Moreover, “altruism” is often predicated on the behavior of social insects and other animals, in which no intentionality is involved but rather comes about as a result of genetically determined behaviors.
Altruism, however, is usually taken to imply some cost to the altruist for the benefit of others, and this is the sense in which I will use “altruism” here.
#Two steps from hell am i not human tv show how to
4): “e can take a person's moral beliefs to be the beliefs she has about how to live her life when she takes into account in a sympathetic way the impact of her life and decisions on others.” Altruism may be defined in a similar way as, for example, “unselfish regard for or devotion to the welfare of others” ( 11). A similar definition is advanced, for example, by David Copp in The Oxford Handbook of Ethical Theory (ref. I will define moral behavior for the present purposes as the actions of a person who takes into account in a sympathetic way the impact the actions have on others. Cultural evolution has come about because of cultural change and inheritance, a distinctively human mode of achieving adaptation to the environment and transmitting it through the generations ( 3, 5– 9). The advent of culture has brought with it cultural evolution, a superorganic mode of evolution superimposed on the organic mode, which has, in the last few millennia, become the dominant mode of human evolution. Culture “is a pool of technological and social innovations that people accumulate to help them live their lives” (ref. Culture in this sense includes social and political institutions, ways of doing things, religious and ethical traditions, language, common sense and scientific knowledge, art and literature, technology, and in general all of the creations of the human mind. A distinctive human social trait is culture, which may be understood here as the set of non–strictly biological human activities and creations. But primate societies do not approach the complexity of human social organization.
Humans live in groups that are socially organized, and so do other primates. Moral codes, however, are outcomes of cultural evolution, which accounts for the diversity of cultural norms among populations and for their evolution through time. That is, morality evolved as an exaptation, not as an adaptation. Ethical behavior came about in evolution not because it is adaptive in itself but as a necessary consequence of man's eminent intellectual abilities, which are an attribute directly promoted by natural selection. Humans have a moral sense because their biological makeup determines the presence of three necessary conditions for ethical behavior: ( i) the ability to anticipate the consequences of one's own actions ( ii) the ability to make value judgments and ( iii) the ability to choose between alternative courses of action. I propose that the capacity for ethics is a necessary attribute of human nature, whereas moral codes are products of cultural evolution. The question of whether the moral sense is biologically determined may refer either to the capacity for ethics (i.e., the proclivity to judge human actions as either right or wrong), or to the moral norms accepted by human beings for guiding their actions. In The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, published in 1871, Charles Darwin wrote: “I fully … subscribe to the judgment of those writers who maintain that of all the differences between man and the lower animals the moral sense or conscience is by far the most important.” I raise the question of whether morality is biologically or culturally determined.