Is Darwinian Metaethics Possible (And If It Is, Is It Well Taken)?

Abstract

Ethics is an illusion put in place by natural selection to make us good cooperators. Ruse and Wilson 1985 When I first started doing philosophy some forty years ago, evolutionary ethics was the philosophical equivalent of a bad smell. One knew that not only was it false, but somehow it was unclean – it was the sign that one had a tin ear for philosophy. Had not G. E. Moore in Principia Ethica shown that evolutionary ethics commits the greatest of all sins, that it ignores or plows through the “naturalistic fallacy”? Or, to put matters in a more historical context, did not evolutionary ethics violate the distinction drawn by David Hume between “is” and “ought”? Now, however, we have had something of a sea change, and it is almost the norm for philosophers interested in morality to admit, with greater or lesser enthusiasm, that evolution surely counts for something. But how much is that “something”? That is still the matter of debate. NORMATIVE ETHICS In dealing philosophically with morality, there are always two levels to be discussed: normative or substantive ethics , which deals with what one ought to do (“love your neighbor as yourself”), and metaethics , which deals with why one ought to do what one ought to do (“God wants you to love your neighbor as yourself”). If one is trying to link evolution and normative ethics, then most obviously one will be trying to show that human ethical relationships are produced by evolution.

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