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Generalizing Evolutionary Altruism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Anthony Peressini
Anthony Peressini*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, University of Wisconsin-Madison
*
‡Send reprint requests to the author, Department of Philosophy, 600 North Park Street, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI 53706, USA.
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Abstract

Although accounts of evolutionary altruism which leave the question of whether altruism can evolve in nature open to empirical confirmation/refutation have been worked out for special (two-trait) cases, no real effort has been made to work out such accounts for general (N-trait) cases. It is tempting to take this lack of attention as evidence for an inextricably conventional element, which precludes such accounts from being of practical scientific value. I argue that such accounts do generalize in a natural way. As is often the case in science, generalizing theoretically simplified notions is not straightforward because of issues hidden in the special case. These issues do not, however, turn out to be essentially conventional.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 60 , Issue 4 , December 1993 , pp. 568 - 586
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1993

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Footnotes

†

I would like to thank Elliott Sober for advice and comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

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