Sixteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

We can broaden the scope of the humanities by doing more to unearth the roots in our evolved biology. Such a large project pushes the humanities toward a closer relationship to the sciences. This paper focuses on how the philosophical study of ethics has successfully moved in this direction. One might think that only ethical approaches that view ethics as purely social or emotion-based could achieve such a project. Yet even ethicists who maintain that morality emerges from a particular intellectual capacity—the capacity for normative self-government, i.e., freedom—can understood morality in an evolutionary framework. We need only accept that normative self-government can derive from self-consciousness. The capacity of normative self-government may be understood as an effect or side-effect of biological evolution. Under the perspective of the timeline of human evolutionary history, once human beings had evolved brains that could yield the intellectual capacity of reflective self-consciousness, then humans would have become capable of normative self-governance. Normative ethics, then, could be said to have become possible. The evolutionary process would have then provided the necessary conditions for morality, yet not the sufficient conditions.