Can I read The Evolution of Morality (Life and Mind: Philosophical Issues in Biology and Psychology) on EtoBox?

The Evolution of Morality (Life and Mind: Philosophical Issues in Biology and Psychology) by Richard Joyce; NetLibrary, Inc is a philosophy book available to read on EtoBox.

What is The Evolution of Morality (Life and Mind: Philosophical Issues in Biology and Psychology) about?

Moral thinking pervades our practical lives, but where did this way of thinking come from, and what purpose does it serve? Is it to be explained by environmental pressures on our ancestors a million years ago, or is it a cultural invention of more recent origin? In The Evolution of Morality , Richard Joyce takes up these controversial questions, finding that the evidence supports an innate basis to human morality. As a moral philosopher, Joyce is interested in whether any implications follow from this hypothesis. Might the fact that the human brain has been biologically prepared by natural selection to engage in moral judgment serve in some sense to vindicate this way of thinking—staving off the threat of moral skepticism, or even undergirding some version of moral realism? Or if morality has an adaptive explanation in genetic terms—if it is, as Joyce writes, ''just something that helped our ancestors make more babies''—might such an explanation actually undermine morality's central role in our lives? He carefully examines both the evolutionary ''vindication of morality'' and the evolutionary ''debunking of morality,'' considering the skeptical view more seriously than have

Who reads The Evolution of Morality (Life and Mind: Philosophical Issues in Biology and Psychology)?

Author

Richard Joyce; NetLibrary, Inc

Publisher

The MIT Press

Published

2006

Language

EN

ISBN

9780262101127

Category

philosophy

Subjects

Philosophy, History, Humanities

Rating

3.9 / 5 (27 ratings)

Updated

2026-03-14