The Prospects for Evolutionary Ethics Today

From: Stimmen der Zeit, 4/2012, P. 253-264 webmaster's own, not authorized translation The evolutionary sciences are a challenge to the traditional moral theology. Rupert M. Scheule, professor of moral theology and Christian social sciences at the Faculty of Theology Fulda examines newer concepts of evolutionary anthropology and ethics.

2013

Hardly a week passes without new findings emerging from evolutionary psychology regarding how our view of morality has been influenced by our biological evolution. Evolutionary ethics is a normative project built upon these scientific insights. Evolutionary ethicists fall into two groups: substantiators or skeptics. Substantiators believe moral ideas can now be scientifically proven. Skeptics believe there are no moral truths because morality is just a biological adaptation. I believe the project of evolutionary ethics is misconceived. I argue that both the substantiators and the skeptics fail to show the direct relevance of biology to ethics. Moral truths can be established. But biology cannot support nor undercut these truths. I present the doctrine of moral realism as embodying the proper process of ethical inquiry, and I defend moral realism from evolutionary psychology's skeptical conclusions. I determine that biology can indirectly inform ethics, but never guide it. The ethical realm is independent. * At times, insisting on the distinction between ethics and morality can be awkward, since it is completely overlooked by EP's normative project. † I also call descriptive is statements facts, and prescriptive ought statements norms or values, unless otherwise stated. * In considering EP's normative capacity, the question of its descriptive capacity can be bracketed. Even if EP described, with perfect accuracy, why we hold our ethical beliefs, its normative pertinence would not follow.

Metascience, 2017

is a distinguished primatologist who has worked for decades studying the behavior of primates, especially chimpanzees. This book presents De Waal's 2003 Tanner Lectures on Human Values, in which he argues that ''the building blocks of morality are evolutionarily ancient'' (7). The book also includes responses to De Waal's argument by the evolutionary psychologist, Robert Wright, and by three philosophers, Christine Korsgaard, Philip Kitcher, and Peter Singer. De Waal replies to his commentators in an afterword, and there is a useful introduction by Stephen Macedo and Josiah Ober. De Waal argues that the behavior of primates, including especially chimpanzee behavior, provides evidence that the emotional and motivational building blocks of morality are present in these animals. Further, given that human beings evolved from primates and that our closest primate relatives are chimpanzees, De Waal argues, we have reason to believe that these emotional and motivational building blocks are evolved characteristics of human beings as well. The emotional and motivational characteristics in question are empathy, prosocial tendencies, including a willingness to cooperate as well as a willingness to look out for the well-being of conspecifics who are not kin, and a tendency to seek fairness of treatment and to reciprocate. De Waal concedes of course that morality is ''more than this,'' but he holds that morality as we know it in humans would be ''impossible'' without these building blocks. He holds, then, that morality as we know it in humans is a product of evolution in that it rests on evolved emotional and motivational features that are ''continuous'' with what is found in other primates (7). Morality is not solely a product of culture or other environmental influences. Instead of simply and straightforwardly arguing for the views I have outlined, however, De Waal structures his discussion as an argument against something he

Beytülhikme An International Journal of Philosophy, 2022

In this study, I will approach morality from a naturalistic perspective and defend that morality is a product of evolutionary processes shared by both human and non-human animals rather than that of human culture. My natural- istic approach is based on simpler components instead of high-level cognitive capabilities such as cognition. Rationality , judgment, and free will are indeed pre- sented as necessary for morality in classical definitions of morality. However, I will put forward that the roots of morality can be understood as the biological disposition in the evolutionary process. Moreover, in this paper, I will propose that morality is not a phenomenon that ought to be restricted to humans. I think morality is not a phenomenon that is exclusively human; rather, morality can be expanded to non-human animals. To defend this claim, I will indicate that mo- rality has a natural content and that this content does not have a structure that can only be justified on a rational basis, but that this normative structure can be established through biological/evolutionary mechanisms and can be explained in this way.

The Cambridge Handbook of Evolutionary Ethics

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.

From Charles Darwin to Edward Wilson, evolutionary biologists have attempted to construct systems of evolutionary ethics. These attempts have been roundly criticized, most often for having committed the naturalistic fallacy. In this essay, I review the history of previous efforts at formulating an evolutionary ethics, focusing on the proposals of Darwin and Wilson. I then advance and defend a proposal of my own. In the last part of the essay, I try to demonstrate that my revised version of evolutionary ethics:

International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences (2nd ed.)., 2015

Morality is a mess. This might seem like a strange place to begin a discussion of the origins of morality, but let me explain why I think it’s a useful starting point. Scientists strive for simple, parsimonious explanations for phenomena. Those that meet this standard are described approvingly as elegant explanations. It seems unlikely, however, that morality will ever have an elegant explanation, for the simple reason that morality is not an elegant phenomenon. Like many human institutions, it is a messy aggregation of a vast array of competing influences. These influences include inclinations rooted in the biology of human nature, such as a tendency to favour kin, a tendency to resent free loaders, and a capacity to empathize with the suffering of others. They also include influences that can be broadly classed as cultural. Among these are norms designed to rein in socially-disruptive aspects of human nature, norms aimed at furthering the interests of the individuals or groups promoting them, and also genuine efforts to work out the logical consequences of universal principles of justice and the common good. If we focus on any of these influences to the exclusion of the others, we will arrive at a lopsided view of the nature of morality - hence the importance of keeping in mind that morality is a mess. In this article, I consider both the biological and cultural evolution of our formal moral systems. I begin with the evolution of altruistic behaviour, which is the area of moral behaviour that evolutionary theory has shed the most light on. I then consider some of the putative evolved mechanisms underlying human morality, such as inhibitions against harming innocents, the capacity for empathy, and an aversion to incestuous mating. Finally, I consider the cultural evolution of morality and why some moral systems thrive and persist while others fade away.

This paper addresses two general questions. First: is it possible to give an explanation in evolutionary terms for the behaviors, language, and sentiments that have been considered distinctly moral? Second: if such an evolutionary account is possible, what can its existence tell us about what morality is? I engage with a view typified by Richard Joyce in The Evolution of Morality (2006). This view answers the first question in the affirmative and the second by arguing that the existence of an evolutionary explanation of moral behavior, language, and sentiments should in fact lead us to agnosticism about the existence of morality, at least in the sense in which it has been commonly understood. I push back against Joyce’s arguments for moral agnosticism, instead arguing that the evolutionary account itself gives a foundation for a new kind of moral naturalism.