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Author : Michael Ruse,Robert J. Richards
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 343 pages
File Size : 48,6 Mb
Release : 2017-08-24
Category : History
ISBN : 9781107132955
This book introduces readers to the application of evolutionary ideas to moral thinking and justification, presenting contrasting perspectives on controversial issues.
Author : Paul Lawrence Farber
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 223 pages
File Size : 42,6 Mb
Release : 1994
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780520213692
Evolutionary theory tells us about our biological past; can it also guide us to a moral future? Paul Farber's compelling book describes a century-old philosophical hope held by many biologists, anthropologists, psychologists, and social thinkers: that universal ethical and social imperatives are built into human nature and can be discovered through knowledge of evolutionary theory. Farber describes three upsurges of enthusiasm for evolutionary ethics. The first came in the early years of mid-nineteenth century evolutionary theories; the second in the 1920s and '30s, in the years after the cultural catastrophe of World War I; and the third arrived with the recent grand claims of sociobiology to offer a sound biological basis for a theory of human culture. Unlike many who have written on evolutionary ethics, Farber considers the responses made by philosophers over the years. He maintains that their devastating criticisms have been forgotten—thus the history of evolutionary ethics is essentially one of oft-repeated philosophical mistakes. Historians, scientists, social scientists, and anyone concerned about the elusive basis of selflessness, altruism, and morality will welcome Farber's enlightening book.
Author : Scott M. James
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
Page : 229 pages
File Size : 42,6 Mb
Release : 2010-11-23
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781444329520
Offering the first general introductory text to this subject, the timely Introduction to Evolutionary Ethics reflects the most up-to-date research and current issues being debated in both psychology and philosophy. The book presents students to the areas of cognitive psychology, normative ethics, and metaethics. The first general introduction to evolutionary ethics Provides a comprehensive survey of work in three distinct areas of research: cognitive psychology, normative ethics, and metaethics Presents the most up-to-date research available in both psychology and philosophy Written in an engaging and accessible style for undergraduates and the interested general reader Discusses the evolution of morality, broadening its relevance to those studying psychology
Author : Matthew H. Nitecki,Doris V. Nitecki
Publisher : SUNY Press
Page : 382 pages
File Size : 51,7 Mb
Release : 1993-01-01
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 079141499X
This volume analyzes the biological and philosophical disagreements in evolutionary ethics and points out difficulties with the interpretations. The book is divided into four sections. The first is an historical introduction to the origin of evolutionary ethics, showing how different evolutionary ethics was a hundred years ago, and how distant Huxley is from most of us now. The second section argues for a sociobiological interpretation of evolutionary ethics. The third section presents the view opposite to that of the second section and rejects the sociobiological interpretation. The fourth section deals objectively with many complex and fundamental issues from diverse perspectives.
Author : Johan De Smedt,Helen De Cruz
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 223 pages
File Size : 51,9 Mb
Release : 2021-05-04
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9783030688028
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.
Author : Richard Joyce
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 285 pages
File Size : 49,6 Mb
Release : 2007-08-24
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780262263252
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 from this hypothesis. Might the fact that the human brain has been biologically prepared by natural selection to engage in moral judgment serve in some sense to vindicate this way of thinking—staving off the threat of moral skepticism, or even undergirding some version of moral realism? Or if morality has an adaptive explanation in genetic terms—if it is, as Joyce writes, "just something that helped our ancestors make more babies"—might such an explanation actually undermine morality's central role in our lives? He carefully examines both the evolutionary "vindication of morality" and the evolutionary "debunking of morality," considering the skeptical view more seriously than have others who have treated the subject. Interdisciplinary and combining the latest results from the empirical sciences with philosophical discussion, The Evolution of Morality is one of the few books in this area written from the perspective of moral philosophy. Concise and without technical jargon, the arguments are rigorous but accessible to readers from different academic backgrounds. Joyce discusses complex issues in plain language while advocating subtle and sometimes radical views. The Evolution of Morality lays the philosophical foundations for further research into the biological understanding of human morality.
Author : Michael Stingl,John Collier
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 276 pages
File Size : 44,5 Mb
Release : 2019-11-25
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781000761108
Against standard approaches to evolution and ethics, this book develops the idea that moral values may find their origin in regularly recurring features in the cooperative environments of species of organisms that are social and intelligent. Across a wide range of species that are social and intelligent, possibilities arise for helping others, responding empathetically to the needs of others, and playing fairly. The book identifies these underlying environmental regularities as biological natural kinds and as natural moral values. As natural kinds, moral values help to provide more complete explanations for the selection of traits that arise in response to them. For example, helping in an aquatic environment is quite different than helping in an arboreal environment, and so we can expect the selection of traits for helping to reflect these underlying environmental differences. With the human ability to name, talk, and reason about important features of our environment, moral values become part of moral discourse and argument, helping to produce coherent systems of moral thought. Combining a naturalistic approach to morality with an equal emphasis on moral argument and truth, this book will be of interest to philosophers and historians of biology, theoretical biologists, comparative psychologists, and moral philosophers.
Author : Neil Levy
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 382 pages
File Size : 51,9 Mb
Release : 2019-06-12
Category : Ethics, Evolutionary
ISBN : 1138378488
Might human morality be a product of evolution? An increasing number of philosophers and scientists believe that moral judgment and behaviour emerged because it enhanced the fitness of our distant ancestors. This volume collects some recent explorations of the evidence for this claim, as well as papers examining its implications. Is an evolved morality a genuine morality? Does an evolutionary origin deflate the pretensions of morality, or strip it of its force in guiding behaviour? Is an evolutionary approach compatible with realism about morality? All sides of these debates are represented in this volume.
Author : Paul Thompson
Publisher : SUNY Press
Page : 464 pages
File Size : 52,7 Mb
Release : 1995-01-13
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 0791420280
This book explores historical and current discussions of the relevance of evolutionary theory to ethics. The historical section conveys the intellectual struggle that took place within the framework of Darwinism from its inception up to the work of G. C. Williams, W. D. Hamilton, R. D. Alexander, A. L. Trivers, E. O. Wilson, R. Dawkins, and others. The contemporary section discusses ethics within the framework of evolutionary theory as enriched by the works of biologists such as those mentioned above. The issue of whether ethical practice and ethical theory can be grounded in the theory of evolution has taken a new and significant direction within the context of sociobiology and is proving to be a challenge to previous thinking. This book conveys that challenge.
Author : Matthew H. Nitecki,Doris V. Nitecki
Publisher : SUNY Press
Page : 382 pages
File Size : 44,5 Mb
Release : 1993-07-16
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 0791415007
This volume analyzes the biological and philosophical disagreements in evolutionary ethics and points out difficulties with the interpretations. The book is divided into four sections. The first is an historical introduction to the origin of evolutionary ethics, showing how different evolutionary ethics was a hundred years ago, and how distant Huxley is from most of us now. The second section argues for a sociobiological interpretation of evolutionary ethics. The third section presents the view opposite to that of the second section and rejects the sociobiological interpretation. The fourth section deals objectively with many complex and fundamental issues from diverse perspectives.
Author : Giovanni Boniolo,Gabriele De Anna
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 189 pages
File Size : 43,9 Mb
Release : 2006-07-03
Category : Science
ISBN : 9781139458412
How can the discoveries made in the biological sciences play a role in a discussion on the foundation of ethics? This book responds to this question by examining how evolutionism can explain and justify the existence of ethical normativity and the emergence of particular moral systems. Written by a team of philosophers and scientists, the essays collected in this volume deal with the limits of evolutionary explanations, the justifications of ethics, and methodological issues concerning evolutionary accounts of ethics, among other topics. They offer deep insights into the origin and purpose of human moral capacities and of moral systems.
Author : Philip Clayton,Jeffrey Schloss
Publisher : Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
Page : 354 pages
File Size : 50,6 Mb
Release : 2004-08-04
Category : Medical
ISBN : 0802826954
Certain to engage scholars, students, and general readers alike, Evolution and Ethics offers a balanced, levelheaded, constructive approach to an often divisive debate.
Author : Neil Levy
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 382 pages
File Size : 55,6 Mb
Release : 2017-03-02
Category : Science
ISBN : 9781351938020
Might human morality be a product of evolution? An increasing number of philosophers and scientists believe that moral judgment and behaviour emerged because it enhanced the fitness of our distant ancestors. This volume collects some recent explorations of the evidence for this claim, as well as papers examining its implications. Is an evolved morality a genuine morality? Does an evolutionary origin deflate the pretensions of morality, or strip it of its force in guiding behaviour? Is an evolutionary approach compatible with realism about morality? All sides of these debates are represented in this volume.
Author : Paul Lawrence Farber
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 228 pages
File Size : 44,5 Mb
Release : 1994-10-11
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 052092097X
Evolutionary theory tells us about our biological past; can it also guide us to a moral future? Paul Farber's compelling book describes a century-old philosophical hope held by many biologists, anthropologists, psychologists, and social thinkers: that universal ethical and social imperatives are built into human nature and can be discovered through knowledge of evolutionary theory. Farber describes three upsurges of enthusiasm for evolutionary ethics. The first came in the early years of mid-nineteenth century evolutionary theories; the second in the 1920s and '30s, in the years after the cultural catastrophe of World War I; and the third arrived with the recent grand claims of sociobiology to offer a sound biological basis for a theory of human culture. Unlike many who have written on evolutionary ethics, Farber considers the responses made by philosophers over the years. He maintains that their devastating criticisms have been forgotten—thus the history of evolutionary ethics is essentially one of oft-repeated philosophical mistakes. Historians, scientists, social scientists, and anyone concerned about the elusive basis of selflessness, altruism, and morality will welcome Farber's enlightening book.
Author : R. Weikart
Publisher : Springer
Page : 312 pages
File Size : 44,8 Mb
Release : 2016-09-27
Category : History
ISBN : 9781137109866
In this work, Richard Weikart explains the revolutionary impact Darwinism had on ethics and morality. He demonstrates that many leading Darwinian biologists and social thinkers in Germany believed that Darwinism overturned traditional Judeo-Christian and Enlightenment ethics, especially the view that human life is sacred. Many of these thinkers supported moral relativism, yet simultaneously exalted evolutionary 'fitness' (especially intelligence and health) to the highest arbiter of morality. Darwinism played a key role in the rise not only of eugenics, but also euthanasia, infanticide, abortion and racial extermination. This was especially important in Germany, since Hitler built his view of ethics on Darwinian principles, not on nihilism.