Is morality just a matter of cultural convention or are some acts right or wrong regardless of anyone’s opinion? And why should we act morally when we don’t want to? Moral philosophers have recorded their attempts at answering these two … Continue reading
Blog Archives
Moral universals from an evolutionist’s perspective
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Cultural moralities are diverse, contradictory, and even bizarre. Sometimes cultural moral norms forbid eating pigs, cutting one’s hair, or having homosexual sex; sometimes they do not. Women may be morally required to be submissive to men and, at least in … Continue reading
Multilevel or gene level perspectives: Which has the best explanatory power for our moral sense?
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Charles Darwin proposed group selection to explain how “altruistic” behaviors toward others and self-sacrifice for the group, which could easily be taken to be counterexamples to his theory of evolution, might instead be examples of its explanatory power. He observed … Continue reading
A Modest Proposal for Updating the Ten Commandments
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There is a contest, see ReThink Prize, to compose a secular replacement for the Ten Commandments. I like this notion. Secular people seek reliable moral guidance just like religious people do, but perhaps from different sources. Could there actually come … Continue reading
How social morality as natural phenomena is encoded in our biology
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Elsewhere, some have commented that game theory is inappropriate for modeling morality, it was not clear how evolution could have encoded social morality in our biology and cultural moral codes, and it was not clear that the science of morality … Continue reading
Meta-Ethics of social morality reducing to a non-moral object
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For some time I have been describing here how science shows that the function of social morality, the morality of interactions between people, can be reduced to a non-moral object by the normal means of science. Specifically, that function is … Continue reading
What data set is best for testing scientific hypotheses about morality?
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Scientific hypotheses must be tested against data. What data set is appropriate for testing scientific hypotheses about what morality ‘is’? Specifically, what data set describes what people believe about morality? (Note the subject here is what morality ‘is’, a subject … Continue reading
Distinguishing between evolution of morality, morality from evolution, and morality of evolution
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Evolution of morality discussions are sometimes derailed by well-intended objections such as 1) “Science and morality occupy different domains of nonoverlapping magisteria”, (2) “You are committing the elementary logical error of deriving a moral ‘ought’ from what ‘is’”, and 3) … Continue reading
Review of Evolution, Games, and God: The Principle of Cooperation (2013) Edited by Martin A. Nowak and Sarah Coakley
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A more accurate, but less ‘catchy’, main title would have been Evolution, Games, Morality, and the Evolution of Religion. Readers whose main focus is on the evolution of morality and its secular ethical implications, as is mine, can be assured … Continue reading
Plato’s description of the Evolutionary Origins of Morality: Just Substitute Biological and Cultural Evolution for Zeus
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“In Plato’s Protagoras there is an avowedly mythical account (told by the Greek philosopher Protagoras) of how Zeus took pity on the hapless humans, who, living in small groups and with inadequate teeth, weak claws, and lack of speed, were … Continue reading
Science and Morality 