Moral Progress and Evolution: Knowledge Versus Understanding

Scientific progress: Knowledge versus understanding.

What is scientific progress? On Alexander Bird's epistemic account of scientific progress, an episode in science is progressive precisely when there is more scientific knowledge at the end of the episode than at the beginning. Using Bird's epistemic account as a foil, this paper develops an alternative understanding-based account on which an episode in science is progressive precisely when scie...

Slavery, Carbon, and Moral Progress

My goal in this paper is to shed light on how moral progress actually occurs. I begin by restating a conception of moral progress that I set out in previous work, the BNaïve Conception,^ and explain how it comports with various normative and metaethical views. I go on to develop an index of moral progress and show how judgments about moral progress can be made. I then discuss an example of mora...

The Evolution of Knowledge Systems: Narrative Knowledge versus Scientific Knowledge

This paper discusses two types of knowledge that are generated by cultural anthropology, narrative knowledge and scientific knowledge. The argument of this article is that narrative knowledge an older form of knowledge that dates to the time when the brain was evolving its capacity for cultural communication, and that scientific knowledge is more recent and depends on writing and other more ela...

Psychopaths and Moral Knowledge

Evolution and Moral Diversity

If humans have an evolved moral psychology, then we should not expect it to function in an identical way between individuals. Instead, we should expect a diversity in the function of our moral psychology between individuals that varies along genetic lines, and a corresponding diversity of moral attitudes and moral judgements that emerge from it. This is because there was no one psychological ty...