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Evolutionary Ethics
Evolutionary ethics is a field of inquiry that explores how evolutionary theory might bear on our understanding of ethics or morality. The range of issues investigated by evolutionary ethics is quite broad. Supporters of evolutionary ethics have claimed that it has important implications in the fields of descriptive ethics, normative ethics, and metaethics. Descriptive evolutionary ethics consists of biological approaches to morality based on the alleged role of evolution in shaping human psychology and behavior. Such approaches may be based in scientific fields such as evolutionary psychology, sociobiology, or ethology, and seek to explain certain human moral behaviors, capacities, and tendencies in evolutionary terms. For example, the nearly universal belief that incest is morally wrong might be explained as an evolutionary adaptation that furthered human survival. Normative (or prescriptive) evolutionary ethics, by contrast, seeks not to explain moral behavior, but to justify ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ethics
Ethics or moral philosophy is a branch of philosophy that "involves systematizing, defending, and recommending concepts of right and wrong behavior".''Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy'' The field of ethics, along with aesthetics, concerns matters of value; these fields comprise the branch of philosophy called axiology. Ethics seeks to resolve questions of human morality by defining concepts such as good and evil, right and wrong, virtue and vice, justice and crime. As a field of intellectual inquiry, moral philosophy is related to the fields of moral psychology, descriptive ethics, and value theory. Three major areas of study within ethics recognized today are: # Meta-ethics, concerning the theoretical meaning and reference of moral propositions, and how their truth values (if any) can be determined; # Normative ethics, concerning the practical means of determining a moral course of action; # Applied ethics, concerning what a person is obligated (or permitted) to do ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
William James
William James (January 11, 1842 – August 26, 1910) was an American philosopher, historian, and psychologist, and the first educator to offer a psychology course in the United States. James is considered to be a leading thinker of the late 19th century, one of the most influential philosophers of the United States, and the "Father of American psychology". Along with Charles Sanders Peirce, James established the philosophical school known as pragmatism, and is also cited as one of the founders of functional psychology. A ''Review of General Psychology'' analysis, published in 2002, ranked James as the 14th most eminent psychologist of the 20th century. A survey published in ''American Psychologist'' in 1991 ranked James's reputation in second place, after Wilhelm Wundt, who is widely regarded as the founder of experimental psychology. [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Moral Realism
Moral realism (also ethical realism) is the position that ethical sentences express propositions that refer to objective features of the world (that is, features independent of subjective opinion), some of which may be true to the extent that they report those features accurately. This makes moral realism a non-nihilist form of ethical cognitivism (which accepts that ethical sentences express propositions and can therefore be evaluated as true or false) with an ontological orientation, standing in opposition to all forms of moral anti-realism and moral skepticism, including ethical subjectivism (which denies that moral propositions refer to objective facts), error theory (which denies that any moral propositions are true); and non-cognitivism (which denies that moral sentences express propositions at all). Within moral realism, the two main subdivisions are ethical naturalism and ethical non-naturalism. Many philosophers claim that moral realism may be dated back at least to Plato ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Teleology
Teleology (from and )Partridge, Eric. 1977''Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English'' London: Routledge, p. 4187. or finalityDubray, Charles. 2020 912Teleology" In ''The Catholic Encyclopedia'' 14. New York: Robert Appleton Company. Retrieved 3 May 2020. – via ''New Advent'', transcribed by D. J. Potter is a reason or an explanation for something which serves as a function of its end, its purpose, or its goal, as opposed to something which serves as a function of its cause. A purpose that is imposed by human use, such as the purpose of a fork to hold food, is called ''extrinsic''. ''Natural teleology,'' common in classical philosophy, though controversial today, contends that natural entities also have ''intrinsic'' purposes, regardless of human use or opinion. For instance, Aristotle claimed that an acorn's intrinsic ''telos'' is to become a fully grown oak tree. Though ancient atomists rejected the notion of natural teleology, teleological accounts of non ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sharon Street
Sharon Street (born 1973) is a professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at New York University. She specializes in metaethics, focusing in particular on how to reconcile our understanding of normativity with a scientific conception of the world. Education and career Street received her B.A. from Amherst College in 1995 and her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2003 under the supervision of Christine Korsgaard. Street's doctoral dissertation examined the metaethical implications of evolutionary biological explanations of our normative capacities, and whether such explanations might have an undermining effect on our moral and other normative commitments. Street is currently Professor of Philosophy at New York University. She joined the NYU Philosophy Department in 2002. Philosophical work Street's work has been particularly influential in the fields of metaethics, where she defends a doctrine she calls "Humean Constructivism", a term she uses to different ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Richard Joyce (philosopher)
Richard Joyce (born 1966) is a British-Australian-New Zealand philosopher, known for his contributions to the fields of meta-ethics and moral psychology. He is Professor of Philosophy at Victoria University of Wellington. Background and education Joyce was born in England and raised in New Zealand (and is an Australian citizen). After an initial education at the University of Auckland, he received his PhD from Princeton University in 1998 (studying under Gilbert Harman). After Princeton, he was a lecturer at the University of Sheffield for a few years, and then held research fellowships at the Australian National University and the University of Sydney. He took up his professorship at Victoria University of Wellington in 2010. Ideas ;Moral error theory To hold an error theory about morality is to endorse a kind of radical moral skepticism—a skepticism analogous to atheism in the religious domain. The atheist thinks that religious utterances, such as "God loves you," really ar ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Michael Ruse
Michael Ruse (born 21 June 1940) is a British-born Canadian philosopher of science who specializes in the philosophy of biology and works on the relationship between science and religion, the creation–evolution controversy, and the demarcation problem within science. Ruse currently teaches at Florida State University. Career Ruse was born in Birmingham, England, attending Bootham School, York. He took his undergraduate degree at the University of Bristol (1962), his master's degree at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario (1964), and Ph.D. at the University of Bristol (1970). Ruse taught at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada for 35 years. Since his retirement from Guelph, he has taught at Florida State University and is the Lucyle T. Werkmeister Professor of Philosophy (2000–present). In 1986, he was elected as a Fellow of both the Royal Society of Canada and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has received honorary doctorates from the Univ ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Reciprocal Altruism
In evolutionary biology, reciprocal altruism is a behaviour whereby an organism acts in a manner that temporarily reduces its fitness while increasing another organism's fitness, with the expectation that the other organism will act in a similar manner at a later time. The concept was initially developed by Robert Trivers to explain the evolution of cooperation as instances of mutually altruistic acts. The concept is close to the strategy of "tit for tat" used in game theory. In 1987 Trivers told a symposium on reciprocity that he had originally submitted his article under the title "The Evolution of Delayed Return Altruism", but reviewer W. D. Hamilton suggested that he change the title to "The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism". Trivers changed the title, but not the examples in the manuscript, which has led to confusion about what were appropriate examples of reciprocal altruism for the last 50 years. In their contribution to that symposium, Rothstein and Pierotti (1988) ad ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Group Selection
Group selection is a proposed mechanism of evolution in which natural selection acts at the level of the group, instead of at the level of the individual or gene. Early authors such as V. C. Wynne-Edwards and Konrad Lorenz argued that the behavior of animals could affect their survival and reproduction as groups, speaking for instance of actions for the good of the species. In the 1930s, R.A. Fisher and J.B.S. Haldane proposed the concept of kin selection, a form of altruism from the gene-centered view of evolution, arguing that animals should sacrifice for their relatives, and thereby implying that they should not sacrifice for non-relatives. From the mid 1960s, evolutionary biologists such as John Maynard Smith, W. D. Hamilton, George C. Williams, and Richard Dawkins argued that natural selection acted primarily at the level of the gene. They argued on the basis of mathematical models that individuals would not altruistically sacrifice fitness for the sake of a group unless ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kin Selection
Kin selection is the evolutionary strategy that favours the reproductive success of an organism's relatives, even when at a cost to the organism's own survival and reproduction. Kin altruism can look like Altruism in animals, altruistic behaviour whose evolution is driven by kin selection. Kin selection is an instance of inclusive fitness, which combines the number of offspring produced with the number an individual can ensure the production of by supporting others, such as siblings. Charles Darwin discussed the concept of kin selection in his 1859 book, ''On the Origin of Species'', where he reflected on the puzzle of sterile social insects, such as honey bees, which leave reproduction to their mothers, arguing that a selection benefit to related organisms (the same "stock") would allow the evolution of a trait that confers the benefit but destroys an individual at the same time. R.A. Fisher in 1930 and J.B.S. Haldane in 1932 set out the mathematics of kin selection, with Halda ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hypocrisy
Hypocrisy is the practice of engaging in the same behavior or activity for which one criticizes another or the practice of claiming to have moral standards or beliefs to which one's own behavior does not conform. In moral psychology, it is the failure to follow one's own expressed moral rules and principles. According to British political philosopher David Runciman, "Other kinds of hypocritical deception include claims to knowledge that one lacks, claims to a consistency that one cannot sustain, claims to a loyalty that one does not possess, claims to an identity that one does not hold". American political journalist Michael Gerson says that political hypocrisy is "the conscious use of a mask to fool the public and gain political benefit". Hypocrisy has been a subject of folk wisdom and wisdom literature from the beginnings of human history. Increasingly, since the 1980s, it has also become central to studies in behavioral economics, cognitive science, cultural psychology, de ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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