Abstract
The programme aims at investigating the philosophical implications of recent empirical research on the evolutionary origin of human morality. Since Charles Darwin in his Descent of Man (1871) sketched an evolutionary explanation of what he called our "moral sense", ever-new insights concerning the evolution of human morality have been gained by various scientific and scholarly disciplines, such as evolutionary biology, comparative behavioural biology, cultural anthropology, history, and, according to some, functional neuro-imagining studies of moral decision-making. This quickly developing field of interdisciplinary research raises four philosophical (conceptual, non-empirical) questions concerning the implications of evolutionary explanations for normative ethics and meta-ethics. The programme is original in that it combines projects on each of these interrelated questions, and applies a novel mixture of methods. The four questions are the following: (1) Are there conceptual and epistemological limits to possible evolutionary explanations of human morality? (2) What are the implications of such evolutionary explanations, if any, for normative ethics? (3) Which repercussions do evolutionary explanations of human morality have for meta-ethics? For example, assuming that those explanations are correct, do they exclude so-called moral realism, the view that moral judgements are true or false independently of our moral inclinations? (4) What is a plausible epistemological model for the justification of normative moral judgements in cases of ethical disagreement, if quite some of our moral intuitions can be explained by evolutionary hypotheses, so that they are "contingent"? Each of these philosophical questions is a topic of heated scholarly debates. But their interrelations are insufficiently appreciated. By integrating the four problems in one interdisciplinary research programme, new solutions to each of them and an overall view will be developed.