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Recent Work on Evolution and Social Contract Ethics

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Notes

  1. Peter Singer, The Expanding Circle: Ethics and Sociobiology (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1981), p. 4.

  2. See Matt Ridley, The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation (New York: Penguin Books, 1996); see also Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation (New York: Basic Books, 1984); E.O. Wilson, On Human Nature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978); Stephen Jay Gould, Eight Little Piggies: Reflections in Natural History (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1993); and Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: a Darwinian View of Life (New York: Basic Books, 1995).

  3. See E.O. Wilson, Consilience: the Unity of Knowledge (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998); see also Christopher Boehm, “Conflict and the Evolution of Social Control,” in L. D. Katz, ed., Evolutionary Origins of Morality: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives (Bowling Green, Ohio: Imprint Academic, 2000); Christopher Boehm, “The Origin of Morality as Social Control,” in L. D. Katz, ed., Evolutionary Origins of Morality: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives (Bowling Green, Ohio: Imprint Academic, 2000); and Frans de Waal, Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996).

  4. See Brian Skyrms, Evolution of the Social Contract (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press,1996); see also Brian Skyrms, The Stag Hunt and the Evolution of Social Structure (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

  5. See Howard Kahane, Contract Ethics: Evolutionary Biology and the Moral Sentiments (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1995).

  6. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, 1 st ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981), p. 71.

  7. Ibid., p. 97.

  8. Ibid., p. 87.

  9. Ibid., p. 81.

  10. Ibid., p. 92.

  11. Ibid., pp. 74–75.

  12. Ibid., p. 79.

  13. Ibid., p. 99.

  14. Ibid., p. 93.

  15. Ibid., p. 79.

  16. Ibid., p. 80.

  17. Ibid., p. 85.

  18. See Charles Darwin, “Moral Sense,” in Paul Thompson, ed., Issues in Evolutionary Ethics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), p. 75.

  19. Darwin, The Descent of Man, p. 105.

  20. Ibid., pp. 105–106.

  21. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (New York: Collier Books, 1962), p. 122.

  22. Ibid., pp. 104 & 122.

  23. Ibid., p. 104.

  24. Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, trans., J.W. Ellington (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1981), p. 37.

  25. John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co.. 1979), pp. 16–17.

  26. Darwin, The Descent of Man, p. 67.

  27. Stephen Jay Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 31.

  28. Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, new ed. (New York, Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 3.

  29. Ibid., p. 3.

  30. Ibid., p. 127.

  31. De Waal, op. cit., p. 212.

  32. Dawkins, River Out of Eden, p. 121.

  33. See Robert Trivers, “The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism” in P. Singer, ed., Ethics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 78–88.

  34. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 503.

  35. Stephen Jay Gould, Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History (New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 1977), p. 255.

  36. Gould, Eight Little Piggies, p. 50.

  37. De Waal, op. cit., p. 136.

  38. Wilson, On Human Nature, pp. 156–157.

  39. Ibid., p. 164.

  40. John Locke, Second Treatise of Government (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1980), p. 50.

  41. Wilson, Consilience, p. 259.

  42. Ibid., p. 259.

  43. De Waal, Good Natured, p. 154.

  44. Ibid., p. 136.

  45. Ibid., pp. 130, 132, 136, 205.

  46. Ibid., p. 170.

  47. See ibid., pp. 131.

  48. Ibid., p. 240.

  49. Axelrod, op. cit., p. 4.

  50. Ibid., p. 173.

  51. Skyrms, The Stag Hunt, p. 55.

  52. De Waal, op. cit., p. 116.

  53. Ibid.

  54. E.O. Wilson, Sociobiology: The Abridged Edition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980), p. 287.

  55. Singer, op. cit., p. 78.

  56. Rawls, op. cit., p. 494.

  57. See ibid, p. 501.

  58. Wilson, On Human Nature, p. 166.

  59. John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), p. 20.

  60. De Waal, op. cit., p. 167.

  61. Michael Ruse, Taking Darwin Seriously: A Naturalistic Approach to Philosophy (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1998), p. 245.

  62. Ibid., p. 246.

  63. Skyrms, Evolution of the Social Contract, p. ix.

  64. Ibid., p. 102.

  65. Ibid., p. 105.

  66. Ibid., pp. xi, 108.

  67. Ibid., p. 109.

  68. Ibid.

  69. Kahane, op. cit., p. x.

  70. Ibid., p. x.

  71. Ibid., p. 15.

  72. Ibid., p. 16.

  73. Axelrod, op. cit., p. 109.

  74. Ibid., p. 110.

  75. Bernard Williams, “Evolution, Ethics, and the Representation Problem” in D.S. Bendall, ed., Evolution From Molecules to Men (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 563.

  76. Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), p. 453.

  77. An earlier version of this article was presented to the International Hobbes Association at the Pacific Meeting of the American Philosophical Association, on 10 April 2009 in Vancouver, Canada. I would like to thank two anonymous referees and Thomas Magnell, the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Value Inquiry for their comments and help.

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Mizzoni, J. Recent Work on Evolution and Social Contract Ethics. J Value Inquiry 44, 377–388 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-010-9235-z

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