222 Catherine Wilson
allegedly failed ideals of the benevolent, expensive, and politically unstable Welfare
State and the return to nature, viewed as an arena of untrammeled competition,
and while traces of Social Darwinism remain in the form of the inference that
the dominant owe their position to their inherited superior characteristics, rather
than chance and history, contemporary Evolutionary Ethics has adopted more
authentically Darwinian views and questions. The emphasis in the literature has
shifted from the issues of war and ethnic conflict to social interaction in pairs and
groups. Public attention has been captured by an array of semipopular books on
animal ethology, of an openly prescriptive or at least highly suggestive character.
“The new sciences of human nature”, Steven Pinker ventures, “can help lead the
way to a realistic, biologically informed humanism... .They promise a naturalness
in human relationships, encouraging us to treat people in terms of how they do
feel rather than how some theory says they ought to feel. They offer a touchstone
by which we can identify suffering and oppression wherever they occur... They
renew our appreciation for the achievements of democracy and of the rule of law.
And they enhance the insights of artists and philosophers who have reflected on
the human condition for millennia.” [Pinker, 2002, xi] Some philosophers have
followed this lead. Daniel Dennett asks inDarwin’s Dangerous Idea, “From what
can ‘ought’ be derived?” “ The most compelling answer”, he decides, “is this:
ethics must somehow be based on an appreciation of human nature — on a sense
of what human nature is or might be like and what a human being might want
to have or be” [Dennett, 1996, 268]. As Mary Midgely points out, all prescriptive
moral doctrines are based on some theory of what people are like, and the claim
that we have no nature really amounts to the claim that we are “— naturally —
quite plastic” [Midgely, 1978, 166].
Yet the supposition that the theory of evolution can provide not only unique
and valuable insights into human nature but offer guidance in framing appropriate
norms of conduct remains problematic. Though a large literature has developed
around applications of game theory to the study of the evolution of social be-
haviour, no professional philosopher has written a standard work in Evolutionary
Ethics providing a rigorous, yet favourable treatment of the subject. This is not
only because, as is sometimes alleged, philosophers since Descartes have promoted
a misleading view of human beings as dematerialized reasoning, willing, choosing
entities, who control and alter nature without being subject to it, but because
conceptual difficulties above and beyond those just set aside infest the very idea
of an Evolutionary Ethics. To appreciate the potential value of evolutionary ap-
proaches and to understand their limitations, it will be useful to sketch the central
assumptions behind the positive assessments just quoted, as well as indicating
the importance of some underutilized conceptual resources from recent evolution-
ary theory, including the notions of the extended phenotype, obsolescence, and
parasitism.