Evolutionary moral realism
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Evolutionary moral realism
（History and philosophy of biology / series editors, Dawn M Digrius, Rasmus Grønfeldt Winther）
Routledge, 2020
- : hbk
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Note
Includes bibliographical references and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Against standard approaches to evolution and ethics, this book develops the idea that moral values may find their origin in regularly recurring features in the cooperative environments of species of organisms that are social and intelligent.
Across a wide range of species that are social and intelligent, possibilities arise for helping others, responding empathetically to the needs of others, and playing fairly. The book identifies these underlying environmental regularities as biological natural kinds and as natural moral values. As natural kinds, moral values help to provide more complete explanations for the selection of traits that arise in response to them. For example, helping in an aquatic environment is quite different than helping in an arboreal environment, and so we can expect the selection of traits for helping to reflect these underlying environmental differences. With the human ability to name, talk, and reason about important features of our environment, moral values become part of moral discourse and argument, helping to produce coherent systems of moral thought.
Combining a naturalistic approach to morality with an equal emphasis on moral argument and truth, this book will be of interest to philosophers and historians of biology, theoretical biologists, comparative psychologists, and moral philosophers.
Table of Contents
- 1. Evolutionary moral realism
- 2. The moon in the water
- 3. Moral trajectories
- 4. Moral sense theories
- 5. Reason, rational contracts, and selfish genes
- 6. Natural moral values and moral progress
- 7. Partial and impartial moral reasons
- 8. Moving from is to ought
- Conclusion.
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