Article ID: CBB181126482

The Evolution of Morality and Its Rollback (2018)

unapi

According to most Evolutionary Psychologists, human moral attitudes are rooted in cognitive modules that evolved in the Stone Age to solve problems of social interaction. A crucial component of their view is that such cognitive modules remain unchanged since the Stone Age, and I question that here. I appeal to evolutionary rollback, the phenomenon where an organ becomes non-functional and eventually atrophies or disappears—e.g. cave-dwelling fish losing their eyes. I argue that even if cognitive modules evolved in the Stone Age to solve problems of social interaction, conditions since then have favoured rollback of those modules. This is because there are institutions that solve those problems—e.g. legal systems. Moreover, evidence suggests that where external resources are available to perform cognitive tasks, humans often use them instead of internal ones. In arguing that Stone Age cognitive modules are unchanged, Evolutionary Psychologists say that evolutionary change is necessarily slow, and that there is high genetic similarity between human populations worldwide. I counter-argue that what is necessarily slow is the building-up of complex mechanisms. Undoing this can be much quicker. Moreover, rollback of cognitive mechanisms need not require any genetic change. Finally, I argue that cross-cultural similarity in some trait need not be rooted in genetic similarity. This is not intended as decisive evidence that rollback has occurred. To finish, I suggest ways we might decide whether moral attitudes are likely to be rooted in unchanged Stone Age modules, given that I have argued that cross-cultural similarity is not enough.

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Authors & Contributors
Coeckelbergh, Mark
Picozzi, Mario
Fornero, Giovanni
Jenna M. Grant
Shelley Ochs
Siano, Silvia
Concepts
Biology and ethics; bioethics
Ethics
Evolutionary psychology
Medicine and ethics
Science and ethics
Medicine
Time Periods
21st century
20th century, late
20th century
19th century
20th century, early
Places
South Korea
Cambodia
England
Singapore
Yunnan Province (China)
Netherlands
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