On Oct 18, 2006, at 10:04 AM, Wojtek Sokolowski wrote:
> Evolutionary theorist Oliver Curry of the London School of Economics
> expects a genetic upper class and a dim-witted underclass to emerge.
>
>
> [WS:] What truly amazes me is that such paper and pencil
> "theorists" survive
> in the academe in the era when empirical neuroscience and genetics are
> making a real progress.
<http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/darwin/people.htm>
Oliver completed his PhD thesis -- on the evolution of human moral sentiments -- in the Government Department of the LSE. His thesis used recent developments in evolutionary game theory, animal behaviour and evolutionary psychology to further the goal of placing the study of morality on a sound scientific basis.
<http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/archive/00000441/>
Morality as natural history
Curry, Oliver (2005) Morality as natural history. PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science, University of London.
Abstract
What are moral values and where do they come from? David Hume argued that moral values were the product of a range of passions, inherent to human nature, that aim at the common good of society. Recent developments in game theory, evolutionary biology, animal behaviour, psychology and neuroscience suggest that Hume was right to suppose that humans have such passions. This dissertation reviews these developments, and considers their implications for moral philosophy. I first explain what Darwinian adaptations are, and how they generate behaviour. I then explain that, contrary to the Hobbesian caricature of life in the state of nature, evolutionary theory leads us to expect that organisms will be social, cooperative and even altruistic under certain circumstances. I introduce four main types of cooperation – kin altruism, coordination to mutual advantage, reciprocity and conflict resolution –and provide examples of ‘adaptations for cooperation’ from nonhuman species. I then review the evidence for equivalent adaptations for cooperation in humans. Next, I show how this Humean-Darwinian account of the moral sentiments can be used to make sense of traditional positions in meta- ethics; how it provides a rich deductive framework in which to locate and make sense of a wide variety of apparently contradictory positions in traditional normative ethics; and how it clearly demarcates the problems of applied ethics. I defend this version of ethical naturalism against the charge that it commits ‘the naturalistic fallacy’. I conclude that evolutionary theory provides the best account yet of the origins and status of moral values, and that moral philosophy should be thought of as a branch of natural history.
[full text: <http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/archive/00000441/01/curryphd.pdf>]