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Comment on Peter Corning's “Evolutionary ethics”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 May 2016

C. Fred Alford
C. Fred Alford*
Affiliation:
Department of Government and Politics University of Maryland College Park, MD 20742 USA [email protected]
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Extract

One can see the appeal of evolutionary ethics today. Throughout the Western world, and nowhere more than the United States, individualism is rampant. Some argue that greed is good; too much social and political theory idealizes individual freedom and choice as the highest values. How gratifying it is to learn that greed and selfishness are not natural, or at least not any more natural than cooperation, self-sacrifice, and altruism. Trouble is, most of the truly horrible acts in this world have been committed not by selfish individuals but by ordinary men and women following orders. We must consider whether evolutionary ethics adequately addresses this problem. Can evolutionary ethics discover the sources of resistance to malevolent authority?

Type
Harrison Symposium III
Information
Politics and the Life Sciences , Volume 22 , Issue 1 , March 2003 , pp. 59 - 61
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Politics and the Life Sciences 

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References

1.Milgram, Stanley, Obedience to Authority (New York: Harper and Row, 1974).Google Scholar
2.Browning, Christopher, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: Harper-Collins, 1992).Google Scholar
3.Arnhart, Larry, Darwinian Natural Right: The Biological Ethics of Human Nature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), p. 265.Google Scholar