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Some evolutionary biologists and game theorists argue that since gradual evolutionary models of morality require incremental evolution of altruism in populations where egoism and cruelty initially reigned, any sense of occasional altruism otherwise egoistic and cruel individuals being worse than consistent cruelty would have made evolution of ...
Normative (or prescriptive) evolutionary ethics, by contrast, seeks not to explain moral behavior, but to justify or debunk certain normative ethical theories or claims. For instance, some proponents of normative evolutionary ethics have argued that evolutionary theory undermines certain widely held views of humans' moral superiority over other ...
The theory of evolution by natural selection has also been adopted as a foundation for various ethical and social systems, such as social Darwinism, an idea that preceded the publication of The Origin of Species, popular in the 19th century, which holds that "the survival of the fittest" (a phrase coined in 1851 by Herbert Spencer, [1] 8 years before Darwin published his theory of evolution ...
An evolutionary debunking, sometimes referred to as an evolutionary debunking argument or evolutionary debunking thesis, is a philosophical argument which holds that, because humans (like all organisms) have an evolutionary origin, the principles of ethics and morality that we have devised are invalid and cannot be considered objective knowledge.
Darwin suggests sympathy is at the core of sociability and is an instinctive emotion found in most social animals.The ability to recognize and act upon others' distress or danger, is a suggestive evidence of instinctive sympathy; common mutual services found among many social animals, such as hunting and travelling in groups, warning others of danger and mutually defending one another, are ...
The Elements of Moral Philosophy is a 1986 ethics textbook by the philosophers James Rachels and Stuart Rachels. [1] It explains a number of moral theories and topics, including cultural relativism, subjectivism, divine command theory, ethical egoism, social contract theory, utilitarianism, Kantian ethics, and deontology. The book uses real ...
Sociology of morality is the branch of sociology that deals with the sociological investigation of the nature, causes, and consequences of people's ideas about morality. ...
Statements of value (normative or prescriptive statements), which encompass ethics and aesthetics, and are studied via axiology. This barrier between fact and value, as construed in epistemology, implies it is impossible to derive ethical claims from factual arguments, or to defend the former using the latter.