never warranted). In this paper, we: (i) locate evolutionary error theory within the broader framework of the relationship between folk conceptions of a domain and our best scientific conception of that same domain; (ii) within that broader framework, argue that error theory and vindication are two ends of a continuum, and that in the light of our best science many folk conceptual structures are neither hopelessly wrong nor fully vindicated, and; (iii) argue that while there is no full vindication of morality, no seamless reduction of normative facts to natural facts, nevertheless one important strand in the evolutionary history of moral thinking does support reductive naturalism -moral facts are facts about cooperation, and the conditions and practices that support or undermine it. In making our case for (iii), we first respond to the important error theoretic argument that the appeal to moral facts is explanatorily redundant, and second, we make a positive case that true moral beliefs are a 'fuel for success', a map by which we steer, flexibly, in a variety of social interactions. The vindication, we stress, is at most partial: moral cognition is a complex mosaic, with a complex genealogy, and selection for truth-tracking is only one thread in that genealogy.

Business, Science, and Ethics

Abstract: “Ought” cannot be derived from “is,” so why should facts about human nature be of interest to business ethicists? In this ar- ticle, we discuss why the nature of human nature is relevant to anyone wishing to create a ...

Syzetesis, 2022

The aim of the paper is to assess two alternative explanations of morality in metaethics: the realist explanation of morality and the one provided by evolutionary theory. According to a traditional argument for moral realism, moral facts are part of the fabric of the world to the extent that postulating such entities is required in our best explanatory picture of what people think and do. In other terms, if moral facts figure in the best explanatory account for human moral thinking and behavior, they earn ontological rights and moral realism is secured. It will be analyzed how this issue might be renewed by taking into account evolutionary considerations and assessing their consequences in metaethics. I will consider the realist explanation of morality and compare it with the evolutionary explanation of morality. Finally, I will show how the realist attempts to reconcile the realist explanation of morality and the evolutionary explanation of morality can be undermined by connecting this discussion to the one about moral disagreement

Partiality and Impartiality, 2010

The Ruffin Series of the Society for Business Ethics, 2004

In this paper I develop a critique of the strong adaptationist view inherent in the work of Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, as presentedat the Ruffin Lectures series in 2002. My critique proceeds in two stages. In the first stage, I advance arguments as to why I find the particular adaptation story that the authors advance for their experimental results unpersuasive even when I fully accept the value of their experimental results. In the second stage, I grant them their adaptation story and critique the implications of such stories forbusiness ethics and for future research. In sum, I argue against recasting key problems in the social sciences to fit the use of toolsdeveloped in the so-called “hard” sciences. Instead, I urge that we deal with these problems on their own terms, i.e. through their basisin and dependence on deliberate social action.

2011

Moral behavior and concern for others are sometimes argued to set humans apart from other species. However, there is some evidence that humans are not the only animal species to possess these characteristics. Work from behavioral biology and neuroscience has indicated that some of these traits are present in other species, including other primates. Studying these behaviors in other species can inform us about the evolutionary trajectory of morality, either helping understand how the behaviors evolved and which environmental characteristics were critical for their emergence. While this evolutionary approach to human behavior is not always well received, a brief historical look indicates that this has not always been the case. For instance Adam Smith, better known for his economics than his natural history, was clearly sympathetic with the view that moral behaviors are present in species other than humans. This paper focuses on how individuals respond to inequity, which is related to moral behavior. Recent evidence shows that nonhuman primates distinguish between inequitable and equitable outcomes. However, this is primarily in situations in which inequity hurts the self (e.g. disadvantageous inequity) rather than another (e.g. advantageous inequity). Studying such responses can help us understand the evolutionary basis of moral behavior, which increases our understanding of how our own morality emerged.

European Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 2020

Evolutionary research on the biological fitness of groups has recently given a prominent value to the role that prosocial behaviors play in favoring a successful adaptation to ecological niches. Such a focus marks a paradigm shift. Early views of evolution relied on the notion of natural selection as a largely competitive mechanism for the achievement of the highest amount of resources. Today, evolutionists from different schools think that collaborative attitudes are an irremovable ingredient of biological change over time. As a consequence, a number of researchers have been attracted by evolutionary studies of human behaviors. Some think that a continuity among prosocial attitudes of human beings and other social mammals (particularly primates) can be detected, and that this fact has relevance for accounting for human morality. Others deny one or the other of these claims, or both. The papers in the present special issue address how these topics impact ethics and religion.

The naturalistic fallacy and Hume's 'law' are frequently appealed to for the purpose of drawing limits around the scope of scientific inquiry into ethics and morality. These two objections are shown to be without force. Thus two highly influential obstacles are removed from naturalizing ethics. The relative merits of moral skepticism and moral realism are compared. Moral skepticism and some forms of moral realism are shown to make similar recommendations for developing a science of moral psychology.

Moral Psychology, 2017

As this volume attests, the study of morality is a difficult task. Philosophers, research scientists and scholars across the academy have been wrestling with how to define, measure, and think about morality for thousands of years. Yet, despite this effort, answers to fundamental questions have been devilishly elusive, with researchers still debating what morality even is. Why is it that the study of morality is such a difficult task? Perhaps the answer is less a result of the subject material than of the minds of those studying it. While the human mind is not usually considered an impediment to scientific progress, it may present particular barriers to accurate models of the nature of morality and moral psychology. This is not the first research question that has been hampered by the fact that science is done by humans. Often, the problem is that we have a powerful intuition or perception of how the world seems or ought to be that gets in the way of scientifically understanding how the world really is. For instance, unassisted by technology, our eyes look to the horizon and see the Earth stretching out as if in a plane. And indeed, flat Earth theory was held in many cultures around the world for hundreds of years. Scientists had been studying gravity for centuries before Einstein's formulation of gravity as a distortion of space-time geometry gave us a more accurate, though far less intuitive, theory: general relativity. Here and elsewhere, the fact that human intuition or perception does not well map the real world has made humans worse at science. But the psychological barriers to understanding morality may not merely be a problem of this kind. Whatever the specific design of our psychology turns out to be, results have been collected that make it very hard to believe that this design is simply a machine for uncovering the objective truth of the world. Whether it is the emotional dog wagging the rational tail (Haidt 2001), our heuristics and biases (Gilovich et al. 2002),