Evolutionary Ethics and the Search for Predecessors: Kant, Hume, and All the Way Back to Aristotle?

Abstract

Hopes of applying the findings and speculations of evolutionary theorizing to the problems of ethics have yielded a program with a (deservedly) bad reputation. At the level of norms – substantival ethics – it has been a platform for some of the more grotesque socio-politico-economic suggestions of our times. At the level of justification – metaethics – it has opened the way to some of the more blatant fallacies in the undergraduate textbook. Recently, however, a number of people, philosophers and biologists, have sensed that a more adequate evolutionary ethics might be possible. United in the conviction that it simply has to matter that we humans are modified monkeys rather than the creation of a Good God, in His image, on the Sixth Day, they argue that recent developments in evolutionary biology, especially those dealing with the genetic basis of social behavior (“sociobiology”), open the way to a satisfactory biological understanding of morality.

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