Evolutionary Biology and Ethics

Abstract

In the last chapter an attempt was made to show that Scholastic principles regarding the metaphysics of modality in general and biological possibility in particular can be deployed to help evolutionary biology make good its claim to provide explanations for biological phenomena. In this final chapter I want to consider another aspect of the intelligibility of organisms. The question I have in mind is this: If one knows what possibilities are genuinely open to an organism, can truth-apt determinations be made as to which of these trajectories it would be in the best interests of the organism to realise? Another way of formulating what I take to be essentially the same question is to ask whether biology has anything to contribute to ethics. Can biology be the basis of ethics, as some have supposed? Or is it rather the case that ethics, and moral behaviour generally, are super-biological phenomenon which arrive on the scene when humans somehow rise above their strictly biological nature? These and related questions regarding the relationships that may or may not obtain between biology and ethics have been on the table ever since Darwin’s discussion of the origins of morality in chapter 3 of his Descent of Man. E. O. Wilson put them front and centre again in 1975 in his (in)famous final chapter of Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, and these questions continue to be a source of debate to this day.