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.
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