Evolutionary Ethics and Contemporary Biology

앞표지
Giovanni Boniolo, Gabriele De Anna
Cambridge University Press, 2006. 7. 3.
How can the discoveries made in the biological sciences play a role in a discussion on the foundation of ethics? This book responds to this question by examining how evolutionism can explain and justify the existence of ethical normativity and the emergence of particular moral systems. Written by a team of philosophers and scientists, the essays collected in this volume deal with the limits of evolutionary explanations, the justifications of ethics, and methodological issues concerning evolutionary accounts of ethics, among other topics. They offer deep insights into the origin and purpose of human moral capacities and of moral systems.

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섹션1
13
섹션2
27
섹션3
43
섹션4
56
섹션5
77
섹션6
97
섹션7
121
섹션8
141
섹션9
159
섹션10
178

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17 페이지 - Blind to the fact, that under the natural order of things, society is constantly excreting its unhealthy, imbecile, slow, vacillating, faithless members, these unthinking, though well-meaning, men advocate an interference which not only stops the purifying process, but even increases the vitiation — absolutely encourages the multiplication of the reckless and incompetent by offering them an unfailing provision, and discourages the multiplication of the competent and provident by heightening the...
32 페이지 - The following proposition seems to me in a high degree probable — namely, that any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well developed, or nearly as well developed as in man.
33 페이지 - A moral being is one who is capable of reflecting on his past actions and their motives — of approving of some and disapproving of others; and the fact that man is the one being who certainly deserves this designation, is the greatest of all distinctions between him and the lower animals.
36 페이지 - How so many absurd rules of conduct, as well as so many absurd religious beliefs, have originated we do not know ; nor how it is that they have become, in all quarters of the world, so deeply impressed on the...
36 페이지 - It may be well first to premise that I do not wish to maintain that any strictly social animal, if its intellectual faculties were to become as active and as highly developed as in man, would acquire exactly the same moral sense as ours.
30 페이지 - Nevertheless, this difficulty, though appearing to our imagination insuperably great, cannot be considered real if we admit the following propositions, namely, that all parts of the organisation and instincts offer, at least, individual differences — that there is a struggle for existence leading to the preservation of profitable deviations of structure or instinct...
18 페이지 - ... in the development of the Earth, in the development of Life upon its surface, in the development of Society, of Government, of Manufactures, of Commerce, of Language, Literature, Science, Art, this same evolution of the simple into the complex, through successive differentiations, holds throughout. From the earliest traceable cosmical changes down to the latest results of civilization, we shall find that the transformation of the homogeneous into the heterogeneous, is that in which Progress essentially...
36 페이지 - If, for instance, to take an extreme case, men were reared under precisely the same conditions as hive-bees, there can hardly be a doubt that our unmarried females would, like the worker bees, think it a sacred duty to kill their brothers, and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters, and no one would think of interfering.
81 페이지 - I think not only, that it becomes the modesty of philosophy not to pronounce magisterially, where we want that evidence that can produce knowledge; but also, that it is of use to us to discern how far our knowledge does reach...

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