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  1. Morals by agreement.David P. Gauthier - 1986 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    Is morality rational? In this book Gauthier argues that moral principles are principles of rational choice. He proposes a principle whereby choice is made on an agreed basis of cooperation, rather than according to what would give an individual the greatest expectation of value. He shows that such a principle not only ensures mutual benefit and fairness, thus satisfying the standards of morality, but also that each person may actually expect greater utility by adhering to morality, even though the choice (...)
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  • After the fall: Religious capacities and the error theory of morality.Michael Stingl & John Collier - 2004 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 27 (6):751-752.
    The target article proposes an error theory for religious belief. In contrast, moral beliefs are typically not counterintuitive, and some moral cognition and motivation is functional. Error theories for moral belief try to reduce morality to nonmoral psychological capacities because objective moral beliefs seem too fragile in a competitive environment. An error theory for religious belief makes this unnecessary.
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  • Wild justice and fair play: Cooperation, forgiveness, and morality in animals. [REVIEW]Marc Bekoff - 2004 - Biology and Philosophy 19 (4):489-520.
    In this paper I argue that we can learn much about wild justice and the evolutionary origins of social morality – behaving fairly – by studying social play behavior in group-living animals, and that interdisciplinary cooperation will help immensely. In our efforts to learn more about the evolution of morality we need to broaden our comparative research to include animals other than non-human primates. If one is a good Darwinian, it is premature to claim that only humans can be empathic (...)
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  • Animal play and the evolution of morality: An ethological approach.Colin Allen & Marc Bekoff - 2005 - Topoi 24 (2):125-135.
    In this paper we argue that there is much to learn about “wild justice” and the evolutionary origins of morality – behaving fairly – by studying social play behavior in group-living mammals. Because of its relatively wide distribution among the mammals, ethological investigation of play, informed by interdisciplinary cooperation, can provide a comparative perspective on the evolution of ethical behavior that is broader than is provided by the usual focus on primate sociality. Careful analysis of social play reveals rules of (...)
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  • Passions Within Reason: The Strategic Role of Emotions.Robert H. Frank - 1988 - Norton.
    In this book, I make use of an idea from economics to suggest how noble human tendencies might not only have survived the ruthless pressures of the material world, but actually have been nurtured by them.
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  • The View From Nowhere.Thomas Nagel - 1986 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    Human beings have the unique ability to view the world in a detached way: We can think about the world in terms that transcend our own experience or interest, and consider the world from a vantage point that is, in Nagel's words, "nowhere in particular". At the same time, each of us is a particular person in a particular place, each with his own "personal" view of the world, a view that we can recognize as just one aspect of the (...)
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  • The Evolution of Morality.Richard Joyce - 2005 - Bradford.
    Moral thinking pervades our practical lives, but where did this way of thinking come from, and what purpose does it serve? Is it to be explained by environmental pressures on our ancestors a million years ago, or is it a cultural invention of more recent origin? In The Evolution of Morality, Richard Joyce takes up these controversial questions, finding that the evidence supports an innate basis to human morality. As a moral philosopher, Joyce is interested in whether any implications follow (...)
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  • The Biology of Moral Systems.Richard D. Alexander - 1987 - Aldine de Gruyter.
    Despite wide acceptance that the attributes of living creatures have appeared through a cumulative evolutionary process guided chiefly by natural selection, many human activities have seemed analytically inaccessible through such an approach. Prominent evolutionary biologists, for example, have described morality as contrary to the direction of biological evolution, and moral philosophers rarely regard evolution as relevant to their discussions. -/- The Biology of Moral Systems adopts the position that moral questions arise out of conflicts of interest, and that moral systems (...)
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  • Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong.John Leslie Mackie - 1977 - New York: Penguin Books.
    John Mackie's stimulating book is a complete and clear treatise on moral theory. His writings on normative ethics-the moral principles he recommends-offer a fresh approach on a much neglected subject, and the work as a whole is undoubtedly a major contribution to modern philosophy.The author deals first with the status of ethics, arguing that there are not objective values, that morality cannot be discovered but must be made. He examines next the content of ethics, seeing morality as a functional device, (...)
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  • The biological basis of morality.Edward O. Wilson - 1998 - The Atlantic Monthly:53-70.
    Do we invent our moral absolutes in order to make society workable? Or are these enduring principles expressed to us by some transcendent or Godlike authority? Efforts to resolve this conundrum have perplexed, sometimes inflamed, our best minds for centuries, but the natural sciences are telling us more and more about the choices we make and our reasons for making them.
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  • The Selfish Gene. [REVIEW]Gunther S. Stent & Richard Dawkins - 1977 - Hastings Center Report 7 (6):33.
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  • Religion's evolutionary landscape: Counterintuition, commitment, compassion, communion.Scott Atran & Ara Norenzayan - 2004 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 27 (6):713-730.
    Religion is not an evolutionary adaptation per se, but a recurring by-product of the complex evolutionary landscape that sets cognitive, emotional and material conditions for ordinary human interactions. Religion involves extraordinary use of ordinary cognitive processes to passionately display costly devotion to counterintuitive worlds governed by supernatural agents. The conceptual foundations of religion are intuitively given by task-specific panhuman cognitive domains, including folkmechanics, folkbiology, folkpsychology. Core religious beliefs minimally violate ordinary notions about how the world is, with all of its (...)
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  • All the Monkeys Aren’t in the Zoo: Evolutionary Ethics and the Possibility of Moral Knowledge.Michael Stingl - 2000 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 30 (sup1):245-265.
    The error theory of moral judgment says that moral judgments, though often believed to be objectively true, never are. The tendency to believe in the objectivity of our moral beliefs, like the beliefs themselves, is rooted in objective features of human psychology, and not in objective features of the natural world that might exist apart from human psychology. In naturalized epistemology, it is tempting to take this view as the default hypothesis. It appears to make the fewest assumptions in accounting (...)
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  • Reasonable Partiality from a Biological Point of View.Michael Stingl & John Collier - 2005 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 8 (1-2):11-24.
    Speculation about the evolutionary origins of morality has yet to show how a biologically based capacity for morality might be connected to moral reasoning. Applying an evolutionary approach to three kinds of cases where partiality may or may not be morally reasonable, this paper explores a possible connection between a psychological capacity for morality and processes of wide reflective moral equilibrium. The central hypothesis is that while we might expect a capacity for morality to include aspects of partiality, we might (...)
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  • Taking Darwin Seriously: A Naturalistic Approach to Philosophy.Michael Ruse - 1986 - New York, NY: Prometheus Books.
    Brings together traditional philosophy and modern sociobiology to examine evolutionary biology and its relation to the evolution of knowledge and ethics.
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  • Evolutionary naturalism and the objectivity of morality.John Collier & Michael Stingl - 1993 - Biology and Philosophy 8 (1):47-60.
    We propose an objective and justifiable ethics that is contingent on the truth of evolutionary theory. We do not argue for the truth of this position, which depends on the empirical question of whether moral functions form a natural class, but for its cogency and possibility. The position we propose combines the advantages of Kantian objectivity with the explanatory and motivational advantages of moral naturalism. It avoids problems with the epistemological inaccessibility of transcendent values, while avoiding the relativism or subjectivism (...)
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  • Evolutionary ethics and moral theory.Michael Stingl - 1996 - Journal of Value Inquiry 30 (4):531-545.
    This example, like the others, demands further discussion. My conclusion must therefore remain modest: an agent-neutral theory of our moral competence is not biologically implausible. Agent-centered rules like tit-for-tat, prerogatives, special obligations, and duties not to harm others might be best regarded as belonging to the theory of moral performance rather than the theory of moral competence. For biologists who may think otherwise, the general argument of this essay is that any claims to the contrary must be based on more (...)
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  • Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong.Marc Hauser - 2006 - Harper Collins.
    Marc Hauser puts forth the theory that humans have evolved a universal moral instinct, unconsciously propelling us to deliver judgments of right and wrong independent of gender, education, and religion. Combining his cutting-edge research with the latest findings in cognitive psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, economics, and anthropology, Hauser explores the startling implications of his provocative theory vis-à-vis contemporary bioethics, religion, the law, and our everyday lives.
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