One reason for the widespread resistance to evolutionary accounts of the origins of humanity is the fear that they undermine morality: if morality is based on nothing more than evolved dispositions, it would be shown to be illusory, many people suspect. This view is shared by some philosophers who take their work on the evolutionary origins of morality to undermine moral realism. If they are right, we are faced with an unpalatable choice: to reject morality on scientific grounds, or to (...) reject our best- confirmed scientific explanation of our origins in order to save morality. Fortunately, as I show, we have no reason to accept the deflationary claims of some evolutionary ethicists: morality, as we ordinarily understand it, is fully compatible with evolution. (shrink)

Voles are attracting attention because genetic variation at a single locus appears to have a profound impact on a complex social behavior, namely monogamy. After briefly reviewing the state of the most relevant scientific literature, I examine the way that this research gets taken up by the popular media, by scientists, and by the notable philosopher of neuroscience Patricia Churchland and interpreted as having deeply revisionary implications for how we ordinarily understand ourselves as persons. We have all these big questions (...) we would like to resolve about free will, consciousness, our understanding of persons, and the nature of morality and there is a tendency to ask more of neuroscience than it can yet answer. I do not deny that advances in neuroscience may eventually bear on important philosophical issues. However, it is not at all clear that this research has many of the sweeping implications being claimed for it and, in communicating science responsibly to the public, there is reason to be cautious about suggesting that it does. (shrink)

I agree with George Williams's most significant point: both questions and answers about our moral natures lie in our biological origins. He fails, however, to show that nature is morally evil and that therefore we should vigilantly resist it. The products of evolution are morally neutral, but the human moral sense is arguably a positive good. Morality is functional. It does not require ultimate justification in the sense of correspondence with or attack upon reality “out there.” It is an adaptation (...) “intended” to make us social, and sociality—with its sense of right and wrong—makes us fitter than otherwise. (shrink)

Abstract:Charles Darwin died in 1882—more than a hundred years ago. His doctrine, however, is still alive. Recently there has been particular interest in his ideas among philosophers. These ideas are indeed a challenge to (traditional) philosophy: To take Darwin seriously means to revise—or even to destroy—some positions in (traditional) philosophy. Among the philosophical disciplines which have been affected by Darwin's ideas are epistemology and moral philosophy (ethics). In the present paper I shall discuss the epistemological and ethical consequences of Darwin's (...) doctrine from the point of view of contemporary philosophy of biology; I shall give a brief outline of evolutionary epistemology and evolutionary ethics which both have caused many controversies. (shrink)

I offer a critical analysis of a view that has become a dominant aspect of recent thought on the relationship between evolution and morality, and propose an alternative. An ingredient in Michael Ruse's 'error theory' (Ruse 1995) is that belief in moral (prescriptive, universal, and nonsubjective) guidelines arose in humans because such belief results in the performance of adaptive cooperative behaviors. This statement relies on two particular connections: between ostensible and intentional types of altruism, and between intentional altruism and morality. (...) The latter connection is problematic because it makes morality redundant, its role having already been fulfilled by the psychological dispositions that constitute intentional altruism. Both behavioral ecology and moral psychology support this criticism, and neither human behavioral flexibility nor the self-regard / other-regard distinction can provide a defense of the error theory. I conclude that morality did not evolve to curb rampant selfishness; instead, the evolutionarily recent 'universal law' aspect of morality may function to update behavioral strategies which were adaptive in the paleolithic environment of our ancestors (to which our psychological dispositions are best adapted), by means of norms more appropriate to our novel social environment. (shrink)

This article starts from the assumption that there are various innate contributions to our view of the world and explores the epistemological implications that follow from this. Specifically, it explores the idea that if certain components of our worldview have an evolutionary origin, this implies that these aspects accurately depict the world. The simple version of the argument for this conclusion is that if an aspect of mind is innate, it must be useful, and the most parsimonious explanation for its (...) usefulness is that it accurately depicts the world. There are a number of important criticisms of this argument. These include the idea that evolutionary justifications are circular, that evolved mental content and principles are not necessarily accurate, and that, if the argument is taken seriously, it has some highly dubious consequences. These criticisms necessitate various qualifications to the initial argument. Nonetheless, it is argued that, in some cases, important conclusions can be drawn about the world from an analysis of evolved contributions to our view of the world. An evolutionary approach cannot provide an ultimate justification for any belief; however, in certain circumstances, it supports the conclusion that a given belief is a reasonable first approximation. To the extent that innate content and principles pertain to topics in metaphysics, they can be viewed as a naturalistic source of metaphysical knowledge. (shrink)

This thesis focuses on models of conceptual change in science and philosophy. In particular, I developed a new bootstrapping methodology for studying conceptual change, centered around the formalization of several popular models of conceptual change and the collective assessment of their improved formal versions via nine evaluative dimensions. Among the models of conceptual change treated in the thesis are Carnap’s explication, Lakatos’ concept-stretching, Toulmin’s conceptual populations, Waismann’s open texture, Mark Wilson’s patches and facades, Sneed’s structuralism, and Paul Thagard’s conceptual revolutions. (...) -/- In order to analyze and compare the conception of conceptual change provided by these different models, I rely on several historical reconstructions of episodes of scientific conceptual change. The historical episodes of scientific change that figure in this work include the emergence of the morphological concept of fish in biological taxonomies, the development of scientific conceptions of temperature, the Church-Turing thesis and related axiomatizations of effective calculability, the history of the concept of polyhedron in 17th and 18th century mathematics, Hamilton’s invention of the quaternions, the history of the pre-abstract group concepts in 18th and 19th century mathematics, the expansion of Newtonian mechanics to viscous fluids forces phenomena, and the chemical revolution. I will also present five different formal and informal improvements of four specific models of conceptual change. I will first present two different improvements of Carnapian explication, a formal and an informal one. My informal improvement of Carnapian explication will consist of a more fine-grained version of the procedure that adds an intermediate, third step to the two steps of Carnapian explication. I will show how this novel three-step version of explication is more suitable than its traditional two-step relative to handle complex cases of explications. My second, formal improvement of Carnapian explication will be a full explication of the concept of explication itself within the theory of conceptual spaces. By virtue of this formal improvement, the whole procedure of explication together with its application procedures and its pragmatic desiderata will be reconceptualized as a precise procedure involving topological and geometrical constraints inside the theory of conceptual spaces. My third improved model of conceptual change will consist of a formal explication of Darwinian models of conceptual change that will make vast use of Godfrey-Smith’s population-based Darwinism for targeting explicitly mathematical conceptual change. My fourth improvement will be dedicated instead to Wilson’s indeterminate model of conceptual change. I will show how Wilson’s very informal framework can be explicated within a modified version of the structuralist model-theoretic reconstructions of scientific theories. Finally, the fifth improved model of conceptual change will be a belief-revision-like logical framework that reconstructs Thagard’s model of conceptual revolution as specific revision and contraction operations that work on conceptual structures. -/- At the end of this work, a general conception of conceptual change in science and philosophy emerges, thanks to the combined action of the three layers of my methodology. This conception takes conceptual change to be a multi-faceted phenomenon centered around the dynamics of groups of concepts. According to this conception, concepts are best reconstructed as plastic and inter-subjective entities equipped with a non-trivial internal structure and subject to a certain degree of localized holism. Furthermore, conceptual dynamics can be judged from a weakly normative perspective, bound to be dependent on shared values and goals. Conceptual change is then best understood, according to this conception, as a ubiquitous phenomenon underlying all of our intellectual activities, from science to ordinary linguistic practices. As such, conceptual change does not pose any particular problem to value-laden notions of scientific progress, objectivity, and realism. At the same time, this conception prompts all our concept-driven intellectual activities, including philosophical and metaphilosophical reflections, to take into serious consideration the phenomenon of conceptual change. An important consequence of this conception, and of the analysis that generated it, is in fact that an adequate understanding of the dynamics of philosophical concepts is a prerequisite for analytic philosophy to develop a realistic and non-idealized depiction of itself and its activities. (shrink)

Many philosophers and psychologists have thought that people untutored in philosophy are moral realists. On this view, when people make moral judgments, they interpret their judgments as tracking universal, objective moral facts. But studies of folk metaethics have demonstrated that people have a mix of metaethical attitudes. Sometimes people think of their moral judgments as purely expressive, or as tracking subjective or relative moral facts, or perhaps no facts at all. This paper surveys the evidence for folk metaethical pluralism and (...) argues for an explanation of this mix of folk metaethical attitudes: without philosophical education, these attitudes are typically caused by factors that are insensitive to their truth. Moreover, unless they can be justified by other means, metaethical attitudes with this etiology are, as a result, irrational, and ought not be used as evidence for or against moral realism. (shrink)

Evolutionary debunkers claim that evolutionary explanations of moral phenomena lead to sceptical conclusions. The aim of this paper is to show that even if we grant debunkers the speculative claims that evolution provides the best explanation of moral phenomena and that there are no other moral phenomena for which moral facts/properties are indispensable, the sceptical conclusions debunkers seek to establish still do not follow. The problem for debunkers is to link the empirical explanatory claim to the normative conclusion that moral (...) beliefs are unjustified. The paper argues that debunkers face a dilemma, and that neither of the two options available to them supports the sceptical conclusions for which they aim. Consequently, it is claimed, the dialectical force of evolutionary debunking arguments is, at best, exceedingly weak. (shrink)

In the field of cultural evolution it is generally assumed that the study of culture and cultural change would benefit enormously from being informed by evolutionary thinking. Recently, however, there has been much debate about what this “being informed” means. According to the standard view, an interesting analogy obtains between cultural and biological evolution. In the literature, however, the analogy is interpreted and used in at least three distinct, but interrelated ways. We provide a taxonomy in order to clarify these (...) different meanings. Subsequently, we discuss the alternatives model of cultural attraction theory and memetics, which both challenge basic assumptions of the standard view. Finally, we briefly summarize the contributions to the special issue on Darwin in the Humanities and the Social Sciences, which is the result of a collaborative project between scholars and scientists from the universities of Lille and Ghent. Furthermore, we explain how they add to the discussions about the integration of evolutionary thinking and the study of culture. (shrink)

A critical review of Frans de Waal's book on evolution of morality (Frans de Waal, Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).

This dissertation is a critique of synthetic ethical naturalism (SEN). SEN is a view in metaethics that comprises three key theses: first, there are moral properties and facts that are independent of the beliefs and attitudes of moral appraisers (moral realism); second, moral properties and facts are identical to (or constituted only by) natural properties and facts (ethical naturalism); and third, sentences used to assert identity or constitution relations between moral and natural properties are expressions of synthetic, a posteriori necessities. (...) The last of these theses, which distinguishes SEN from other forms of ethical naturalism, is supported by a fourth: the semantic contents of the central moral predicates such as 'morally right' and 'morally good' are fixed in part by features external to the minds of speakers (moral semantic externalism). Chapter 1 introduces SEN and discusses the most common motivations for accepting it. The next three chapters discuss the influential "Moral Twin Earth" argument against moral semantic externalism. In Chapter 2, I defend this argument from the charge that the thought experiment upon which it depends is defective. In Chapters 3 and 4, I consider two attempts to amend SEN so as to render it immune to the Moral Twin Earth argument. I show that each of these proposed amendments amounts to an abandonment of SEN. Chapter Five explores Richard Boyd's proposal that moral goodness is a "homeostatic property cluster." If true, Boyd's hypothesis could be used to support several metaphysical, epistemological, and semantic claims made on behalf of SEN. I advance three arguments against this account of moral goodness. In the sixth chapter, I argue that moral facts are not needed in the best a posteriori explanations of our moral beliefs and moral sensibility. Because of this, those who accept a metaphysical naturalism ought to deny the existence of such facts or else accept skepticism about moral knowledge. In Chapter 7, I consider a counterargument on behalf of SEN to the effect that moral facts are needed in order to explain the predictive success of our best moral theories. I show that this argument fails. (shrink)

This article is a defense of Michael Ruse's sociobiological account of the origins and nature of morality. In the piece, the author provides a summary explanation of Ruse's views and arguments. Then he goes on to explain and critically discuss a variety of objections that have been made against sociobiological accounts of morality. He argues that the criticisms that have been made often work against less sophisticated sociobiological theories but that Ruse's theory is immune to the criticisms. The author responds (...) to the arguments of the following critics of sociobiology: Kitcher, Flew, Flanagan, Nagel, Miles, Singer, and Jacquette. Key Words: Michael Ruse • E. O. Wilson • sociobiology • altruism • ethical naturalism. (shrink)

This short article is a reply to Fine's criticisms of Haidt's social intuitionist model of moral judgement. After situating Haidt in the landscape of meta-ethical views, I examine Fine's argument, against Haidt, that the processes which give rise to moral judgements are amenable to rational control: first-order moral judgements, which are automatic, can nevertheless deliberately be brought to reflect higher-order judgements. However, Haidt's claims about the arationality of moral judgements seem to apply equally well to these higher-order judgements; showing that (...) we can exercise higher-order control over first-order judgements therefore does not show that our judgements are rational. I conclude by sketching an alternative strategy for vindicating the rationality of moral judgements: by viewing moral argument as a community-wide and distributed enterprise, in which knowledge is produced by debate and transferred to individuals via testimony. (shrink)

In this paper, I develop a naturalistic conception of evolutionary progress. I argue that the Waddingtonian notion of adaptability can be embedded meaningfully into a framework which views living things as nonequilibrium structures. This thermodynamic interpretation places great emphasis on the dynamics of environmental change, whereas the classical conceptions are based on equilibrium conceptions of the evolutionary process. What improves in evolution is the ability of living things to stay alive in increasingly heterogeneous environments.

The values which are definitive of the humanist project, such as freedom and self-determination, are of central concern to environmentalism. This means, according to Lewis P. Hinchman, that environmentalists should seek a rapprochement with humanism, rather than rejecting it for its apparent anthropocentrism. He argues that this requires in turn the acceptance of those approaches to human self-understanding which are central to the hermeneutic traditions and the rejection of naturalist approaches, such as sociobiology, which is accused of producing deterministic, reifying, (...) reductionist, dehumanising forms of understanding of human beings and human life. This paper seeks to show that sociobiology does not pose the kinds of threat to humanism and environmentalism outlined by Hinchman. (shrink)

Evolutionary ethics has a bad reputation. But we must not remain prisoners of our past. Recent advances in Darwinian evolutionary biology pave the way for a linking of science and morality, at once more modest yet more profound than earlier excursions in this direction. There is no need to repudiate the insights of the great philosophers of the past, particularly David Hume. So humans’ simian origins really matter. The question is not whether evolution is to be linked to ethics, but (...) how. (shrink)

Do universities still need departments in the humanities—philosophy, history, languages, and so forth? Many today, particularly legislators with control over the funding of public universities, feel that the emphasis should be on, and only on, departments in the STEM field. Willem B. Drees, a former dean of humanities, makes a spirited defense of the worth of the humanities and of their continued place in higher education. This essay looks at Drees's arguments in a critical, yet appreciative, fashion. It is a (...) debate we need to have. (shrink)

The non-adaptationist approach to evolutionary epistemology was born at the end of the 1970s as an alternative to traditional adaptationist EE. Despite the fact that non-adaptationist EE offers compelling interpretative models and its explanatory power is widely recognised, an organic overview of the broad non-adaptationist field is still lacking. In this paper, I propose to fill this gap. To this effect, after providing a systematisation of the perspectives that are commonly associated with non-adaptationist EE, I will discuss two recurring orders (...) of arguments that non-adaptationist scholars, often independently of one another, put forward against their adaptationist rivals. By offering a way to conceive non-adaptationist evolutionary epistemological approaches as part of a structured whole, the resulting systematic account is meant to provide a reading grid, a compass for orienting oneself in the uneven territories of non-adaptationist EE. Moreover, the consequent identification of two recurring argumentative bodies is intended to add to the explanatory power of non-adaptationist EE, which in finding new strength in numbers eventually acquires a greater critical efficacy against its adaptationist counterpart. (shrink)

Evolutionary Debunking Arguments purport to show that our moral beliefs do not amount to knowledge because these beliefs are “debunked” by the fact that our moral beliefs are, in some way, the product of evolutionary forces. But there is a substantial gap in this argument between its main evolutionary premise and the skeptical conclusion. What is it, exactly, about the evolutionary origins of moral beliefs that would create problems for realist views in metaethics? I argue that evolutionary debunking arguments are (...) best understood as offering up defeaters for our moral beliefs. Moreover, the defeater in question is a paradigmatic instance of undercutting defeat. If anything is an undercutting defeater, then learning about the evolutionary origins of our moral beliefs is a defeater for those beliefs. (shrink)

Although a detailed analysis of Darwin’s lexicon inOn the Origin of Specieshas not been undertaken, critical literature claims that there are lexical signs of a teleological nature in the language used in this work. I intend to refute, through an analysis of the lexicon in Darwin’s work, the criticisms that claim a teleological subtext in Darwin’s language and that conceive said language to be a reflection of a teleological conception of nature. I will place special emphasis on the lexical material (...) that Darwin uses in those paragraphs dedicated to the description of the function of Natural Selection. (shrink)

Discussions about the evolution of human social cognition usually portray the social environment of early hominins as highly hierarchical and violent. In this evolutionary narrative, our propensity for violence was overcome in our lineage by an increase in our intellectual capacities. However, I will argue in this article that we are at least equally justified in believing that our early hominin ancestors were less aggressive and hierarchical than is suggested in these models. This view is consistent with the available comparative (...) and palaeoanthropological evidence. I will show that this alternative model not only does not support long-held views of human origins, but also has important consequences for debates about the evolution of our capacity for normative guidance. _1_ Introduction _2_ Philosophical Motivation _3_ The Puzzle of Hominin Evolution _4_ The Mosaic Hypothesis _5_ Evidence for the Model _6_ Palaeoanthropological Support _7_ Philosophical Consequences. (shrink)

How is moral thinking, ethics, related to evolutionary theorizing? There are two approaches, epitomized by Charles Darwin who works under the metaphor of the world as a machine, and by Herbert Spencer who works under the metaphor of the world as an organism. Although the author prefers the first approach, the aim of this paper is to give a disinterested account of both approaches.

Human propensities that are the products of Darwinian evolution may combine to generate a form of social behavior that is not itself a direct result of such pressure. This possibility may provide a satisfying explanation for the origin of socially transmitted rules such as the incest taboo. Similarly, the regulatory processes of development that generated adaptations to the environment in the circumstances in which they evolved can produce surprising and sometimes maladaptive consequences for the individual in modern conditions. These combinatorial (...) aspects of social and developmental dynamics leave a subtle but not wholly uninteresting role for evolutionary biology in explaining the origins of human morality. (shrink)

Francis Collins, the director of the NEH and well-known Christian, has said that agnosticism is a bit of a cop-out. Either be a Christian or be an atheism, but have the guts to make up your mind. I shall argue in a positive way for agnosticism, showing that it can be as vibrant a position as belief or non-belief. It gives you a renewed appreciation of life and the world in which we live.

This work takes a stand on whether Wallace should be regarded as co-author of the theory of natural selection alongside Darwin as he is usually considered on behalf of his alleged essential contribution to the conception of the theory. It does so from a perspective unexplored thus far: we will argue for Darwin’s priority based on a rational reconstruction of the theory of natural selection as it appears in the writings of both authors. We show that the theory does not (...) appear in exactly the same manner in the writings of each of its alleged co-discoverers: tough we find the same fundamental elements in both works, even in Darwin’s early texts, we discern a more complex unifying and ramified structure than the one we find in Wallace’s Ternate manuscript. Even when we think the badge of the “Darwin–Wallace” theory is well deserved, the unifying force of Darwin’s version has proved to be one of the keys for the ulterior success of the so-called Darwinian revolution in Biology. (shrink)

So-called evolutionary error theorists, such as Michael Ruse and Richard Joyce, have argued that naturalistic accounts of the moral sentiments lead us to adopt an error theory approach to morality. Roughly, the argument is that an appreciation of the etiology of those sentiments undermines any reason to think that they track moral truth and, furthermore, undermines any reason to think that moral truth actually exists. I argue that this approach offers us a false dichotomy between error theory and some form (...) of moral realism. While accepting the presuppositions of the evolutionary error theorist, I argue that contract-based approaches to morality can be sensitive to those presuppositions while still vindicating morality. Invoking Stephen Darwall’s distinction between contractualism and contractarianism, I go on to offer an evolutionary-based contractarianism. (shrink)