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This chapter presents an overview of the book. It argues that the metaphysical approach to ethics is a failure and that the time has come to take a scientific view of morality. A social contract is taken to be the set of common understandings that allow the citizens of a society to coordinate. Such social contracts are seen as the product of biological and cultural evolution. To survive, a social contract must therefore be an equilibrium in the repeated game of life played by a society. Since the folk theorem of repeated game theory says that there are large numbers of such equilibria, fairness norms then become explicable as an equilibrium selection device that selects one of the many efficient equilibria of a society's game of life. It is suggested that the deep structure of such fairness norms is captured by John Rawls' notion of the original position, and is therefore universal in the human species. On the other hand, the standard of interpersonal comparison needed as an input to the original position is culturally determined.

As a student of William Morton Wheeler, Kinsey made his first contributions to biology, and adapted the taxonomic methods he had used in research on gall wasps to the study of human sexuality. The research for which he is famous was fueled not just by scientific curiosity, but also by a conviction that a scientific understanding of the varieties of sexual behavior should have an impact on the value judgments society makes about sexuality. He was less successful in this enterprise, in part because he may not have understood the logical and philosophical difficulties, such as those involving the naturalistic fallacy and the argument de animalibus, that beset any attempt to devise an evolutionary ethics.

Friedrich Nietzsche's ethical theory has two components: one negative, the other positive. The negative component is his genealogical program. Its primary function is critical and destructive. Nietzsche wanted to undermine deeply held values by exposing their sordid history and base underlying motives. The positive component is captured in Nietzsche's myth of the "bermensch — a being who is capable of living in a world beyond the good and evil dichotomy of contemporary morality. The theme of natural values appears inOn the Genealogy of Morals, where Nietzsche claims that our current values are reactive, or reactionary. This chapter concedes that we are biologically prone to have certain kinds of values, but rejects the notion that there is an innate morality. It also argues that our biological predispositions do not qualify as moral rules without cultural elaboration. Morality is artificial all the way down, and 'evolutionary ethics" is a myth.

This chapter seeks to clarify the meaning of the claim that human morality is innate. It argues that if human morality is indeed innate, an explanation may be provided that does not resort to an appeal to group selection, but invokes only individual selection and so-called “reciprocal altruism” in particular. It is hypothesized that “moralizing” one's deliberations (e.g., thinking of stealing as forbidden, as opposed merely to feeling disinclined to steal) might make more probable the performance or omission of adaptive actions (e.g., acts of reciprocity) by acting as a bulwark against certain kinds of motivational infirmity, such as weakness of will.

Thanks to the Is-Ought dogma and the tyranny of Logical Positivism, mainstream 20th-century moral philosophers remained militantly ignorant of the twentieth-century science of ethics, except to dismiss sociobiology as politically reactionary. Darwin’s closure of the distance between Homo sapiens and other closely related species was invoked by Peter Singer and James Rachels in service of their animal welfare ethics, but neither paid any attention whatsoever to Darwin’s account of ethics, both insisting, rather, on the distance between autonomous, rational ethics and any scientific account of its evolutionary origins in human emotions. Sentiment-based community-oriented ethics are legitimately and appropriately partial. Group (now multi-level) selection has been rehabilitated in evolutionary moral psychology. The “normative force” of ethics in the Humean-Darwinian tradition is analogous to medical norms. A Humean-Darwinian science of ethics supports constrained cultural relativism, analogous to linguistic pluralism. The current state of the science of ethics fully vindicates Leopold’s land ethic.

This chapter evaluates the extent to which humans meet the criteria of four conceptions of what it means to be moral—conceptions that are defined in terms of good behavior, virtue, moral knowledge or wisdom, and honor and integrity. It is concluded that most people acquire the ability to fulfill all four requirements, but that they are naturally-disposed to do so only in optimal conditions, and that in other conditions, they are naturally-disposed to behave in immoral ways. A sophisticated sense of morality consists more in the flexibility necessary to solve moral problems than in the capacity to engage in highly sophisticated forms of moral reasoning. Cardinal moral principles exhort people to promote their own welfare in ways that promote the welfare of others. With respect to evolutionary ethics, there is no necessary inconsistency between behaving in accordance with utilitarian and deontological moral principles and propagating one’s genes.

Evolutionary ethics or “social Darwinism” is a powerful and wide-ranging doctrine or set of beliefs. In ethics and morality, it is useful to make a twofold distinction between “substantive” or “normative ethics” and “metaethics.” Darwin himself drew attention to the fact that more organisms are born than can possibly survive and reproduce and that this leads to what Darwin called a “struggle for existence.” Humans cooperate for biological ends, namely that they are “altruists” for their own biological ends.

This chapter discusses the history of the long-standing and vexed debate over evolutionary ethics, which is considered an inescapable aspect of any paradigm shift in evolutionary theory. It explains that changes in evolutionary theory have major implications both for our ethics and our understanding of the moral impulses that shape our lives and societies. This chapter suggests that the main theoretical impediment to a robust evolutionary ethics can be removed when Neo-Darwinism is replaced by the more balanced, ecumenical, economically oriented paradigm of Holistic Darwinism. It also provides arguments favoring the proposition that our ethical systems are products of human evolution and are genetically grounded.

Although not destined to produce any new systems of equivalent stature to those of Green, Bradley, or Caird, idealist ethics did not simply cease at the turn of the century. Later idealist thinking on ethical matters is marked by a number of fundamental disagreements and divergences, as the apparent consensus of the latter years of the century began to come apart. This chapter examines debates internal to the Idealist school, such as that between the individualism of McTaggart and the holism of Bosanquet, as well as the way in which Idealism responded to outside theories, such as evolutionary ethics, Nietzsche, Moore, and Intuitionism. The chapter concludes with a consideration of two late systems of Idealist ethics, those of Paton and Joseph, which emerged at a point when idealism is often but erroneously considered a spent force.

From the beginning of his theorizing, Darwin had human beings in mind. He sought to give an account of their, emotional repertoire, linguistic abilities, and high intelligence; he offered ingenious explanations of these traits. The chief human trait of moral capacity did not so easily yield to his analysis. A principle difficult was that natural selection might produce instinctive behaviors that provided benefit to those expressing them, but altruistic behaviors benefited others, not self. Darwin was able to explain the evolution of morality only after he solved a more fundamental problem that arose in the case of the social insects. His solution allowed him to understand how moral behavior might have arisen in proto-human clans. Darwin has provided an explanation of morality that can meet contemporary requirements for normative justification.

Homo sapiens, like any other biological species, arose through the process of evolution. It is natural to suppose, then, that we could appeal to evolution in explaining human nature. Yet the project of grounding human nature in evolutionary theory is generally thought to have failed. After a brief survey of two failed attempts, I argue that one cannot reduce the concept of an organismal nature to evolutionary theory because a proper understanding of evolution presupposes the concept of an organismal nature. I draw on Aristotle’s concept of bios (way of life) as a good candidate for the concept of organismal nature required by evolution. I further argue that the concept of human nature posited by proponents of neo-Aristotelian metaethics is an instance of Aristotelian bios. The upshot is that the concept of human nature is sanctioned by our best evolutionary science but can be given no reductive evolutionary account.

Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer developed their respective evolutionary theories roughly during the same periods, and each was aware of the views of the other. Scholars have typically regarded Spencer as developing his conceptions in an a priori manner, with little regard to empirical evidence. A comparison of the theories of these two naturalists reveals a great deal of accord on major issues, though with decidedly different emphases. Both believed, for instance, that evolutionary theory explained human intellectual and moral capacity. And both endorsed the inheritance of acquired characters and natural selection as causal forces in transmutation, though Spencer emphasized the negative aspect of selection (“survival of the fittest”) while Darwin emphasized the creative aspect. Both Spencer and Darwin were “social Darwinists,” each in his own way. Spencer’s evolutionary Kantianism is a view adopted by many evolutionary psychologists today. Spencer deserves better than he has gotten from scholars.

Suppose we grant that evolutionary forces have had a profound effect on the contours of our normative judgments and intuitions. Can we conclude anything from this about the correct metaethical theory? This chapter argues that, for the most part, we cannot. Focusing attention on Sharon Street’s justly famous argument that the evolutionary origins of our normative judgments and intuitions cause insuperable epistemological difficulties for a metaethical view she calls “normative realism,” the chapter argues that there are two largely independent lines of argument in Street’s work which need to be teased apart. The first of these involves a genuine appeal to evolutionary considerations, but it can fairly easily be met by her opponents. The second line of argument is more troubling; it raises a significant problem, one of the most difficult in all of philosophy, namely how to justify our reliance on our most basic cognitive faculties without relying on those same faculties in a question-begging manner. However, evolutionary considerations add little to this old problem, and rejecting normative realism is not a way to solve it.

This introductory chapter discusses the coverage of this volume which is about the so-called Holistic Darwinism. This volume is divided into four parts. This first deals with the role of synergism in evolutionary theory, the second focuses on bioeconomics, the third addresses the theoretical foundations of evolutionary theory and Holistic Darwinism, and the fourth examines the long-standing and vexed debate over evolutionary ethics. This chapter also discusses criticisms against Neo-Darwinism and the key features of Holistic Darwinism.

In recent years there has been a growing interest among mainstream Anglophone moral philosophers in the empirical study of human morality, including its evolution and historical development. This chapter compares these developments with an earlier point of contact between moral philosophy and the moral sciences in the early decades of the twentieth century, as manifested in some of the less frequently discussed arguments of G. E. Moore and W. D. Ross. It is argued that a critical appreciation of Moore and Ross’s response to the emerging moral sciences of their day has significant implications for contemporary moral epistemology. The chapter also offers a novel interpretation of G. E. Moore’s ‘open question argument’.

This chapter begins with a careful analysis of the language, logic, and phenomenology of moral obligations, including their prescriptive strength, authority, and what Evans calls the “Anscombe intuition.” It then argues that a range of secular ethical theories fail to do justice to such features and thus fall short of providing adequate explanations. Among the secular ethical efforts at explanation considered are various evolutionary ethicists, including Frans de Waal, Cornell realists, and contemporary ethicists like David Enoch, Erik Wielenberg, and Derek Parfit. In each case it’s argued that, despite the insights furnished by such accounts, they fail to do justice to moral obligations, usually by watering down their prescriptive implications.

Wide-ranging debunking arguments aim to support moral skepticism based on empirical evidence (particularly of evolutionary pressures, framing effects, automatic emotional heuristics, and incidental emotions). But such arguments are subject to a debunker’s dilemma: they can identify an influence on moral belief that is either substantial or defective, but not both. When one identifies a genuinely defective influence on a large class of moral beliefs (e.g. framing effects), this influence is insubstantial, failing to render the beliefs unjustified. When one identifies a main basis for belief (e.g. automatic heuristics), the influence is not roundly defective. There is ultimately a trade-off for sweeping debunking arguments in ethics: identifying a substantial influence on moral belief implicates a process that is not genuinely defective. We thus lack empirical reason to believe that moral judgment is fundamentally flawed. Our dual process minds can yield justified moral beliefs despite automatically valuing more than an action’s consequences.