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 support...
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.
作者简介
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Richard Joyce is a Research Fellow in the Philosophy Program at the Research School of the Social Sciences at the Australian National University. He is the author of The Myth of Morality.
(i) Evolutionary psychology does not claim that observable human behavior is adaptive, but rather that it is produced by psychological mechanisms that are adaptations. The output of an adaptation need not be adaptive.
(ii) Nor does evolutionary psychology imply that an adaptation must result in cross-cultural universals in human behavior. The evolved mechanisms may be designed to be environmentally sensitive, may operate unexpectedly in unanticipated environments, or may not develop at all if not properly triggered. It is only in the absence of such defeaters that cross-culturality might be expected. This noted, cross-culturality can be offered as evidence of innateness in the absence of any better hypothesis indicating a universally present exogenous explanans.
(iii) Though preserving ... (查看原文)
But let’s put into the midst of this population a few helpful individuals. In performing helpful behaviors toward non-kin, helpers lower their own reproductive capacity. Let’s say that they sacrifice 9 percent of their reproductive capacity in order to help 10 of their comrades get a boost of 0.4—that distribution of benefits being uniform and undiscriminating of whether the recipient is helper or non-helper. If we put 10 such characters into the mix, then 100 individuals will get their capacity boosted by 0.4. And since the distribution is uniform, five of those 100 will be helpers. We end up with the following spread of reproductive capacities in our population: five helpers with a reproductive rate of 1.4, five with a rate of 1.0, 95 unhelpful individuals with a rate of 1.5, and 95 on t... (查看原文)
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1 有用 堕落的爱德华 2020-11-30 20:25:46
ch6 Error Theory—Evolutionary Debunking Argument—Fictionalism 封面不错！
1 有用 堕落的爱德华 2020-11-30 20:25:46
ch6 Error Theory—Evolutionary Debunking Argument—Fictionalism 封面不错！