Four principal papers and a total of 43 peer commentaries on the evolutionary origins of morality. To what extent is human morality the outcome of a continuous development from motives, emotions and social behaviour found in nonhuman animals? Jerome Kagan, Hans Kummer, Peter Railton and others discuss the first principal paper by primatologists Jessica Flack and Frans de Waal. The second paper, by cultural anthropologist Christopher Boehm, synthesizes social science and biological evidence to support his theory of how our hominid (...) ancestors became moral. In the third paper philosopher Elliott Sober and evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson argue that an evolutionary understanding of human nature allows sacrifice for others and ultimate desires for another's good. Finally Brian Skyrms argues that game theory based on adaptive dynamics must join the social scientist's use of rational choice and classical game theory to explain cooperation. (shrink)

Pleasure, in the inclusive usages most important in moral psychology, ethical theory, and the studies of mind, includes all joy and gladness — all our feeling good, or happy. It is often contrasted with similarly inclusive pain, or suffering, which is similarly thought of as including all our feeling bad. Contemporary psychology similarly distinguishes between positive affect and negative affect.[1..

Depue & Morrone-Strupinsky's (D&M-S's) language suggests that, unlike Kent Berridge, they may allow that the activity of a largely subcortical system, which is presumably often introspectively and cognitively inaccessible, constitutes affectively felt experience even when so. Such experience would then be phenomenally conscious without being reflexively conscious or cognitively access-conscious, to use distinctions formulated by the philosopher Ned Block.

One can share Block's aim of distinguishing “phenomenal” experience from cognitive function and agree with much in his views, yet hold that the inclusion of representational content within phenomenal content, if only in certain spatial cases, obscures this distinction. It may also exclude some modular theories, although it is interestingly suggestive of what may be the limits of the phenomenal penetration of the representational mind.

Interpreting VTA dopamine activity as a facilitator of affective engagement fits Depue & Collins's agency dimension of extraverted personality and also Watson's and Tellegen's (1985) engagement dimension of state mood. Serotonin, by turning down the gain on dopaminergic affective engagement, would permit already prepotent responses or habits to prevail against the behavior-switching incentive-simulation-driven temptations of the moment facilitated by fickle VTA DA. Intelligent switching between openly responsive affective engagement and constraint by long-term plans, goals, or values presumably involves environment-sensitive balancing (...) of these neuromodulators, such as socially dominant primates may show. (shrink)

Rolls's preliminary definitions of emotion and speculative restriction of consciousness, including emotional sentience, to humans, display behaviorist prejudice. Reinforcement and causation are not by themselves sufficient conceptual resources to define either emotion or the directedness of thought and motivated action. For any adequate definition of emotion or delimitation of consciousness, new physiology, such as Rolls is contributing to, and also the resources of other fields, will be required.

Human emotional experience is organized at multiple levels, only some of which are easily penetrable by or dependent on language. Affects connected with mammalian parental care seem involved in Anna Wierzbicka's example of the experience of Jesus in Gethsemane. However, such affects are not characterizable as she requires, using only NSM's short list of linguistic semantic universals. Following her methodology, even using an enriched NSM really exhaustive of linguistic semantic universals, may involve serious losses of cognitive opportunity. Specifically, it forecloses (...) any possibility of linking language with other cognitive resources to construct novel concepts, as may be needed to understand the deep biologically-based structure of emotion—which, after all, goes far deeper in us than language does. (shrink)

Editorial Introduction to ‘Evolutionary Origins of Morality: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives’. The four principal papers presented here, with interdisciplinary commentary discussion and their authors’ responses, represent contemporary approaches to an evolutionary understanding of morality -- of the origins from which, and the paths by which, aspects or components of human morality evolved and converged. Their authors come out of no single discipline or school, but represent rather a convergence of largely independent work in primate ethology, anthropology, evolutionary biology, and dynamic systems modelling (...) on related problems, conjectures and tentative conclusions. In inviting contributions I deliberately made no attempt to define morality more sharply than common language and understanding have left it, including our ordinary responses to right and wrong, but not all of the very diverse thinking about this and other practical concerns -- and about what we should make of all these -- that ethics encompasses. This was not because of any lack of past definitions of morality, but because the history of controversy over these makes it advisable not to prejudge the question pending our inquiry's results. From these we may see some outlines of plausible answers begin to emerge, only a brief sketch of some of which I can attempt here, sampling the hypotheses, scientific support, critical discussion of this, and refinement of positions in authors’ responses. (shrink)

This article offers a novel reconstruction of Foucault’s methodology that emphasises his respect for the natural sciences. Foucault’s work has long been suspected of reducing knowledge to power, and thus collapsing into unconstrained relativism and methodological incoherence. These concerns are predicated on a misunderstanding of Foucault’s overall approach, which takes the form of a historico-critical project rather than a normative epistemology. However, Foucault does sometimes make normative epistemological judgements, especially about the human sciences. Furthermore, there are outstanding questions about what (...) secures the descriptive rigour of the genealogical method. To address these issues, I develop two claims that will significantly enrich our understanding of Foucault’s methodology. The first is that Foucault’s respect for the natural sciences is crucial in making sense of his normative epistemological judgements. The second is that the descriptive rigour of his genealogical method derives from the fact it is modelled on empirical inquiry. (shrink)

The fact of evil has worried theists for a long time. The earliest clear statement of this worry is perhaps to be found in the book of Habbakuk: (i, 13). More precisely formulated, it comes to this: if God is good and omnipotent, why evil ? From his goodness it would follow necessarily that he does not will evil and from his omnipotence that he could prevent it; why then should it occur? Theists have attempted to escape from this dilemma (...) by means of an argument which turns on the claim that human beings are, to some degree at any rate, free to choose and act as they will. They are free to do good or evil; frequently they choose the latter and that is why evils, or at least many of them, occur. This human freedom, however, is a necessary condition of personality and, as such, a great good; so it is perfectly consistent with the goodness of God that he should will it. But what of his omnipotence? The point of the argument is that God has to allow those evils which result from men making evil choices, and this certainlylooks, at first blush, like a limitation of his power. But, we are assured,it is not really a limitation because all it amounts to is that God cannot do the logically impossible, viz., make beings who, at one and the same time, are both free to do what they will and pre-determined to do good.To deny that God can do the logically impossible, of course, is not to den his omnipotence; it is merely to point out that there are some things which it would not make sense to say that he had done. (shrink)