The Descent of Instinct and the Ascent of Ethics

doi:10.1017/CBO9780511498428.004

2 - The Descent of Instinct and the Ascent of Ethics

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 July 2009

Giovanni Boniolo

Edited by

Giovanni Boniolo and

Gabriele De Anna

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Giovanni Boniolo: Affiliation:
Firc Institute for Molecular Oncology (IFOM), Milan
Giovanni Boniolo: Affiliation:
Università degli Studi di Padova, Italy
Gabriele De Anna: Affiliation:
University of St Andrews, Scotland

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Summary

Let us then liken the soul to the natural union of a team of winged horses and their charioteer. The gods have horses and charioteers that are themselves all good and come from good stock besides, while everyone else has a mixture. To begin with, our driver is in charge of a pair of horses; second, one of his horses is beautiful and good and from stock of the same sort, while the other is the opposite and has the opposite sort of bloodline. This means that chariot-driving in our case is inevitably a painfully difficult business.

Plato, Phaedrus, 246 a–d

MORAL CAPACITY

Reflecting on the biological foundations of human moral behavior within a Darwinian framework should involve something too often forgotten: finding actual links with what Darwin proposed in his writings. This task should not be intended as a philosophically idle form of deference to an author of the past, but as a necessary step to recover the correct historical and theoretical bases of the problems we are facing. Indeed, an interest in the history does not necessarily mean to commit fallacies akin to argumentum ad verecundiam, but it can take the form of a correct argumentum ad auctoritatem. In considering what Darwin wrote about the biological bases of morality, I will recall some of the theses of The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man that, mutatis mutandis, could be accepted without much difficulty by those who believe in the correctness and validity of (neo-)Darwinian evolutionism.

Type: Chapter
Information: Evolutionary Ethics and Contemporary Biology , pp. 27 - 40

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511498428.004 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2006

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