Carl’s Reviews > The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress > Status Update

First book of 2025 conquered. In, The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution and Moral Progress, Singer engages with the view espoused by scientists such as E.O. Wilson in the 1970s and Robert Sapolsky today that as science continues to explain human behavior, we will soon have no need for concepts such as free will or prescriptive moral reasoning. He forcefully defends the idea that values cannot be inferred from facts

Chapter 5: Reason and Genes. Singer attempts to reconcile altruism for those beyond self and kin with theories of evolution which suggest such has no evolutionary value or purpose by suggesting such impartial altruism is the end result of reason, and that it has flourished because the advanced reasoning capabilities it requires are useful in other domains of evolutionary competition.

Singer discusses implications for ethical philosophy of ideas in the scientist E.O. Wilson's books Sociobiology and On Human Nature. Singer's conclusion is that while science can supply information relevant to making ethical judgments, it cannot replace or supplant the work of philosophy in thinking about how we should or ought to go about making those judgments.