Meat made us moral: a hypothesis on the nature and evolution of moral judgment

In the first part of the article, an account of moral judgment in terms of emotional dispositions is given. This account provides an expressivist explanation of three important features of moral demands: inescapability, authority independence and meriting. In the second part of the article, some ide...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Biology & philosophy 2013-11, Vol.28 (6), p.903-931
Main Author: Mameli, Matteo
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Education
Ethical aspects
Evolutionary Biology
Meat
Philosophy
Philosophy of Biology
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Summary:In the first part of the article, an account of moral judgment in terms of emotional dispositions is given. This account provides an expressivist explanation of three important features of moral demands: inescapability, authority independence and meriting. In the second part of the article, some ideas initially put forward by Christopher Boehm are developed and modified in order to provide a hypothesis about the evolution of the ability to token moral judgments. This hypothesis makes evolutionary sense of inescapability, authority independence and meriting. It does so by referring to the selection pressures generated in the Late Pleistocene by large-game hunting. If the hypothesis is correct, we can say that, in a sense, meat made us moral .
ISSN:0169-3867
1572-8404
DOI:10.1007/s10539-013-9401-3