The academic world is witnessing the formation and rapidly evolving field of animal studies.  I’m not referring to the narrower field of animal rights, begun more or less with the publication of Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation in 1975, which seems as vibrant a field as ever.  Animal studies cuts across and embraces such disciplines as history, anthropology, psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, religious studies, art history, sociology, biology, among others.  The rapidity by which interesting insights have been formulated and shared in this vast field is staggering.  This is also true of another cross-disciplinary field that might be called evolutionary studies.  The last decade or so of research in these two broad areas area has helped to shape new understandings of both human and non-human animals.  This volume offers representative examples of some of the best work going on at the convergence of these areas.

Evolved Morality is a 270-page book divided into four sections of two to four chapters each and includes a forward and an index.  It consists of a collection of presentations to a workshop on the biological roots of morality and ethics that took place in 2012.  These presentations were also already published in the journal Behavior in 2014.  In the editors’ words, “… we brought together a collection of experts from disparate fields with the goal of exploring how and why morality may have evolved, how it develops in the human child, and how it is related to religious beliefs, and whether neuroscience and evolutionary theory can shed light on its functioning in our species” (3).  By the end of the volume it’s clear that much light has been and can be so shed.

Section one, “Evolution,” starts with the controversy arising between Darwin, Huxley, and others about how and whether evolutionary theory can adequately account for the phenomenon of altruism.  Are human beings basically “brutish” as Hobbes said?  Are brutes “brutish” in the same way as humans?  Is morality just a sham in the sense that it is a social convention that glosses over the otherwise basic ruthlessness of all animals includinghomo sapiens?  In “A History of the Altruism-Morality Debate in Biology,” Owen Harmen, as the title of his contribution implies, provides a very accessible entrée into the whole collection and De Waal’s “Natural Normativity: the ‘Is’ and ‘Ought’ of Animal Behavior” provides a sturdy and accessible bridge between the science and philosophy of morality.

The next section, “Metaethics,” continues the discussion of the metaethical issue of the “is/ought problem” with some of contemporary philosophy’s heavy hitters (e.g., Owen Flanagan, Simon Blackburn, Philip Kitcher).  Their “research has explored new directions” (71) in the sense that the questions for them is not the standard “Do the biology and psychology of moral behavior bear upon ethical judgments,” but has become more like “How does the biology and psychology of moral behavior bear upon ethical judgments?”  In fact, the assumption here more or less underlies the approach of all the contributors to this volume.  The debates in this book are more like family squabbles than they are like divorce-inducing irreconcilable differences.

The third section, “Neuroscience and Development,” explores the relationship between the social inclinations and the basic genetic substructures that make them possible, thereby providing the biological “foundations” of morality.  For a non-scientist, this may be the densest section of the book.  But the contributors here are all fairly masterly writers so that some of the most intricate scientific details are quite comprehensible.  Churchland’s “The Neurobiological Platform for Moral Values,” is representative.  She makes the whole enterprise of the scientific study of morality possible by bringing morality back from the Platonic (or other) heaven and placing it firmly on familiar ground with this simple claim: “…moral values are not other-worldly; rather they are social worldly.  They reflect facts about how we feel and think about certain kinds of social behavior” (147). 

The fourth and final section, “religion,” offers a fascinating rehearsal of a number of research projects that explore “the connections in human evolution between supernatural beliefs, organized religion, and morality” (227).  The two contributions to this section, Norenzayan’s “Does Religion Make People Moral?” and Girtotto et al’s “Supernatural Beliefs: Adaptations for Social Life or By-Products of Cognitive Adaptations?” lay to rest a number of silly assumptions about this issue and offer clear, level-headed summaries of some very interesting empirical research.

Evolved Morality is not meant for a general reading audience.  Nonetheless, the various pieces making up this collection are for the most part accessible and well-written.  I think intelligent readers with no specific background in the various disciplines covered here could find the book interesting and useful.   It’s the sort of collection that one can dabble in, reading chapters in no particular order, ignoring some altogether for that matter.  The great strength of this collection, for me, was that it offers some real answers to real questions about the evolutionary roots of morality without being polemical.  Furthermore, it clarifies some of the debates and questions that have been quite muddled so that false questions can be dispensed with allowing for fruitful research projects to proceed.  Because this collection represents some of the most cutting edge research questions being addressed in the field of animal studies right now, for anyone interested in the nature and development of morality in humans and animals and the relations between the two, this book is well worth considering.

© 2015 Ben Mulvey

Ben Mulvey, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the College of Arts and Sciences of Nova Southeastern University.  He received his doctorate in philosophy from Michigan State University specializing in political theory and applied ethics.  He teaches philosophy at NSU and is a member of the board of advisors of the Florida Bioethics Network.