This book is a systematic and constructive treatment of a number of traditional issues at the foundations of ethics. These issues concern the objectivity of ethics, the possibility and nature of moral knowledge, the relationship between the moral point of view and a scientific or naturalist world-view, the nature of moral value and obligation, and the role of morality in a person's rational lifeplan. In striking contrast to traditional and more recent work in the field, David Brink offers an integrated (...) defense of the objectivity of ethics. (shrink)

1. Evolutionary Moral Realism. On most contemporary approaches to evolution and ethics, morality is not a real part of the environment in which social and intelligent creatures evolve.1 According to such approaches, certain cooperative behavioural patterns develop, and thus become biologically real, but morality doesn’t become possible until creatures evolve a sophisticated enough cognitive ability to mistake the goals of such behavioural patterns for objective moral values. At a metaethical level, this line of thought has led evolutionary biologists and moral (...) philosophers alike to the conclusion that objective moral values are illusory. At an ethical level, the same line of thought has led most moral philosophers to suppose that evolutionary biology tells us nothing very important about ethics. Ethics is possible because of our evolutionary heritage as cooperative primates, but ethics itself only begins as we humans begin to talk, argue and reason about how we ought to live our lives together. With the standard view, we think morality is tied to cooperative behavioural patterns that.. (shrink)