Overview
- Presents an interdisciplinary engagement between philosophers and scientists on evolutionary ethics
- Examines how morality emerged in human evolution using empirical resources
- Looks at the evolutionary of morality from multiple scientific and philosophical perspectives
- Offers a global perspective on evolutionary ethics, with authors from around the world
Part of the book series: Synthese Library (SYLI, volume 437)
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About this book
A growing body of evidence from the sciences suggests that our moral beliefs have an evolutionary basis. To explain how human morality evolved, some philosophers have called for the study of morality to be naturalized, i.e., to explain it in terms of natural causes by looking at its historical and biological origins. The present literature has focused on the link between evolution and moral realism: if our moral beliefs enhance fitness, does this mean they track moral truths? In spite of the growing empirical evidence, these discussions tend to remain high-level: the mere fact that morality has evolved is often deemed enough to decide questions in normative and meta-ethics. This volume starts from the assumption that the details about the evolution of morality do make a difference, and asks how. It presents original essays by authors from various disciplines, including philosophy, anthropology, developmental psychology, and primatology, who write in conversation with neuroscience, sociology, and cognitive psychology.
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Keywords
- Gene culture evolution morality
- Cultural evolution morality
- Evolutionary debunking moral realism
- Psychological foundation morality
- Moralities across cultures
- Evolutionary Basis Moral Beliefs
- Link Evolution Moral Realism
- Morality evolution
- Empirical resources evolutionary ethics
- evolutionary ethics
- prehistory ethics
- developmental perspective evolutionary ethics
- Archeology Philosophy
- Archeology Morality
- evolution morality ethics
- Chimpanzee ethics
- Morality Mesoamerica
- inclusive sympathy evolution
- Evolution parochial altruism
Table of contents (10 chapters)
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Front Matter
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The Nuts and Bolts of Evolutionary Ethics
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Editors and Affiliations
About the editors
Johan De Smedt has co-authored A natural history of natural theology. The cognitive science of theology and philosophy of religion (MIT Press, 2015) and The Challenge of Evolution to Religion (Cambridge University Press, 2020), and published empirically-informed philosophy of science, religion, and art.
Helen De Cruz is holder of the Danforth Chair in the Humanities at Saint Louis University, Missouri, US. Her publications are in empirically-informed philosophy of cognitive science, philosophy of religion, social epistemology, and metaphilosophy. She is author of, recently, Religious Disagreement (Cambridge University Press, 2020), and co-editor of Philosophy through Science Fiction Stories. Exploring the Boundaries of the Possible (Bloomsbury, 2021).
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Empirically Engaged Evolutionary Ethics
Editors: Johan De Smedt, Helen De Cruz
Series Title: Synthese Library
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68802-8
Publisher: Springer Cham
eBook Packages: Religion and Philosophy, Philosophy and Religion (R0)
Copyright Information: Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-68801-1Published: 05 May 2021
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-68804-2Published: 06 May 2022
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-68802-8Published: 04 May 2021
Series ISSN: 0166-6991
Series E-ISSN: 2542-8292
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XI, 223
Number of Illustrations: 7 b/w illustrations
Topics: Moral Philosophy, Evolutionary Biology, Philosophy of Biology