Evolutionary ethics is the study of human morality from the perspective of evolutionary biology. What is characteristic of such study is that it involves empirical as well as philosophical investigation. Empirical evolutionary ethics explores the evolutionary origin of morality, drawing evidence from primatology, developmental psychology, evolutionary biology, and so on. Essential to philosophical evolutionary ethics is the claim that facts about human evolution can help address certain perennial problems in moral philosophy, such as how we ought to act or whether our moral judgments are justified.
Empirical evolutionary ethics hasn’t really taken root until Darwin’s publication of The Descent of Man in 1871. In the course of the second half of 20th century, W. Hamilton’s work on kin selection, R. Trivers’ work on reciprocal altruism, along with the sociobiology advocated by E.O. Wilson, and the evolutionary psychology at its heel, helped to revive empirical evolutionary ethics. Such a revival prompted a number of philosophers to pay attention to evolutionary ethics, and even to claim that the time for ethics to be biologicized has come.
The question of how promising philosophical evolutionary ethics is depends on whether and to what extent it could succeed in:
(1) establishing that morality is a biological adaptation (the thesis of moral nativism);
(2) showing that moral nativism has implications for ethics (the thesis of relevance); and
(3) finding out exactly what significant implications there are (either the vindication thesis or the undermining thesis).
The prospects of biologicizing ethics would be dim without demonstrating that all three claims are plausible.
In this course, we aim to assess the prospects of philosophical evolutionary ethics by scrutinizing each of the three theses.