engleski

Morality as a Biological Trait

Evolutionary explanations of morality usually run into two classes of objections. According to the first class of objections, attempts to explain morality in biological terms are unfounded because morality is obviously not a biological trait and as such does not lend itself to evolutionary explanations. According to the second class of objections, morality is a biological trait, but only in a trivial and scientifically uninteresting sense of the word. The central objective of the paper is to show that both classes of objections are wrong. In the first part of the paper it is shown that morality satisfies some of the most central criteria for biological traits (like species typicality, developmental stability, non-malleability and genetic background). In the second part of the paper it is argued that biological status of morality can be traced by focusing on design constraints it shares with various forms of altruism in other species.

Morality; biological traits; altruism; design constraints

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