Introduction

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Notes

Here is an old, now quite familiar idea about ethics:

‘The moral sentiments were designed for ... hunter-gatherer villages and other, earlier, societies that are lost in the mists of prehistory. It is safe to say that these societies didn't have an elaborate judicial system and a large police force.’ (Wright, 1994, p. 374)^[1]

This idea guides thinking about ethical improvement. To illustrate:

‘We have an empirically confirmed theory about where our moral judgments come from [...] This amounts to the discovery that our moral beliefs are products of a process that is entirely independent of their truth, which forces the recognition that we have no grounds one way or the other for maintaining these beliefs.’ (Joyce, 2006, p. 211)^[2]

But is the idea about evolution correct?

The arguments that Wright (1994) and Joyce (2006) offer depend on premises about how humans come have to moral intuitions and how they make ethical judgements. This area, moral psychology, has seen many new discoveries in the last decade.

Key support for the idea about evolution comes from discoveries associated with Greene et al’s dual-process theory of moral cognition (Greene, 2014; Joshua D. Greene, 2017).

If we found that the dual-process theory of moral cognition is not well supported by evidence, this would remove a key support for the idea about intuitions or sentiments reflecting humans’ evolutionary history.^[3] ...

References

Boyd, R., & Richerson, P. J. (2005). The origin and evolution of cultures. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/warw/detail.action?docID=279791

Greene, Joshua D. (2017). The rat-a-gorical imperative: Moral intuition and the limits of affective learning. Cognition, 167, 66–77. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2017.03.004

Greene, Joshua David. (2014). Moral tribes: Emotion, reason and the gap between us and them. New York: Atlantic Books.

Joyce, R. (2006). The evolution of morality. Cambridge, MA ; London: MIT Press. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/warw/detail.action?docID=3338603

Richerson, P. J., & Boyd, R. (2005). Not by genes alone: How culture transformed human evolution. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Sebanz, N., & Knoblich, G. (2021). Progress in Joint-Action Research. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 30(2), 138–143. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721420984425

Vlerick, M. (2017). Better than our nature? Evolution and moral realism, justification, and progress. In M. Ruse & R. J. Richards (Eds.), Handbook of Evolutionary Ethics (p. 226—239). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wright, R. (1994). The moral animal: Evolutionary psychology and everyday life. New York: Pantheon Books.

Endnotes

See also Wright (1994, p. 191): ‘We live in cities and suburbs and watch TV and drink beer, all the while being pushed and pulled by feelings designed to propagate our genes in a small hunter-gatherer population.’ This is a version of what call the Richerson & Boyd (2005, p. 150) 'the big-mistake hypothesis'. ↩︎
Others offer less radical conclusions but endorse the claim that the idea about evolution should guide our thinking about ethics. See, for example, Vlerick (2017, p. 238): ‘An evolutionary perspective on our moral wiring ... teaches us to regard the output of some of our evolved moral dispositions with a healthy dose of skepticism, given that the behavior they evolved to produce cannot always be expected to lead to good (moral) results (as determined by our reason-powered moral compass).’ ↩︎
Boyd & Richerson (2005) argue that Wright, Joyce and others are wrong about the scale of prehistric social systems, and the identify a significant role for cultural evolution. They agree that ‘Contemporary human societies differ drastically from the societies in which our social instincts evolved’ (p. 264) and also hold that ‘Innate principles furnish people with basic predispositions, emotional capacities, and social dispositions that are implemented in practice through highly variable cultural institutions, the parameters’ (p. 264). ↩︎