The impact of science on ethics forms since long the subject of intense debate. Although there is a growing consensus that science can describe morality and explain its evolutionary origins, there is less consensus about the ability of science to provide input to the normative domain of ethics. Whereas defenders of a scientific normative ethics appeal to naturalism, its critics either see the naturalistic fallacy committed or argue that the relevance of science to normative ethics remains undemonstrated. In this paper, (...) we argue that current scientific normative ethicists commit no fallacy, that criticisms of scientific ethics contradict each other, and that scientific insights are relevant to normative inquiries by informing ethics about the options open to the ethical debate. Moreover, when conceiving normative ethics as being a nonfoundational ethics, science can be used to evaluate every possible norm. This stands in contrast to foundational ethics in which some norms remain beyond scientific inquiry. Finally, we state that a difference in conception of normative ethics underlies the disagreement between proponents and opponents of a scientific ethics. Our argument is based on and preceded by a reconsideration of the notions naturalistic fallacy and foundational ethics. This argument differs from previous work in scientific ethics: whereas before the philosophical project of naturalizing the normative has been stressed, here we focus on concrete consequences of biological findings for normative decisions or on the day-to-day normative relevance of these scientific insights. (shrink)

The dominant theory of the evolution of moral cognition across a variety of fields is that moral cognition is a biological adaptation to foster social cooperation. This chapter argues, to the contrary, that moral cognition is likely an evolutionary exaptation: a form of cognition where neurobiological capacities selected for in our evolutionary history for a variety of different reasons—many unrelated to social cooperation—were put to a new, prosocial use after the fact through individual rationality, learning, and the development and transmission (...) of social norms. This chapter begins with a brief overview of the emerging behavioral neuroscience of moral cognition. It then outlines a novel theory of moral cognition that I have previously argued explains these findings better than alternatives. Finally, it shows how the evidence for this theory of moral cognition and human evolutionary history together suggest that moral cognition is likely not a biological adaptation. Instead, like reading sheet music or riding a bicycle, moral cognition is something that individuals learn to do—in this case, in response to sociocultural norms created in our ancestral history and passed down through the ages to enable cooperative living. (shrink)

In this article I elaborate a scientifically based moral realism that I call affordance moral realism, and I offer a promissory note that affordance moral realism is the best current explanation of morality. Affordance moral realism maintains that morality is constituted by the interaction of moral agents and moral affordances. The latter are the natural and social environments in which moral agents’ activities take place and contain the objects of moral agents’ activities whose actualizations are the manifestation of substantive moral (...) goods. In making this argument, I take a scientific naturalistic approach that includes both the natural and social sciences, aiming to make my account both methodologically and substantively naturalistic. On the subject side of my affordance view, I offer a scientific account of moral agency, one based on an extension of social cognitive theories of agency to the realm of morality. And I argue that affordance moral realism explains the nature of moral agency, its acquisition, maintenance, and successful performance. To explain its origin and maintenance, I make use of a general theory of selection that embraces biological, social, cultural, and intentional selection. On the object side, I offer a theory of moral affordances and their actualizations, employing the findings and theories of moral developmental psychology and moral psychology to understand their actualizations through the successful operations of moral agents. I conclude that a scientifically based naturalistic affordance moral realism promises to provide the best current account of morality. It is not only affordable; it’s a bargain. (shrink)

I describe a suite of reinforcement learning environments in which artificial agents learn to value and respond to moral content and contexts. I illustrate the core principles of the framework by characterizing one such environment, or “gridworld,” in which an agent learns to trade-off between monetary profit and fair dealing, as applied in a standard behavioral economic paradigm. I then highlight the core technical and philosophical advantages of the learning approach for modeling moral cognition, and for addressing the so-called value (...) alignment problem in AI. (shrink)

Existentialism is a concern about the foundation of meaning, morals, and purpose. Existentialisms arise when some foundation for these elements of being is under assault. In the past, first-wave existentialism concerned the increasingly apparent inability of religion, and religious tradition, to provide such a foundation, as typified in the writings of Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche. Second-wave existentialism, personified philosophically by Sartre, Camus, and de Beauvoir, developed in response to the inability of an overly optimistic Enlightenment vision of reason and the (...) common good to provide such a foundation. There is a third-wave existentialism, a new existentialism, developing in response to advances in the neurosciences that threaten the last vestiges of an immaterial soul or self. With the increasing explanatory and therapeutic power of neuroscience, the mind no longer stands apart from the world to serve as a foundation of meaning. This produces foundational anxiety. This collection of new essays explores the anxiety caused by this third-wave existentialism and some responses to it. It brings together some of the world’s leading philosophers, neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, and legal scholars to tackle our neuroexistentialist predicament and explore what the mind sciences can tell us about morality, love, emotion, autonomy, consciousness, selfhood, free will, moral responsibility, law, the nature of criminal punishment, meaning in life, and purpose. (shrink)

According to David Chalmers, the hard problem of consciousness consists of explaining how and why qualitative experience arises from physical states. Moreover, Chalmers argues that materialist and reductive explanations of mentality are incapable of addressing the hard problem. In this chapter, I suggest that Chalmers’ hard problem can be usefully distinguished into a ‘how question’ and ‘why question,’ and I argue that evolutionary biology has the resources to address the question of why qualitative experience arises from brain states. From this (...) perspective, I discuss the different kinds of evolutionary explanations (e.g., adaptationist, exaptationist, spandrel) that can explain the origins of the qualitative aspects of various conscious states. This argument is intended to clarify which parts of Chalmers’ hard problem are amenable to scientific analysis. (shrink)

What are the nature and status of moral norms? And what makes individuals abide by them? These are central questions in metaethics. The first concerns the nature of the moral domain—for example, whether it exists independently of what individuals or groups think of it. The second concerns the bindingness or practical clout of moral norms—how individuals feel impelled to abide by them. In this article, I bring two distinct approaches to these questions into dialogue with one another.

This paper offers an analysis of work on human development in evolutionary anthropology from a Thomist perspective. I show that both fields view care for others as fundamental to human nature and interpret cooperative breeding as expression of the virtue of charity. I begin with an analysis of different approaches to the relationship between evolutionary anthropology and moral theory. I argue that ethical naturalism is the approach best suited to interdisciplinary dialogue, since it holds that natural facts are useful for (...) moral theory but do not encompass it. This forms the basis for a Thomist analysis of some key features of human evolution including bipedalism, higher encephalisation and extended childhood. In each case I explain how these parts of our nature contributed to the evolution of modern humans, and how each is reliant upon communal care. Finally, I offer three observations on these facts from a Thomist perspective. Firstly, that a good human life necessarily involves caring for others and being cared for ourselves. Secondly, that this is exemplified in the virtue of charity, which is the ground of all virtue. Finally, that the need for such care shows that human flourishing cannot be attained without divine aid. (shrink)

It is argued that a chief obstacle to a naturalistic explanation of the origins of mind is human exceptionalism, as exempli fi ed in the seventeenth century by René Descartes and in the twentieth century by Noam Chomsky. As an antidote to human exceptionalism, we turn to the account of aesthetic judgment in Charles Darwin’s Descent of Man , according to which the mental capacities of humans differ from those of lower animals only in degree, and not in kind. Thoroughgoing (...) naturalistic explanation of these capacities is made easier by shifting away from the substance-metaphysical implications of the search for an account of mind , toward a dispositional account of the origins of mindfulness . (shrink)

Recent advances in moral psychology and applications of virtue science have created promising opportunities to refine theories of media practice and ethical principles. This article sets forth the theoretical foundation for a model of virtuous action among media exemplars that is multidimensional, inductive, and informed by these developments. The model draws on a range of psycho-social assessment tools to explore five key dimensions of virtuous behavior: story of the self, personality, integration of morality into the self, moral ecology, and moral (...) skills and knowledge. The model's structure is designed to strengthen the empirical basis used to make normative and predictive claims about media practice. (shrink)

I offer a brief survey of thematic elements in contemporary literature on forgiveness and then an overview of the responses to that literature comprising the contents of this volume. I concentrate on the extent to which work in moral psychology provides a needed corrective to some excesses in philosophical aversion to empirically informed theorizing. I aim to complicate what has been referred to at times as the standard or classic view, by which philosophers often mean the predominant view of forgiveness (...) in the first half of the thirty-year boom in contemporary philosophy of forgiveness. I conclude by enjoining philosophers to further consider psychological contexts in which forgiveness may be seen primarily as a commitment rather than primarily as an emotional state. (shrink)

Contemporary ethics and moral philosophy need a kind of revision due to their negligence in human moral capacities, ordinary life, and humans’ expectations of ethics. The assumptions and presuppositions of ethics result in their current unsatisfactory status. In this paper, we first explore and criticize those presuppositions. Then, instead of introducing ideal presuppositions of ethics, we introduce folk ethics and its components in order to show that contemporary ethics and moral philosophy should always begin with folk ethics. The most important (...) advantage of folk ethics is its realistic foundation, which in turn will produce better results. (shrink)

Biological research has the capacity to inform ethical discussions. There are numerous questions about the nature of sexual orientation, intelligence, gender identity, etc., and many of these questions are commonly approached with the benefit of implicit or explicit biological commitments. The answers to these sorts of questions can have a powerful impact on social, ethical, and political positions. In this project I examine the prospect of naturalizing ethics under the umbrella of developmental systems theory (DST). If one is committed to (...) DST, then those ideas involved in DST that steer biological research will also have implications for ethics. There has been much debate over whether certain human traits or attributes are the consequence of nature or nurture. This kind of question tends to be articulated in dichotomous terms where the focal point of the discussion is over which opposing causal mechanism asserts the most power over the development of these attributes. The debate places particular importance on such distinctions as that between gene and environment, and biology and culture. DST seeks to dismiss such dichotomous accounts. In this sense, DST is an attempt to do biology without these dichotomies. In the process, DST articulates a reconceptualized notion of "the natural." I am interested in how DST’s reconceptualization of the natural can inform a naturalistic approach to ethics. Thus, the aim of this project is to examine the ramifications of taking DST as a guiding principle in the naturalization of ethics. (shrink)

The paper explores the interplay among moral progress, evolution and moral realism. Although it is nearly uncontroversial to note that morality makes progress of one sort or another, it is far from uncontroversial to define what constitutes moral progress. In a minimal sense, moral progress occurs when a subsequent state of affairs is better than a preceding one. Moral realists conceive “it is better than” as something like “it more adequately reflects moral facts”; therefore, on a realist view, moral progress (...) can be associated with accumulations of moral knowledge. From an evolutionary perspective, on the contrary, since there cannot be something like moral knowledge, one might conclude there cannot even be such a thing as moral progress. More precisely, evolutionism urges us to ask whether we can acknowledge the existence of moral progress without being committed to moral realism. A promising strategy, I will argue, is to develop an account of moral progress based on moral understanding rather than moral knowledge. On this view, moral progress follows increases in moral understanding rather than accumulations of moral knowledge. Whether an understanding-based account of moral progress is feasible and what its implications for the notion itself of moral progress are, will be discussed. (shrink)

The central question for this dissertation is, how do we do moral philosophy well from within a broadly naturalist framework? Its main goal is to lay the groundwork for a methodological approach to moral philosophy that integrates traditional, intuition-driven approaches to ethics with empirical approaches that employ empirical data from biology and cognitive science. Specifically, it explores what restrictions are placed on our moral theorizing by findings in evolutionary biology, psychology, neuroscience, and other fields, and how we can integrate this (...) data while still offering a fully normative account of ethics. To that end, the dissertation explores the methodological assumptions behind both traditional and more empirical or experimental approaches to ethics, to find where these assumptions cannot be properly supported and need to be re-examined. Chapter 1 explores the science-based objections that have been raised to traditional approaches, with a particular focus on questions concerning the reliability of moral intuitions. Chapter 2 examines three fundamental assumptions supporting the empirical approach to moral philosophy, and how those assumptions ultimately do not fit with how we ought to understand the project of ethics. In chapter 3, I discuss the fact/value distinction, and the restrictions that are placed on our moral theorizing by our commitment to this distinction. Chapter 4 offers a defense of ‘companions in guilt’ arguments, and uses these arguments to draw an analogy between moral philosophy and epistemology that will be used to help defend moral philosophy against empirical debunking arguments. Chapter 5 explores the ways in which epistemologists’ methods of incorporating empirical data into their research while maintaining the normativity of their accounts can be adapted to allow moral philosophers to do the same, and brings together the various methodological concerns addressed up to this point to lay out a methodological approach I call empirically-informed moral philosophy. (shrink)

The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World is my attempt to explain whether and how existential meaning is possible in a material world, and how such meaning is best conceived naturalistically. Neuroexistentialism conceives of our predicament in accordance with Darwin plus neuroscience. The prospects for our kind of being-in-the-world are limited by our natures as smart but fully embodied short-lived animals. Many find this picture disenchanting, even depressing. I respond to four criticisms of my relentless upbeat naturalism: that (...) naturalism can make no room for norms, for values; that I overvalue truth at the expense of happiness; that I underestimate the extent to which supernaturalism has made peace with naturalism; and that I can give no account for why humans as finite animals should want to overcome our given natures and seek impersonal, self-transcendent value. (shrink)

Neuroethics applies cognitive neuroscience for prescribing alterations to conceptions of self and society, and for prescriptively judging the ethical applications of neurotechnologies. Plentiful normative premises are available to ground such prescriptivity, however prescriptive neuroethics may remain fragmented by social conventions, cultural ideologies, and ethical theories. Herein we offer that an objectively principled neuroethics for international relevance requires a new meta-ethics: understanding how morality works, and how humans manage and improve morality, as objectively based on the brain and social sciences. This (...) new meta-ethics will simultaneously equip neuroethics for evaluating and revising older cultural ideologies and ethical theories, and direct neuroethics towards scientifically valid views of encultured humans intelligently managing moralities. Bypassing absolutism, cultural essentialisms, and unrealistic ethical philosophies, neuroethics arrives at a small set of principles about proper human flourishing that are more culturally inclusive and cosmopolitan in spirit. This cosmopolitanism in turn suggests augmentations to traditional medical ethics in the form of four principled guidelines for international consideration: empowerment, non-obsolescence, self-creativity, and citizenship. (shrink)

An impressive amount of evidence from psychology, cognitive neurology, evolutionary psychology and primatology seems to be converging on a ‘dual process’ model of moral or practical (in the philosophical sense) psychology according to which our practical judgments are generated by two distinct processes, one ‘emotive-intuitive’ and one ‘cognitive-utilitarian’. In this paper I approach the dual process model from several directions, trying to shed light on various aspects of our moral and practical lives.

The project of naturalizing ethics has multiple contributions, from cognitive and moral psychology to primatology, neuroscience or evolutionary theory. One of the strategies for naturalizing ethics has been to argue that moral norms and values can be explained away if we focus on their causal history, if it is possible to offer both an ultimate and proximate causal explanation for them. In this article, I will focus on the contribution of cognitive and moral psychology as a way of offering a (...) proximate causal explanation for moral judgments. I am mostly interested in understanding to what extent these cognitive and psychological questions have some bearing in the fields of ethics and meta-ethics. Does this research programme put at stake the contention that ethics is a manifestation of human rationality? Is it true that finding the cognitive underpinnings of some of our moral judgments vindicates some meta-ethical position, namely some kind of reductionist naturalism? In the end, I will argue that even if scientific disciplines such as cognitive psychology give us a naturalized picture of the moral agent, there seem to be no reasons to think that from a naturalized perspective of the agent capable of perceiving value it must follow the naturalization of value itself. (shrink)

The aim of this chapter is to investigate changes and continuities of human moral systems from an evolutionary and socio-historical perspective. Specifically, I will argue that these systems can be approached through the lens of non-genetic inheritance systems and niche construction. I will examine morality from a comparative socio-historical perspective. From this, I suggest that these inheritance systems are cognitively scaffolded, and that these scaffolds are part of the nucleus of the historical Mesoamerican cosmovision.