Evolutionary Ethics and Biologically Supportable Morality :: Philosophy Essays

Evolutionary Ethics and Biologically Supportable Morality ABSTRACT: Consider the paradox of altruism: the existence of truly altruistic behaviors is difficult to reconcile with evolutionary theory if natural selection operates only on individuals, since in that case individuals should be unwilling to sacrifice their own fitness for the sake of others. Evolutionists have frequently turned to the hypothesis of group selection to explain the existence of altruism; but group selection cannot explain the evolution of morality, since morality is a one-group phenomenon and group selection is a many-group phenomenon. After spelling out just what the problem is, this paper discusses several ways of solving it. Introduction The term ‘evolutionary ethics’ denotes an approach to naturalistic moral philosophy which seeks to explain how moral traits and behavior evolved. Sophisticated versions of evolutionary ethics do not argue that the moral judgments of each and every individual can be predicted given only the tenets of evolutionary theory. Rather the aim is usually to show that human beings possess moral traits because such traits confer a selective advantage. The motivation for this kind of view lies in a broader naturalism: if moral philosophy is to be founded on a naturalistic understanding of human beings and their place in the world, and if evolutionary theory gives us the best (kind of) account of the natural history of human beings, then moral philosophy will need to be brought in line with (some version of) evolutionary theory. Shaping moral theory so that it is possible to explain the selective advantage of moral traits and behavior is thus the vocation of evolutionary ethics. One of the intriguing problems confronting evolutionary ethics is to solve the apparent paradox of altruism. According to evolutionary theory, natural selection entails that in general only the fittest individuals in any given biological population will survive and reproduce. An organism’s evolutionary telos, or goal, seems to be to promote its own fitness in order to survive long enough to reproduce. In situations where an organism confronts a choice between enhancing its own fitness and enhancing the fitness of others, it would seem to follow that the organism will (or "ought to," or should be expected to) choose to enhance its own fitness. (1) The paradox arises because empirical facts seem to contradict this prediction of evolutionary theory. In a wide range of cases, and among organisms of differing levels of sentience and sapience, individual organisms frequently behave in ways that promote the fitness of some group (especially but not always a kin group) at the expense of their own individual fitness.