Evolution and Ethics A Critique of Sociobiology

by Bennett, Franklin Roy

• ISBN13: 9781137523815
• ISBN10: 1137523816
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2015-08-06
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Does evolution inform the ancient debate regarding the roles that reason and instinct play in how we decide what to do? Sociobiologists adopt Darwinism as a premise from which they draw conclusions about ethics, but upon analysis, our understanding of how evolution happens is highly speculative. Evolution and Ethics offers an insightful analysis of four epistemological types of sociobiology, which appear in the extant literature, and includes a preliminary analysis of Darwinism itself. Franklin Roy Bennett asserts that evolution does inform ethics, but only very basically by helping us to decide what we can believe about ourselves and nature.

Author Biography

Franklin Roy Bennett completed his BSc and MA degrees at the University of Guelph, Canada and his PhD degree at the CUNY Graduate Center. He has worked as a secondary school science teacher and as a professor of philosophy in New York City.

Table of Contents

1 Introduction
2 Two Theories of Evolution
3 Descriptive Instinctivism
4 Descriptive Rationalism
5 Prescriptive Instinctivism
6 Prescriptive Rationalism