Evolutionary Ethics

Evolutionary Ethics

ABSTRACT: Michael Ruse has argued that evolutionary ethics discredits the objectivity and foundations of ethics. Ruse must employ dubitable assumptions, however, to reach his conclusion. We can trace these assumptions to G. E. Moore. Also, part of Ruse’s case against the foundations of ethics can support the objectivity and foundations of ethics. Cooperative activity geared toward human flourishing helps point the way to a naturalistic moral realism and not exclusively to ethical skepticism as Ruse supposes.

Introduction: Ruse’s Metaethical Assumptions

Michael Ruse has argued that evolutionary ethics discredits the objectivity and foundations of ethics (Ruse 1991, Ruse 1993). Ruse must employ dubitable assumptions, however, to reach his conclusion. Also, parts of Ruse’s case against the foundations of ethics can support the objectivity and foundations of ethics.

Ruse’s narrow construal of ‘the foundations of ethics’ plays an important role in his arguments against the foundations of ethics. He considers only 3 possible contenders that could serve as foundations for ethics: 1) Moorean non-naturalism, 2) Platonic Forms, and 3) the Divine Command Theory (Ruse 1993: 157). For Ruse, each of the three contenders explains how morality can refer to something "out there"(Ruse 1993: 153, 158). Notice that for Ruse one can only maintain the position of moral realism—the view that at least some moral issues are objective and obtain independently of our moral beliefs—non-naturalistically. His reasoning for this is clear. He points out that Moore’s arguments against the evolutionary ethics of Herbert Spencer turned on the is/ought distinction. According to this distinction, we cannot logically ground ethical statements naturalistically, for one cannot derive ‘ought’ from ‘is’. Moore’s arguments against ethical naturalism—the view that moral claims/facts/judgments are nothing but a special class of natural claims/facts/judgments—help make Moore’s case in favor of non-naturalism. Plato’s non-natural Forms and the commands of a non-natural divinity would also avoid the difficult task of deriving values from natural, physical facts that ethical naturalism faces.

Philosophers (not least of all Ruse) commonly proclaim that Moore’s application of the naturalistic fallacy hinges on the is/ought distinction. For Moore, we cannot derive moral statements from non-moral statements because "‘good’ is indefinable, or, as Prof. Sidgwick says, an ‘unanalysable notion’" (Moore 1903: 17). This would imply of course that any attempt whatsoever to define or analyze a moral term such as ‘good’ in other terms is fallacious. Moore concedes that we can analyze moral words in terms of each other but all reductions of moral terms will ultimately reduce to ‘good’ and ‘bad’.