For context, read the description in Part 1. In this part, we move on to the second part of the dissertation, which is about meta-ethics and some philosophy of biology. Researching this portion of the dissertation stoked my interest in philosophy of biology and planted the seeds for my eventual move to the History and Philosophy of Science (HPS) department at the University of Cambridge to further my graduate studies in 2017.

Researching this and the next part of the dissertation also acquainted me with the writings of some exceptional thinkers like the Philosophy (of science) Professor Philip Kitcher of Columbia University whom I corresponded with briefly via email about possible doctoral supervision following my stint at Cambridge. He was polite and shared some things for my careful consideration regarding pursuing a humanities PhD. TLDR, am grateful that I didn’t.

On an unrelated topic, I just finished watching the all six seasons of the TV series Cobra Kai, the 34 year sequel to 1984’s Karate Kid on Netflix. Having watched the series season by season since its introduction to Netflix in 2020, am blown away by how entertaining it is: it’s competent (martial arts, drama, and comedy all checked), passionate (faithful to the source material, expanding on it meaningfully [virtually all the 1980s cast members appear at some point] and offering much needed closure), and confident (unapologetically itself).

1. Introduction
2. A Selective History of Evolutionary Ethics
3. Engaging with the Fact-Value Gap and Meta-Ethical Objections for Theological Appropriation
4. Assessing the Levels of Certainty Required for Science
5. Tracing and Appraising the Cumulative Case for Evolutionary Ethics
6. Conclusion

3. Engaging with the Fact-Value Gap and Meta-Ethical Objections for Theological Appropriation

Philosophers have debated meta-ethics, that is, the ultimate justification for moral judgments and ethical norms, for millennia. [16] Some philosophers since Darwin have attempted to ground that justification in evolutionary theory. Herbert Spencer argued that the evolution of ethics entailed the ethics of evolution, and, along with the social Darwinists after him, promoted a connection between “more evolved conduct” and “morally good conduct”, violating Hume’s Law and Moore’s “naturalistic fallacy” (James 2011: 153, 133). A generation later, Julian Huxley, the grandson of T. H. Huxley, said in his 1943 Romanes Lecture that ‘it is ethically right to aim at whatever will promote the increasingly full realization of increasingly higher values’ which are determined by evolution. This provoked a similar accusation of moving too hastily from an “is” to an “ought” (1943: 125; Messer 2007: 97,100). Even though many contemporary philosophers do not think that evolutionary accounts of human nature, or in fact anything, can offer ultimate justification for moral norms and ethical judgments, [17] we should reappraise the two aforementioned arguments against moving from an “is” to an “ought”, and some closely related debates concerning meta-ethical justification to determine if a philosophically defensible model that retains moral realism, a key requirement for theology, can be formulated in support of this dissertation’s thesis. This section seeks to show that a general “Aristotelian” virtue ethical approach will not fall foul of Hume’s Law or the “naturalistic fallacy”. On this approach, careful theorizing about evolutionary perspectives on human nature could offer insights into the nature of objective human moral traits without the attendant recourse to a species of evolutionary anti-realism that contemporary philosophers and scientists make to avoid the concomitant fallacies listed above.

It will be helpful to begin with Philip Kitcher’s four-fold typology of what Wilson’s early socio-biological call to “biologicize” ethics could mean. This typology first appears in his book, Vaulting Ambition dedicated to critiquing Wilson’s early efforts, and has appeared a number of times as a tool to clarify and navigate these issues. [18] In their most summarized form, they are:

1. Explaining our moral psychology
2. Constraining or expanding our moral principles
3. Determining the metaphysical status of moral properties, and
4. Deriving new moral principles from evolution (James 2011: 2)

Kitcher points out that the first two endeavours are uncontroversial and are already being legitimately pursued in the relevant disciplines, but Wilson’s defence of the next two is problematic (2006a: 575-576, 584). Although Kitcher argues rightly that it is not always clear which one Wilson supports because he casually flits between them (1985: 417-418), the overall breadth of his relevant work suggests that he supports all of them (2006a: 576). [19] Concerning endeavour four, by locating the source of moral principles only in humanity’s evolved nature, which Kitcher understands to be a form of ‘emotivist metaethics’ in which ‘Human beings should do whatever may be required to ensure the survival of a common gene pool for Homo sapiens’, (1985: 427-428) Wilson’s approach cannot determine what should be considered ‘morally perverse’, is unable to justify why certain desires should be given priority
to others, and will not be able to adjudicate difficult questions of social organization, such as ‘the rights, interests, and responsibilities’ of others parties (2006a: 580, 580, 580, 583). In other words, if ethics is founded only upon the ‘dictates of neural systems that have allegedly been fashioned to maximize the inclusive fitness of the individuals who possess them, [then] pop sociobiological “ethics” lacks any theory of the resolution of conflicts’ (1985: 433-434). These problems, among others, have led Wilson’s early collaborator, Michael Ruse, to clarify that his view is a form of evolutionary anti-realism, that is, the belief that nothing grounds moral and ethical truths, not even evolution, even though it may be helpful for societal functioning to believe that something does. [20] Leaving aside closely related meta-ethical concerns, that is, endeavour three, for a fuller treatment down the road, this dissertation will presently focus on if and how Hume’s law and the “naturalistic fallacy” invalidate the hasty conflation of fact and value that Wilson and most flavours of evolutionary moral naturalisms committed to moral realism seem to contravene.

Hume’s Law discerned from A Treatise on Human Nature, states that ‘statements of fact “are entirely different from” statements of value’. Scott James shows that there cannot be any deductively valid arguments whose premises are factual statements and whose conclusion contains a moral statement, even if the conclusion seems very convincing, as in

Premise: Jones kills Beatrice.
Premise: Beatrice’s death is harmful to Beatrice.
Conclusion: Therefore, Jones should not have killed Beatrice. [21]

The only way for a conclusion in a deductively valid argument to possess a value statement is for a value statement to already be baked into one of the premises, as in

Premise: No one should ever deliberately kill another innocent human being.
Premise: Beatrice is an innocent human being.
Conclusion: Therefore, no one should deliberately kill Beatrice (James 2011: 134, 137).

By the standards of deductive logic, this implies that ‘moral theorizing […] is going to be forever autonomous, that is to say, a field of study whose laws and connections must, in the end, remain within the sphere of value’ (James 2011: 138), a sphere in which facts about evolved human nature have nothing to contribute. The related, but less convincing (James 2011: 142; Joyce, 2006: 151-152) objection to an easy “fact-value” connection can be found in Moore’s discussion on the real, and not merely the nominal definition of words like “good” in his Principia Ethica. Richard Joyce clarifies: ‘A nominal definition explains how the term is used in the language; a real definition explains what a thing is, ideally providing the item’s essential features’ (2006: 147). Moore thinks that something like “goodness” cannot be defined in that real way because it is simple and has no parts. That is to say, the statement ‘X is good’ can only be a statement of predication rather than a statement of identity. Consequently, ‘it is OK to say things about goodness, but unacceptable to say what goodness is because goodness is “simple, indefinable, unanalysable”’ (Joyce 2006: 148, 148, 148).

Moore justifies this claim with the Open Question Test (OQT). The OQT asks

X is A, but is X P?
For example
X is a bachelor, but is X unmarried?

If the answer is yes, as the above statement indicates, then this is not an open question, and the property P has passed the OQT. Being unmarried is a necessary property of bachelorhood.

However, consider

X is a fruit, but is X sweet?

If the answer is no, as the above statement indicates, then this is an open question, and the property P has failed the OQT. “Sweetness” is not a necessary property of a fruit. Moore argues that ‘with respect to goodness, no property could pass the Open Question Test’. He applied it to the then-dominant view on the nature of goodness, namely, the desire to desire, and found it lacking. [22] James applies it to Wilson’s support of endeavour four in Kitcher’s aforementioned typology:

Action Y ensures the survival of a common gene pool for Homo sapiens, but is Y good?

Say, killing off half the world’s population now to ensure the future survival of the species, which fits the above description, is one of the actions under consideration. The goodness of this action is at least controversial. Therefore, this is a very open question. [23]

Both these arguments have been attacked by philosophers looking to defend endeavours three and four of Kitcher’s typology. Some note that Moore’s objection only applies to a semantic identification between “goodness” and another statement, like “more evolved conduct”, but does not invalidate an ontological relationship between them. That is, ‘if it’s being claimed that “morally good conduct” is, as a matter of mind-independent existence, “more evolved conduct,” then the view is not obviously mistaken. For, in this case, it’s a claim about what morally good conduct is, not a claim about what the concept “morally good conduct” means’ (James 2011: 153). However, the onus is on the evolutionary moral naturalist to show how this mind-independent connection exists on naturalism. Concerning Hume’s Law, John Searle has offered a deductively valid argument that purportedly bridges the “is-ought” gap with the introduction of “normative institutions” like promise-making (James 2011: 154). [24] However, J. L. Mackie’s critique, which prompted a series of counter-responses leading to no resolution, claimed that, from the perspective of someone outside the institution, a moral statement is not derived from a factual statement, rather, a factual statement is derived from another factual statement, that is, a descriptive statement of what ought to be done within an institution. For example, in the game of chess, the claim that a pawn that has reached the end of the board can be promoted to a queen is a factual statement based on the factual rules of the game of chess. [25] More recently, James Rachels has offered to bypass the requirements of deductive logic by defending inductive and abductive routes to discerning moral truths. [26] However, James points out that Rachels himself falls back to a deductive argument to render his views more objective than if they were founded upon induction or abduction alone. [27] Accordingly, James and Joyce argue that many of these early attempts to dissolve Hume’s Law and Moore’s “naturalistic fallacy” fail. [28] Among the views that engage these objections from an evolutionary perspective like Dennett’s and Wilson’s, the implication, as Ruse has discerned, is that nothing grounds moral values and ethical judgements in an objective sense, but ‘evolution has tricked us into believing it’ (James 2011: 120). This has become a popular view among contemporary philosophers. To circumvent Hume’s Law and the “naturalistic fallacy”, they maintain some form of evolutionary moral anti-realism concerning endeavour three in Kitcher’s typology and assert that moral and ethical norms are merely convenient fictions foisted upon us by evolution. [29]

The immediate appeal of this view seems obvious. As Joyce points out, ‘the moral skeptic can hardly be defeated by moral condemnation of her position’, and evolutionary moral anti-realism predicts accurately ‘that moral scepticism may seem to many obviously false and pernicious’ (2006: 223). [30] Furthermore, this view explains the ubiquity of beliefs concerning rewards and punishments in the afterlife to coerce, shame, and motivate across cultures. [31] The dilemma for the evolutionary moral-realist, proposed by Sharon Street, also indicates the appeal of moral anti-realism. She argues that the moral realist has two options: to say that evolution has exerted a ‘purely distorting force’ on human evaluation of objective moral and ethical truths, or try to explain plausibly how evolution has enabled humanity to detect, or in her words, ‘track’ said truths (Street 2006: 121, 125). Because she thinks both options are more problematic than helpful, she settles for an anti-realist adaptive link account on which human minds evolved merely to connect some biologically beneficial situations with moral value. In other words, moral judgments do not track independent moral truths but are evolved dispositions to motivate humans to act in certain ways. This Darwinian dilemma, in conjunction with Hume’s Law and the “naturalistic fallacy”, suggests rather strongly that flavours of evolutionary moral anti-realism are the only philosophically defensible options.

Any theology worth the name will find this conclusion problematic. If a Creator of everything, that is, time, space, matter, and energy, exists – an affirmation of classic Christian doctrine – then that Creator has the last say on whether or not there are mind-independent moral and ethical realities out there ready to be discerned by humans. Furthermore, a facet of scripture supports this. [32] Therefore, theology should be committed to a form of moral realism. However, if the insurmountable complexities surrounding the second horn of Street’s dilemma hold, then returning to the first horn in which evolution effects a purely distorting force on human moral judgments, which legitimates an autonomous realm of Christian moral thinking, would be to capitulate to a form of fundamentalism that commits the ‘ancient error of Gnosticism’, that is, the refusal to ‘affirm the notion that human moral understanding must take account of human biological embodiment’ (Clayton, Schloss 2004: 3). Consequently, looking into the remaining options for the evolutionary moral realist which purport to escape Hume’s Law, the “naturalistic fallacy” and both horns of Street’s dilemma for theological appropriation will be pertinent. James proposes a moral-constructivist model that tackles the second horn of Street’s dilemma head-on without relinquishing moral realism. However, for this dissertation’s thesis, the focus will be on William Casebeer and Kitcher’s defence of what can be broadly considered an “Aristotelian” virtue ethic. This approach looks at how evolution informs what sort of person someone should be, rather than determine what sort of actions someone should take, avoiding both fallacies and the horns of Street’s dilemma. [33] Aristotle thought that the answer to what sort of person someone should be could be found in the function, or the distinguishing feature of humanity, which, for him, was reason. [34] However, the location of humanity’s function in the dictates of reason is arbitrary; humans have other distinguishing traits that could also be considered their function. Furthermore, Aristotle’s description of telos in nature justified in part by the eternality of species would sit uncomfortably in the modern mind. [35] Casebeer, therefore, proposes that talk of function be updated with modern evolutionary science so that facts concerning moral character can be discerned from careful empirical work on humanity’s “nested” attributes, such as their social nature (2003: 49, 53). [36] Kitcher also offers a picture of a naturalized virtue ethic based on the function of proto-morality ‘to reinforce the psychological capacities that made sociality possible’ in homo sapiens’ phylogenetic heritage (2005: 178). Consequently, for Kitcher, ‘the function of morality is the enhancement of social cohesion via the amplification of our psychological altruistic dispositions. […] Virtue, then, is a matter of developing those traits that […] amplify our biologically given disposition to altruism’ (James 2011: 198).

Joyce countrargues that it is not clear how language of one kind of function, natural function, discerned solely from biology, can translate into language of another kind of function, moral function, with its own unique flavour of normativity: “how ‘we get from “Joe’s heart ought to pump blood” to “Joe ought to keep his promise” remains problematic’” (2006: 170). Objections aside, this reappraisal of “Aristotelian” virtue ethics marks a return to a great tradition in the history of moral philosophy prior to Hume when facts and values were not distinctly separated. [37] This was represented in theology by Thomistic anthropology, which, bolstered by a theistic supposition that bypasses Joyce’s critique, asserted that ‘even with attenuated rational powers, the human mind can discover a range of truths’, including ‘the moral precepts of the natural law’ (Harrison 2008: 46). [38] While key aspects of Reformation theology served to weaken the general discourse about the apprehension and cultivation of virtues in Christian moral thinking (Harrison 2015: 80-81), some theologians and faith-minded researchers from within and outside the Roman Catholic tradition have nevertheless found a recourse to something like Thomistic natural law with roots in “Aristotelian” virtue ethics invaluable, especially when engaging with evolutionary science. [39] Accordingly, this dissertation proposes that a form of moral realism predicated on an updated “Aristotelian” virtue ethic, which is philosophically defensible, as shown above, related historically to major theological currents, and can incorporate the best empirical work from the evolutionary sciences, would be the ideal model for a sustained interaction between evolutionary ethics and theology. This model is not without its critics. Consequently, before moving on to explore the acceptable standards of certainty required from science for public policy and the corresponding robustness of evolutionary ethics for theology, it will first be incumbent to defend this model. Opposing perspectives include Messer’s preference for a Barthian divine command ethic and Timothy Jackson’s claim that the Eudaimonia characteristic of game theoretical models privileges eros over agape, and for that reason has no place in moral theology.

Messer argues that a Barthian divine command ethic is preferable to any natural law ethics because he believes this will ‘safeguard us against the danger […] of grounding our ethics on ideological constructions of nature’ (2007: 106). He notes that theology affirms that humans ‘lack the capacity not only to be truly good people, but also to understand what it is to be truly good’ (2007: 93). He acknowledges that recourse to Barthian theology in engagement with contemporary evolutionary science seems counterintuitive since Barth opposed natural theology, did not engage with science, and has been critiqued for forwarding an ethic that is voluntarist, arbitrary and unpredictable, closing off the possibility of self-criticism and ironically rendering his system vulnerable to ideologically motivated projections itself (2007: 61, 107-108). In response, Messer argues that Barth’s approach avoids the above objections and does have resources to engage with evolutionary science. For example, Messer argues that Barth did not take a voluntarist line of thought concerning moral reasoning in highly unusual cases, and was

determined to guard against self-justifying or manipulative uses of the Bible, such as selective proof-texting or treating it as no more than a moral rule-book. Accordingly, he privileges biblical narrative as a more comprehensive mode of witness to God’s command than individual texts, rules or principles (Messer 2007: 108). [40]

What this means is that a Barthian divine command ethic ‘will qualify and order such [evolutionary explorations of human nature] with a necessarily theological account of real human being – that is, human being as creature, pardoned sinner, and child of the Father’ (2007: 126).

One of the advantages of this approach is that it is more easily able to endorse a robust form of universal love that the kin selection of evolutionary language cannot (2007: 127). In much the same vein, Jackson’s article on ‘The Christian Love Ethic and Evolutionary “Cooperation”’ argues that the Eudaimonia characteristic of evolutionary game theory, a key component in evolutionary ethics, ‘conflate[s] doing good with doing well, […] overestimat[es] the power of eros’, cannot approximate the altruistic, self-giving ideal of the life and teachings of Jesus because it is predicated on ‘self-interested flourishing’, and for these reasons cannot ‘exhaust the meaning and methods of ethics’ (2013: 308, 310-311, 321). [41]

Jackson’s claim that game theory cannot exhaust the meaning of ethics is unobjectionable. Game theoretical models cannot directly account for intentionality, which is key for the language of cooperation to progress to the language of morality and altruism (2013: 315). However, his related claim that the Eudaimonia undergirding game theoretical approaches, which attempts to describe or explain self-giving behaviour by recourse to self-interest, cannot approximate the self-giving love of Jesus’ life and teaching, and by extension, the teachings of Christianity, is objectionable. Jesus’ call to love (ἀγαπήσεις) the neighbour as the self suggests that consideration of the self is a key component of Christian love. [42] Other examples in scripture of the rewards and satisfactions obtained for the self, including one cited by Jackson, that is, ‘those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life will find it’ (Matt. 10.39), can be multiplied to bolster this point. [43] He writes that a ‘Christian eudaimonism’ is problematic because ‘Jewish, Christian, and Muslim morality begins, not with immanence but transcendence, not with the goal of human flourishing but the reality of divine holiness’ (2013: 311). However, if the chronology of the scriptural canon is taken into account, then, much to the contrary, it very clearly states that the first divinely sanctioned obligation to humanity is earthly flourishing. [44] Furthermore, much of Christian doctrine affirms ‘eternal self-survival and enjoyment, and they demand that this survival be attended to, for the self and for others’ (Rolnick 2004: 311). [45] There is little reason, therefore, to dichotomize “agapistic” love with self-concerned love since scripture and common sense indicate that they are inextricably linked. [46] Furthermore, Jackson’s remarks on evolutionary ethics are outdated. He takes “Hamilton’s Rule”, Dawkins’ gene-selectionism and a crude adaptationism (2013: 316, 319-320, 321) – concepts that few researchers think are explanatorily adequate today – as his scientific references concerning the paucity of evidence for the evolution of altruistic behaviour and ignores the wealth of new advances in multi-level selection and evolutionary dynamics, advances that instigated the pioneering collaborative book in which his article resides. Lastly, if the “agapistic” ideal that he wishes to promote is truly other-worldly, as is suggested in remarks like ‘if one sacrifices for a limited group, even one including persons unrelated to you, this is tribalism, not altruism’ (2013: 317), then by definition, no naturalistic (nor theological, see Rom. 3.10-17, 23) account of human nature could support that ideal, nor should it. Consequently, to seek support for an unattainable ideal in nature – evident in his attempt to locate altruism outside the “adaptationist” paradigm (2013: 318-319) – and then castigate mature evolutionary science for being unable to provide it is to beg the question.

Similarly, Messer’s suspicions concerning the susceptibility of Thomistic anthropology to ideological distortion are understandable. However, it is not clear if a Barthian divine command ethic can escape charges of voluntarism, arbitrariness, or even ideological distortion either. Biggar’s remarks suggest that this approach sets divine command as adjudicator of what can and cannot be appropriated from evolutionary science. This does not sound like mutual interaction, but a selective appropriation on its terms that does not accord respect to the general integrity of the scientific enterprise and shields the theologian from dialectical critique. Furthermore, it is not clear what Messer means by divine command. While he helpfully notes that Barth wishes to safeguard against manipulative uses of the scriptures when determining said commands, history has borne out prominent episodes wherein certain aspects of scripture were elevated to moralize and legitimate unsavoury actions and states of affairs. [47] Furthermore, the affirmation of an innate morality in humans embedded in a naturalized virtue ethic finds support in psychological studies that suggest that children, regardless of upbringing, including Amish children, consider certain actions, like hitting another person, immoral even if they were informed that God would be okay with it. In other words, children of diverse upbringings were able to tell the difference between conventional rules and moral rules and tended not to think that an authority of any sort, including a divinely imposed authority, could change the latter (Nucci et. al. 1983; Nucci 1986; Nucci 2001; Nichols 2004). It seems therefore that a naturalized virtue ethic updated by evolutionary science, which consistently engages with the entirety of the scriptural witness, is superior on every count since it is not voluntarist or arbitrary, accords a greater degree of respect for the integrity of the scientific enterprise, recognizes a certain natural moral compass in humans (Rom. 2.14-15), and for these reasons can maintain a stronger bulwark against ideological distortion. Its dialectical nature would aid in preventing either side from sliding into unwarranted decadence, for example, the excesses of self-serving biases on the one hand, and the manipulation of the scriptural witness or the canons and creeds by selective proof-texting to moralize immoral actions and agendas on the other. [48]

Having offered a defensible frame for a constructive dialogue between evolutionary ethics and theology, the next section will determine the standards appropriate for the use of science in public policy, and by extension, the use of evolutionary science in theology.

Endnotes:

• 16 See (Craig 2002)
• 17 See for example (Boniolo, Anna 2006: 3)
• 18 See also (Kitcher 2006a: 575)
• 19 See for example (Wilson 1975), (Wilson 1978), (Ruse, Wilson 1986), (Wilson 1998a), (Wilson 2014)
• 20 See also (Ruse 1995: 230-231) and (Ruse, Wilson 1993: 308-311)
• 21 See (James 2011: 138, 133-136)
• 22 See (James 2011: 145, 145-146); see also Joyce (2006: 149-151)
• 23 See (James 2011: 148)
• 24 See (Searle 1964)
• 25 See (Mackie 1977)
• 26 See (Rachels 1990)
• 27 See (James 2011: 154-159)
• 28 See for example (Joyce 2006: 164-168)
• 29 See (James 2011: 164-167, 178); see also (Joyce 2006: 193-228), (Street: 2006)
• 30 Hume himself considered ‘the brute fact of human natural sympathy’ to be a sufficient explanation, see (Hume 1751)
• 31 See (James 2011: 167), (Atran 2002) and (Boyer 2001)
• 32 See Rom. 2.14-15.
• 33 See (Casebeer 2003), (Kitcher, Copp 2005) and (Pruss 2013)
• 34 See (Aristotle 1980/350 BCE)
• 35 See (James 2011: 195-196), see also (Okasha 2002: 7)
• 36 See (Ober, Macedo 2009: xiv) and (De Waal 2009: 18)
• 37 See (Harrison 1998: 271-272), see also (MacIntyre 1984)
• 38 See (Aquinas 1485) and (Harrison 2008: 7)
• 39 See for example (Wright 2010), (Schloss 2004: 15), (Midgley 1994), (Haarsma 2004: 159), (Arnhart 2004: 205-207), (Boyd 2004: 222), (Samuelson, Church, Jarvinen, Paulus 2013) and (Noble 2009: 127)
• 40 See (Biggar 1993) and (Barth 1932-1967)
• 41 See Matt. 10.34-39; Matt. 5-7
• 42 See Lev. 19.18; Mk. 12: 31; Matt. 22.39, and also Mk 2.27
• 43 See for example, Matt. 5.12; Rom. 12.20; Eph. 6.8; Col. 3.24; Heb. 10.35; 11.6, 26; 2 Jn. 1.8; Rev. 11.18; 22.12.
• 44 See Gen. 1.26-28.
• 45 See also (Jenson 1999: 317)
• 46 See also (Nowak, Highfield 2011: 89-90)
• 47 See for example the discussions on the history of fundamentalism in (Barr 1977), (Barr 1984: 119), (Harriet 2008), (Laats 2010), (Marsden 1980), and (Noll 1994).
• 48 A political analogy in the Hebrew Bible that supports this tension can be found in (Hazony 2012: 140-160); on the related topic of the value of understanding and appraising scripture from an evolutionary perspective, see (Parmigiani et. al. 2006: 133), (Kitcher 2006b), (Lahti 2004), (Rolnick 2004)