WHAT DOES AN EVOLUTIONARILY BASED CAPACITY LOOK LIKE?

Granting the scientific plausibility of the claim that evolutionarily based moral capacities exist, what can we learn about them and their acquisition by studying their development? Consider two approaches to understanding the nature of these moral capacities as adaptive proximate mechanisms, one straightforward and the other indirect. On the straightforward approach, the identification of different fitness-enhancing patterns of moral behavior, for instance, patterns of parental care for offspring, kin altruism, and reciprocal or group altruism, leads to an inference to a disposition for such behaviors, namely — to use the preceding examples — dispositions to care for offspring, kin altruism, reciprocal altruism, and group altruism. These four dispositions would constitute the totality of our moral agency or a significant part of it and, as evolutionarily based moral capacities, would be the adaptations for which there has been selection. But, of course, things cannot be that simple; even Wilson and Alexander implicitly recognize that. Any one of these simple dispositions, at least in higher organisms and certainly in humans, either must be associated with other proximate mechanisms that are cognitive and motivational in nature or must themselves be complex dispositions with cognitive and motivational components. A bare dispositional account of the nature of the proximate mechanisms that constitute our evolutionarily based moral capacities, if there are such, is unsatisfactory.