The Ethical Project

An ambitious naturalistic account of ethics as a human practice, developed over tens of thousands of years to solve problems of social life. It has three parts. The first is an 'analytical history'. Our ancestors lived in small groups held together by a limited capacity for psychological altruism, and failures of altruism produced tension and conflict. Ethics began, Kitcher argues, when they started to regulate conduct together through shared rules, and it was later elaborated through social life, trade and religion. The second part draws a metaethical view, which he calls pragmatic naturalism, from this history. There are no prior moral truths waiting to be discovered, but there can be ethical progress, understood as the better fulfilment of ethics' functions, and talk of ethical truth is derived from progress rather than the other way round. The third part makes normative proposals, building on John Dewey: the ethical project should be renewed through inclusive conversation among people who engage with one another's needs.

It is one of the most thorough attempts to explain ethics through evolution and history without reducing it to biology, and a serious alternative to both moral realism and relativism.