Workshop: Evolutionary Ethics - Prospects and Problems

Time and place:  May 8, 2007 02:00 PM - 04:00 PM, Oslo

Grupperom 4, Georg Sverdrups Hus

Professor Catherine Wilson (City University of New York)

Evolutionary Theory, "Darwinism" for short, presents an image of human nature, understood as a set of physical and psychological characteristics - or a range of such characteristics - and also, in an "extended" sense, as associated with a set of typical human institutions and practices. While one might think that the right and the good can only be the right and the good for organisms that it is something to be like, and that it is better to have up-to-date theories and hypotheses about what we are like than those delivered by the tradition, Evolutionary Ethics stands in ill-repute amongst philosophers. I would like to discuss why this is so, and to suggest that EE is not incompatible with a commitment to social equality and other allegedly unnatural ideals not rooted in the human genome.

Catherine Wilson is a specialist in the history of early-modern philosophy. Her areas of particular interest are moral and social theory, evolutionary psychology, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century history and philosophy of science, and philosophy of literature.

She is the author of two classic books: Leibniz's Metaphysics: A Historical and Comparative Study and The Invisible World: Early Modern Philosophy and the Invention of the Microscope, and she recently published Moral Animals: Ideals and Constraints in Moral Theory and Descartes's Meditations: An Introduction. Furthermore, she has edited several volumes of essays, contributed to many books, published in numerous journals, and was the editor of History of Philosophy Quarterly and Canadian Journal of Philosophy.