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Is evolution compatible with objective morality?

Emeka Nwosu Contributor
· 3 replies
Biology & evolutionAnalytic#evolutionary-ethics#moral-realism
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Darwin argued in The Descent of Man (1871) that our moral sense evolved from social instincts. Sharon Street, in "A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value" (2006), turned this into a challenge for moral realism: evolution shaped our moral judgments to promote survival and reproduction, not to track objective moral truths. So either there's no connection between our judgments and the moral truths (and our moral knowledge is a lucky accident), or the realist must explain the connection.

As a physicist, I'm used to thinking our senses evolved but still track reality. Why can't our moral sense do the same?

3 answers

  1. Tomasz Wójcik

    Fellow

    The disanalogy Street stresses: our senses track physical facts because tracking them helped survival. Moral facts, if they're non-natural, have no causal influence on survival. So there's no reason selection would make our moral judgments track them.

    Helpful · 1
  2. Omar Farouk

    Contributor

    Religious traditions have an answer: God could have created the evolutionary process so that it yields a moral sense that tracks moral truth. That's not science, but it's a coherent answer to the dilemma. The difficulty is for secular realists.

    Helpful · 2
  3. Priya Raghavan

    Contributor

    Some realists, like Parfit, argued that our capacity for reasoning, which evolution gave us for other purposes, can grasp moral truths, just as it grasps mathematics. Evolution gave us general intelligence; we use it to discover things evolution never "intended".

    Helpful · 3

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