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Normative evolutionary ethics is the most controversial branch of evolutionary ethics. Normative evolutionary ethics aims at defining which acts are right or wrong, and which things are good or bad, in evolutionary terms. It is not merely describing, but it is prescribing goals, values and obligations.
Some evolutionary biologists and game theorists argue that since gradual evolutionary models of morality require incremental evolution of altruism in populations where egoism and cruelty initially reigned, any sense of occasional altruism otherwise egoistic and cruel individuals being worse than consistent cruelty would have made evolution of ...
The Moral Animal was a national bestseller and has been published in 12 languages; The New York Times Book Review chose it as one of its eleven Best Books of 1994. [1] The linguist Steven Pinker praised The Moral Animal as a "fiercely intelligent, beautifully written and engrossingly original book" but "found his [Wright's] larger ethical arguments problematic."
In the 20th century, evolutionary science underwent the modern evolutionary synthesis, and in the 21st century is undergoing the extended evolutionary synthesis. Social Spencerism was a misapplication of Darwin's ideas resulting from Spencer's problematic ethics.
An evolutionary debunking, sometimes referred to as an evolutionary debunking argument or evolutionary debunking thesis, is a philosophical argument which holds that, because humans (like all organisms) have an evolutionary origin, the principles of ethics and morality that we have devised are invalid and cannot be considered objective knowledge.
Evolutionary ethics, a closely related field, explores how evolutionary processes have shaped ethics. One of its key ideas is that natural selection is responsible for moral behavior and moral sensitivity. It interprets morality as an adaptation to evolutionary pressure that augments fitness by offering a selective advantage. [187]
The theory of evolution by natural selection has also been adopted as a foundation for various ethical and social systems, such as social Darwinism, an idea that preceded the publication of The Origin of Species, popular in the 19th century, which holds that "the survival of the fittest" (a phrase coined in 1851 by Herbert Spencer, [1] 8 years before Darwin published his theory of evolution ...
Utilitarian Jeremy Bentham discussed some of the ways moral investigations are a science. [9] He criticized deontological ethics for failing to recognize that it needed to make the same presumptions as his science of morality to really work – whilst pursuing rules that were to be obeyed in every situation (something that worried Bentham).