EPISTEMOLOGY OF EVOLUTIONARY ETHICS

Abstract

The article presents the logic of justification of moral norms based on the apparatus of the theory of evolution, reconstruction of the course of anthropogenesis as well as modeling the consequences of accepting a prescription as a norm with a forecast of its acceptability for a particular community. The justification of a moral norm from the side of the decision-making process can be based exclusively on two types of revealed dependencies of the actual world («nature of phenomena»): (1) reconstruction of the historical formation of a specific mechanism for regulating the behavior of an individual in society, which determines its objective characteristics — morality; (2) predicting the consequences of the consolidation of a certain norm, which are expressed in the assessment of the stability of the entity that cultivates this norm in its environment, including competition with other communities, as well as the possibility that this norm will be accepted by this community, given the objective configuration of the already established mechanisms of behavior regulation, mental attitudes and a set of norms and the degrees of freedom in permissible transformations that can be realized in this system in real time. However, no amount of knowledge alone is identical to an internal willingness to act in a certain way, and there is no argumentation that is universally effective in this regard. Likewise, the search for «true good» and some autonomous «morality» as a cognizable criterion of the proper in action, the cognition of which sets a specific system of values, is meaningless. The logic of evolutionary ethics, therefore, does not contain a naturalistic fallacy. The mistake is not that the description of facts and patterns leads to the conclusion that a precept is obligatory, but that this precept is taken out of the context of the objective conditions for the formation of a structure of relations in which an individual is motivated to act, guided by a specific model. However, comprehending the consequences of adopting a certain norm can never lead to an unambiguous conclusion for any rational agent, because the ability to foresee the entire set of moves and consequences is limited, just as the agent himself is never free from his history and the attitudes he has formed.Thus, the search for a universal moral law that defines an absolute system of value coordinates is a futile endeavor, which, however, does not exclude the possibility that in the course of the development of societies, moral norms are modified so that these communities become more stable when compared to their predecessors in some horizon of the predicted course of events.