The Cultural Evolution of Extended Benevolence

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.

Evolution: Education and Outreach, 2009

Abstract: After presenting Darwin’s own views on the evolution of the moral sense and the Victorian spectrum of opinion on the relevance of natural selection to morals, I go on to discuss the eugenics movement and the racialist assumptions of earlier Darwinians. There are echoes of these assumptions in a number of contemporary theorists, but evolutionary ethics has largely moved beyond them to explore instead the biological basis for altruism and co-operation as well as moralistic and political aggression.

Philosophical Studies, 1998

EAS Journal of Psychology and Behavioural Sciences

This article explores the consequences of these propositions: (1) the enlightenment made popular a belief in causal determinism – the idea that every event has a cause. (2) The Scottish enlightenment Adam Smith’s moral theory begins from the notion that the morality behind human actions is practical and based on the sentiment of sympathy, a mechanism that we use to place ourselves in others’ shoes. (3) Certain contemporary ethical theories use empirical evidence and evolutionary arguments to explain the origin of sympathy and to support the interference of evolutionary pressures in our moral sentiments. These propositions together have the following consequences: (3) Different biological interpretations of sympathy can lead us to different results from a practical standpoint. (4) So, our understanding of the evolutionary dimension of sympathy has implications for moral theories that have sympathy as their base. Thus, the combination of the Enlighten ideas and moral sentimentalism le...

Environmental Ethics, 2017

This paper examines the significance of scientific research into the evolution of altruism for environmental ethics through an analysis of recent debates over William Hamilton's theory of inclusive fitness. I argue that recent debates over how to explain altruism have become particularly charged with ideological weight because they are seen to have some consequence for how we understand the human moral project, especially with regard to non-human life. I show this by analyzing the place of evolutionary theory in the work of environmental ethicists and finally by drawing some conclusions about the extent to which these debates, and evolutionary research into behavior more generally, are and are not significant for environmental ethics. In particular, I argue that the most important issues at stake for environmental ethicists concerns the conditions under which altruistic forms of behavior can thrive and the degree to which we consider intensive forms of altruism to be unstable and anomalous, or rather stable and predictable outcomes of social evolution given favorable conditions.*

Revista Voluntas: Estudos sobre Schopenhauer, 2012

Just as animals in general are described as “feeling” nothing like “pain” but “stimuli responses” or “behaviours,” scientific theorists once proposed to reduce the differences between socio-cultural expressions of pain to differences in general between the races: Black, White, Asian, and especially so-called aboriginal peoples and Nazi experiments on human pain extended the same test of pain thresholds from experiments performed on animals for centuries (the same experiments on animals unchecked to this day) to human beings designated as subhuman. Ethological studies by Franz de Waal suggest that animals share this capacity for sympathizing with the other. Schopenhauer’s notion of compassion thus serves as the basis for a new understanding of becoming moral. This essay situates Schopenhauer with respect to Kant as well as Nietszche and develops connections with Levinas and Adorno as well as Isaac Bashevis Singer.

2004

What are moral values and where do they come from? David Hume argued that moral values were the product of a range of passions, inherent to human nature, that aim at the common good of society. Recent developments in game theory, evolutionary biology, animal behaviour, psychology and neuroscience suggest that Hume was right to suppose that humans have such passions. This dissertation reviews these I should like to thank my supervisor Keith Dowding for his help, criticisms, and encouragement. I should also like to express my gratitude to Helena Cronin, who has been a constant source of inspiration, insight, and all-round good advice.

Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 2017

Moral progress may be a matter of time scale. If intuitive measures of moral progress like the degree of physical violence within a society are taken as empirical markers, then most human societies have experienced moral progress in the last few centuries. However, if the development of the human species is taken as relevant time scale, there is evidence that humanity has experienced a global moral decline compared to a small-band hunter-gatherer (SBHG) baseline that represents a lifestyle presumed to largely account for 99% of human history. A counter-argument to such a diagnosis of moral decline is the fact that the living conditions of the modern world that emerged since sedentariness and the beginning of agriculture are completely different compared to those of SBHG due to cultural and technological developments. We therefore suggest that two notions of moral progress should be distinguished: a “biological notion” referring to the inherited capacities typical of the evolutionary niche of mammals and that unfold in a specific way in the human species; and a “cultural notion” that relates moral progress to dealing with an increasing diversity of temptations and possible wrongdoings in a human social world whose complexity accumulates in time. In our contribution, we describe these two different notions of moral progress, we discuss how they interact, how this interaction impacts the standards by which we measure moral progress, and we provide suggestions and justifications for re-aligning biological and cultural moral progress.

Environmental Values, 2006

It is sometimes claimed that as members of the species Homo sapiens we have a responsibility to promote the good of Homo sapiens itself (distinct from the good of its individual members). Lawrence Johnson has recently defended this claim as part of his approach to resolving the problem of future generations. We show that there are several difficulties with Johnson's argument, many of which are likely to attend any attempt to establish the moral considerability of Homo sapiens or species generally. Further, even if Homo sapiens were morally considerable, this would not ground an adequate response to the problem of future generations. The sort of moral considerability that would be appropriate to Homo sapiens, or species generally, would not be as robust nor have the implications that many have supposed.