Evolution and Impartiality

Ethics 124 (2):327-341 (2014)
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Abstract

Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek and Peter Singer argue that evolutionary considerations can resolve Sidgwick’s dualism of practical reason because such considerations debunk moral views that give weight to self-interested or partial considerations but cannot threaten the principle of universal benevolence. I argue that even if we grant these claims, this appeal to evolution is ultimately self-defeating. De Lazari-Radek and Singer face a dilemma. Either their evolutionary argument against partial morality succeeds, but then we need to also give up our conviction that suffering is bad; or there is a way to defend this conviction, but then their argument against partiality fails. Utilitarians, I suggest, should resist the temptation to appeal to evolutionary debunking arguments

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Guy Kahane
University of Oxford

Citations of this work

Strangers to ourselves: a Nietzschean challenge to the badness of suffering.Nicolas Delon - 2024 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 67 (9):3600-3629.
Egoism.Robert Shaver - 2021 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Contingency inattention: against causal debunking in ethics.Regina Rini - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 177 (2):369-389.

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Evolutionary Debunking Arguments.Guy Kahane - 2010 - Noûs 45 (1):103-125.

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