HUMAN MORALITY AS AN EVOLUTIONARY ILLUSION: A PHILOSOPHICAL EXPLORATION AND CRITIQUE

Résumé

For well over two millenniums, philosophers and theologians assumed that morality presupposed compliance to a set of ideals used for the regulation of human conduct, in consideration for other individuals with whom a moral agent shared his or her social space. Accordingly, ethical inquiry was pursued with the primary aim of discovering and fostering these ideals. Beginning from the second half of the 19th century, however, Darwin (1871) redefined morality as an innate trait evolved by biological organisms in their struggle for existence in otherwise hostile primordial environments. Subsequent moral theory, fed by the naturalistic temper of post-modernism, and its new conception of freedom, developed an individualist ethics, where morality is to be left at the discretion of the individual. The assumption is that each individual can only automatically elicit the appropriate moral behaviour as the need arises, owing to their biological moral constitution acquired through evolution by natural selection. This has forced much of contemporary ethical theory to focus merely on the biological explanation of the evolutionary mechanisms of moral behaviour, viewing human morality as a biological illusion prompted by genes. Using traditional moral philosophy as background, this paper critically assesses these assumptions through the analysis of the concepts of morality and ethics. It argues that, under any judicious reckoning, morality, being a phenomenon that fundamentally arises and goes on in the concrete daily concerns of humans, gives meaning to human existence and interaction. Second, even the biological explanations of morality themselves squarely rest on the assumption that the ensuing knowledge would be practically applied in actual life. As such, morality, adequately conceptualised within its social context and pragmatic framework, is not merely a biological illusion. This connection must be taken into cognizance for ethical inquiry to remain a worthwhile exertion.