The Evolution of Morality

by Richard Joyce

Moral thinking pervades our practical lives, but where did this way of thinking come from, and what purpose does it serve? Is it to be explained by environmental pressures on our ancestors a million years ago, or is it a cultural invention of more recent origin? In The Evolution of Morality , Richard Joyce takes up these controversial questions, finding that the evidence supports an innate basis to human morality. As a moral philosopher, Joyce is interested in whether any implications follow from this hypothesis. Might the fact that the human brain has been biologically prepared by natural selection to engage in moral judgment serve in some sense to vindicate this way of thinking—staving off the threat of moral skepticism, or even undergirding some version of moral realism? Or if morality has an adaptive explanation in genetic terms—if it is, as Joyce writes, "just something that helped our ancestors make more babies"—might such an explanation actually undermine morality's central role in our lives? He carefully examines both the evolutionary "vindication of morality" and the evolutionary "debunking of morality," considering the skeptical view more seriously than have others who have treated the subject. Interdisciplinary and combining the latest results from the empirical sciences with philosophical discussion, The Evolution of Morality is one of the few books in this area written from the perspective of moral philosophy. Concise and without technical jargon, the arguments are rigorous but accessible to readers from different academic backgrounds. Joyce discusses complex issues in plain language while advocating subtle and sometimes radical views. The Evolution of Morality lays the philosophical foundations for further research into the biological understanding of human morality.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Science, Evolution, Psychology, History, Biology

288 pages, Paperback

First published December 2, 2005

Reviews

[Mohamed Albarqi · Rating 3 out of 5]

للاسف كتاب زي ده لفيلسوف زي ريتشارد جويس مش مترجم و متاح للقاريء العربي،و دي حاجة مؤسفة

بس الكتاب جميل،هو بيحطك قدام جملة فطرية الاخلاق و ينطلق منها الى النقاشات و تفسيرها بالانتخاب الطبيعي.
ثم الجزء التاني للكتاب و اللي لايقل اهمية : وماذا بعد ؟

[Nate · Rating 5 out of 5]

This would be the philosophical companion to Marc Hauser’s *Moral Minds*. Hauser is a psychologist who tries to explain how our moral psychological machinery could be universal. Joyce takes this into account, along with other natural explanations of how we have become moral animals, and provides a cogent argument for moral skepticism. Persuasive and thorough (a lot is packed into 230 pages, yet it doesn't seem dense)—Joyce’s book is an excellent model for philosophical writing.

[Kevin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Joyce's argument, in brief, is that recognizing that our moral sense evolved does NOTHING to show that morality is in any way objective or to show that moral facts are real. In fact, Joyce argues that there is evolutionary reasons to suppose error theory correct, the idea that even though our moral instincts are subjective preferences, there may be evolutionary advantages when organisms experience them as expressing facts about the world. A brilliant analogy Joyce uses is with the way we see color: I see my walls as red, even though the 'redness' is actually not as much in the wall as in the way lightwaves from the wall interact with my eye, and how my eye interprets that qualia. Our senses, for whatever reason, evolved to see the redness 'in' the wall (probably for the sake of simplicity) even though we know the redness is in how we experience the wall. Not that this analogy proves morality to be subjective, but using arguments from fellow error theorists like Mackie (and some of his own), Joyce suggests that error theory is the much more probable result of evolution than any form of moral realism.

[Kaine Ransby · Rating 3 out of 5]

Joyce really presents a book of two halves. While the book on a whole is well structured and informative, I found the first half of the book to be vastly superior to the latter. I could put the book down for the first 100 or so pages, filled with history, psychology, and philosophy. Joyce brings together screeds of knowledge in a digestible (albeit dense) format in a way I have not seen before in philosophical literature.

The latter half I found dry. The density of the text became too much and the ideas presented less interesting. Having been introduced to Joyce’s ideas during my study, I knew what I was in for, and was familiar with many of the arguments presented in the second half.

Joyce presents himself as a “moral error theorist”. While I find these ideas interesting, there ultimately isn’t the “so what?” in the conclusion I was expecting, aside from what amounts to “keep an open mind in regard to your moral beliefs.”

An interesting real and I would recommend to anyone interested in ethics. This is potentially a little too high powered for the casual reader, but undergraduate students or those interested in the topics should find it attainable.

[Paul · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book, like other analytic philosophy, was painful to read at points, but not as bad as some of the philosophy I've read. The book has some useful points in response to a very specific conception of morality. However, I think he gets the evolution of morality wrong. He is waaaay too biased toward the view that reasoning is central for morality (very western analytic philosopher view). He makes too many assumptions about what morality MUST be like for humans. I think he does so because he realized that moral error theory is in jeopardy if he doesn't find a story of how morality originated that makes human verbal reasoning essential. He also assumes that EVERYONE MUST see morality as objective and outside of themselves. There may be many who view it that way, but even if there are kids who do, that doesn't mean we evolved to be that way. For information about origins of morality and a better account of what morality is, I recommend Patricia Churchland's book Conscience: The Origins of Moral Intuition.

[Georgia Bucea]

"If uncomfortable truths are out there, we should seek them and face them like intellectual adults, rather than eschew-ing open-minded inquiry or fabricating philosophical theories whose only virtue is the promise of providing the soothing news that all our heartfelt beliefs are true"

[Zedder · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good read all around.