Question Why aren't more contemporary ethicists doing work informed by the broader social-biological scope of animal behavior?

Accepted:
April 25, 2006

Comments

I may not be best positioned to address this question, since my own work in ethical theory is mostly not deeply informed by broader social-biological perspectives on animal behavior, but I'll have a try. The question seems to assume (a) that ethicists are not influenced by social-biological perspectives on animal behavior and (b) that they should be. But both assumptions may be open to question. Here, much may depend on what the questioner has in mind by social-biological perspectives and the way in which they might inform ethics. If this is a catch-all for any good work done in the natural and social sciences, then (a) might be doubted. At least, it would be overstated. While some ethicists pursue primarily internal questions about ethics conceived of as articulating principles that both subsume and explain common moral judgments and also provide reflectively acceptable guidance and criticism, others do work that is interdisciplinary in some way or other. For instance, there has been recent work (e.g. Doris, Harman, and Vranas) about how the precepts of virtue theory are affected by the situationist paradigm in social and personality psychology. Many moral philosophers and decision theorists are interested by ways in which conceptions of rationality are affected by the discovery of so-called framing effects. Current work on altruism is often situated in part in relation to discussions in game theory and evolutionary biology. Jurisprudential discussions of responsibility and culpability are often shaped by work done in developmental psychology and neuroscience (a subject in which I have written myself). Now there may be more truth in (a) if "social-biological" is taken to refer to the narrower field of socio-biology. Even here there are some philosophers (e.g. Kitcher, Sober, Ruse, Midgely, Gibbard, and Flanagan) who see potential bearing of socio-biological ideas on some issues within ethics. For instance, Flanagan thinks that socio-biology might place some feasibility/realism constraints on what a moral theory could reasonably demand of agents. But in general caution is needed here. This is issue (b). Socio-biological accounts of the evolution of particular traits and dispositions purport to explain where and why these traits arose. What traits contributed to survival in very different circumstances may provide a poor guide to how we should behave now or what traits we should try to cultivate or reform. Traits that were selectively advantageous relative to a particular environment need not have been selectively optimal for that environment. What was advanatageous/optimal for one environment may not be for another, different environment. And there may be a lot we should care about besides reproductive fitness.

The bottom-line is that ethics, as practiced by most contemporary ethicists, is a normative science (or art), whereas sociobiology is a descriptive or explanatory science. That doesn't mean there can be nothing that one can learn from the other, but it does mean that they are very different enterprises. On this view, which recognizes the autonomy of the two disciplines, it makes no more sense to ask the ethicist why he isn't talking a lot about sociobiology than it does to ask the sociobiologist why she isn't talking about whether we have duties to future generations.

Question Why aren't more contemporary ethicists doing work informed by the broader social-biological scope of animal behavior? Accepted:April 25, 2006

Question Why aren't more contemporary ethicists doing work informed by the broader social-biological scope of animal behavior?

Accepted:
April 25, 2006