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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.

This chapter begins by surveying the naturalistic fallacy's philosophical landscape and some of the scientific literature on the evolution of morality. It then proposes a set of principles that legal decision-makers might use to determine what to do, if anything, when our moral intuitions conflict with existing legal doctrine. It concludes by applying those principles to the felony murder rule, arguing that the broadest Anglo-American forms of that rule are dissonant with our intuitions of moral blameworthiness and should be abolished.

Considers, first, why the programme of evolutionary psychology appears to have such appeal, despite its epistemological weakness. Answers to this question include a commitment to an ill‐conceived unity of science, a reluctance to accept irreducible contingency, and the rewards that accrue to advocates of even excessively ambitious projects. A final section argues that, contrary to the claims of its adherents, often based on appeals to the naturalistic fallacy, evolutionary psychology has significant political consequences, often of a harmful kind. The impossibility of a rigid fact/value distinction is illustrated with respect to evolutionary psychological theories of rape.

The examination of Aristotle’s conception of nature in his practical works attempts to face some charges, which seem to undermine the normativity of Aristotle’s ethical and political theory and thus the very attempt to attribute a theory of political obligation to him. These charges, which basically come down to numerous variations on the theme of the naturalistic fallacy, derive essentially from a misunderstanding of Aristotle’s handling of the connection between well-being and human nature—especially his discussion of the human function and the theses that human beings are political by nature, that the polis exists by nature, and that the polis is naturally prior to its members. This chapter argues that Aristotle’s ethical and political naturalism is built upon a normatively safe foundation. Whereas Aristotle’s ethical naturalism is examined against the background of Kantian morality, his political naturalism is discussed vis-à-vis Hobbesian contractarianism.

Considers another popular way of evading the force of Hume's argument, Naturalism. According to this doctrine, Hume merely shows why we must give up trying to find top–down justifications for our scientific procedures. Instead, we should use scientific procedures to investigate ways of acquiring knowledge. Naturalism is closely related to Reliabilism, like it claiming that the ordinary canons of evidence are all we need to underwrite the reliability of ordinary inductive procedures. These claims are investigated and shown to rest on a version of the Naturalistic Fallacy.

Two highly developed transcendental arguments exist in the current ethical and meta-ethical debates about moral realism and moral judgements. Karl-Otto Apel has developed what is known as an ‘argument from discourse’, while Alan Gewirth has suggested an ‘argument from agency’. This chapter analyses Apel's account and a similar account by Wolfgang Kuhlmann to justify ethics. Both understand truth as a consensus and, consequently, reason as a form of discourse. Their central argument is that to reason at all everyone (including the sceptic) must accept the rules and principles which are required for any discourse to be rational. Both Apel and Kuhlmann demonstrate very clearly the manner in which their argument is supposed to escape the naturalistic fallacy. However, Apel and Kuhlmann cannot show that every reasoner necessarily anticipates a universal discourse community in his reasoning. This chapter discusses moral realism and the argument from discourse, how the argument from discourse answers the naturalistic-fallacy objection, restricted and unrestricted normative judgements, and what moral realism must achieve.

This chapter responds to J. L. Mackie’s challenge to show just what there is in reality that supports claims about what is valuable and obligatory. It seeks to explain the relationship between a moral fact and a non-moral one and to consider the charge that perfectionism of any form commits the so-called naturalistic fallacy. In so doing, five ways of understanding the supposed gap between what is and what is valuable—that is, the ontological, logical, semantic, epistemological, and motivational gaps—are considered (along with some of the views of David Hume, G. E. Moore, Simon Blackburn, and Stephen Darwall). It is argued that individualistic perfectionism, which is grounded in a life-based, non-reductionist naturalistic account of teleology (which is in certain ways like that of Philippa Foot’s), does not commit any fallacy and that it can meet Mackie’s challenge.

The late philosopher James Rachels argued in a famous paper that there is essentially no moral difference between terminating treatment on a dying patient and directly killing that patient by, say, a lethal injection. That argument was widely accepted by moral philosophers but rejected by most physicians. The physicians are right. What Rachels did not note was the way over time medicine came to develop moral rules for the care of the dying. Those rules served to shape the practice of physicians, who in the end are helpless in the face of the fact that all patients eventually die. A physician who stops useless life-sustaining treatment of the dying is not responsible for the patient’s death; the underlying lethal disease is. Analogously, we would not say that a person who stopped shoveling a driveway in the face of an overpowering blizzard is responsible for the snow eventually filling that driveway. A failure to see the force of socially constructed moral rules leads to the fallacy of deriving an “is” from an “ought,” as if those rules were themselves facts.

This chapter discusses the function of natural law as a dimension of the anthropological foundation of canon law. It focuses on the so-called new natural law theory, which has been developed by, inter alia, Germain Grisez, John Finnis, and Robert George. The discussion concerns the following: human nature as the foundation of law, the naturalistic fallacy, and the response of the new natural law theorists; the role of natural law in shaping the fundamental law of the church; and the relation between the natural and theological foundations of natural law.

This chapter shows how the main principle points the way to a solution to the two deepest mysteries in moral philosophy, one metaphysical and one epistemological. The metaphysical mystery is to explain why moral norms and principles always seem to have exceptions. The epistemological mystery is to explain how human beings could come to recognize exceptions to the very moral norms and principles that were used in their moral training. The solution to the metaphysical mystery is to see that moral reasoning has a reference class logic, modeled by conditional probability. The solution to the epistemological mystery is to see that moral training can produce practical wisdom, understood as implicit sensitivity to the main principle. The chapter also reviews the historical discovery of the paradox of direct consequentialism to explain why the main principle does not endorse a change to using it as a ground-level moral principle. The chapter then compares the book's account of legal improvement with R. Dworkin’s account of law as integrity on the issue of retroactivity in the civil law.

Logic and probability theory have been the traditional arbiters of the normative question of how to make good decisions, while psychology has been relegated to studying the descriptive question of how people do make decisions. This chapter argues instead for the normative study of heuristics in terms of their ecological rationality—their fit to particular environments—alongside the descriptive study of the mind’s adaptive toolbox of decision mechanisms in terms of process models rather than as-if optimizing models. In most real-world problems, optimization, the traditional normative standard, is not possible or feasible, so agents must choose a decision tool that will do well enough in the current environment compared to other available tools—satisficing, rather than optimizing. The study of heuristics can be normative through answering questions about what particular heuristic one should use to succeed in a given environment by exploiting the information structure available there.

Sociology and social-cultural anthropology have trailed other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences in engaging with the evolution revolution. This is in part because of the horrific misuse in the past of Darwinian theories; in part because of an adherence to a Cartesian folk psychology in which body but not mind can be produced by evolution; and in part because of a misunderstanding of Durkheimian views of psychology and biology. The vertical-compatible approach makes it clear that evolutionary and social science accounts, being at different levels of organization, can never be in competition with one another. An evolutionary perspective is not the antithesis of social constructionism but, in fact, requires it and easily accommodates the frequent maladaptations found in social behavior. An evolutionary praxis can explain why, to the dismay of “moral mission” social scientists, yesterday's good guys are so often today's bad guys.

Is addiction a disease, or simply a product of a bad character or a weak will? What about obesity? Questions like these are not only empirical disagreements over whether a human category or behavior is a natural kind. They are questions that become central to contemporary social morality for they frame negotiations over which behaviors and traits are appropriate targets of retributive attitudes, responsibility judgments, and other moral assessments. Mallon argues that we can illuminate moral concern with human category representations by appreciating that representing a human category C as natural reduces attributions of moral responsibility (or related moral evaluations) for instances of C, or for behaviors that are represented as natural consequences of instantiating C. He suggests that evolutionary psychological opponents have misunderstood such moral concern, and that such concern remains even when the representations in question are true.

Can values be reduced to facts about nature? There are different forms of ethical naturalism: conceptual naturalism (that value‐terms are definable in natural terms, a view that G.E. Moore famously denounced as ‘the naturalistic fallacy’) and substantive naturalism (that certain matters of value in effect come down to certain matters about the natural world). Both these forms of naturalism bring us up against the fuzziness of the notion of the ‘natural’. In this connection, the chapter considers whether values supervene on natural properties, and ends with doubts that they do. The chapter then proposes a third form of naturalism: expansive naturalism, in which the boundaries of the ‘natural’ are pushed outward a bit, in a duly motivated way, with the effect that they now encompass basic human interests and so prudential values.

This chapter examines Darwin’s account of the origins of human morality in The Descent of Man and explores its challenging implications for ideas of inviolable human dignity. The early romance between Darwinians and utilitarians was foiled by what has come to be known as Hume’s Law or the naturalistic fallacy. An equally compelling vision of morality based upon sociobiological and evolutionary concepts therefore emerges in Nietzsche’s writings. Some evolutionary theorists have sought to avoid these corrosive implications of natural selection for questions of morality and ethics by resorting to a fact-meaning dichotomy in their epistemology. But it is an untenable dichotomy that rapidly breaks down under scrutiny, raising the question: Is the theory of natural selection adequate to explain all that Darwin believed it could explain? If not, how might we approach questions of human nature and origins in a way that is at once non-reductive, truly humanistic, and truly scientific?