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.