Social evolution as moral truth tracking in natural law

Morality can be adaptive or maladaptive. From this fact come polarizing disputes on the meta-ethical status of moral adaptation. The realist tracking account of morality claims that it is possible to track objective moral truths and that these truths correspond to moral rules that are adaptive. In contrast, evolutionary anti-realism rejects the existence of moral objectivity and thus asserts that adaptive moral rules cannot represent objective moral truths, since those truths do not exist. This article develops a novel evolutionary view of natural law to defend the realist tracking account. It argues that we can identify objective moral truths through cultural group selection and that adaptive moral rules are likely to reflect such truths.

Social Evolution as Moral Truth Tracking in Natural Law

Morality can be adaptive or maladaptive. From this fact come polarising disputes on the meta-ethical status of moral adaptation. The realist tracking account of morality claims that it is possible to track objective moral truths and that these truths correspond to moral rules that are adaptive. In contrast, evolutionary anti-realism rejects the existence of moral objectivity and thus asserts that adaptive moral rules cannot represent objective moral truths, since those truths do not exist. This article develops a novel evolutionary view of natural law to defend the realist tracking account. It argues that we can identify objective moral truths via cultural group selection and that adaptive moral rules are likely to reflect such truths.

Axiological Problems of Statutory Interpretation

The paper discusses the question of axiological determinants of statutory interpretation in the context of statutory law. The author formulates the argument that the paradigm of the so-called non-axiological statutory interpretation, originating from the non-axiological jurisprudence approach, does not offer an effective protection against obtaining meanings which are contrary to elementary moral rules. The paper focuses on axiological instructions for an interpreter, i.e. how to look for morally objective meanings and what the moral objectivity criteria of meaning in the law are.

Debunking and Vindicating in Moral Psychology

One way that cognitive science can inform our metaphysical views is by explaining why we have the metaphysical views that we do. Psychological explanations can serve to debunk our intuitive metaphysical commitments when the commitments derive from an epistemically defective process. But psychological explanations can also serve to vindicate our intuitive commitments when they derive from epistemically proper processes. This chapter explores both debunking and vindicating arguments for the belief in moral objectivity. The debunking argument draws on work suggesting that the belief in objectivity is generated from epistemically defective emotional/motivational processes. The vindicatory argument draws on the finding that beliefs about consensus correlate with beliefs about objectivity, and argues that a rational learner would often be right to take consensus information as evidence regarding objectivity.

Making Sense of Eighty Years of Theological Ethics

This article surveys all the contributions in ethics on these pages over the past eighty years and is divided into four historical parts: the first three years; the years from 1943 to 1964; the years Richard McCormick wrote from 1964 to 1984; and the years beyond McCormick. It surveys a period from neo-Scholastic manualism at the eve of World War II to the contemporary era, where methods for attaining moral objectivity are complex. This survey notes shifts in theological method, the movement of the center from the personal to the social, the transition from an exclusively clerical authorship to a much broader array of authors, and a shift in readership from priest confessors to professional theologians.

Countering the Crisis of American Democracy with the Thomistic Personalism of Aquinas and John Paul II

The crisis of democracy unfolding in the United States was identified by John Paul II as due to misunderstanding the relationship of truth and freedom. This crisis has grown worse due to a libertinism that sees objective moral truths as impositions on both free choice and fulfilling relationships, that identifies self-fulfillment with a self-creation in which one creates one’s own values, that seeks to build democracies apart from moral objectivity, and that dismisses the relevance of God for living well. I argue that democracy cannot survive these libertine errors and that they cannot be successfully countered by utilitarianism, Rawls’s political liberalism, or democratic proceduralism. Survival requires adopting the Thomistic personalism formulated by Aquinas and developed by Karol Wojtyła as indispensable for understanding those lived experiences through which one encounters the ethical moment of self-determination, achieves moral objectivity, avoids loneliness by loving truly, and seeks—via collaboration with women exercising their feminine genius for discerning the welfare of others—the common good, without which democracies collapse into atheistic tyranny.