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Law and Biology: The New Synthesis?
Elliott, E.
Elliott, E.
Abstract
For the last two thousand years, we have made remarkably little progress in moral philosophy, or its stepchild, jurisprudence, by attacking the field as a matter of a priori philosophy. Recently, a different approach has begun to be used, which is to treat morality as an empirical matter subject to scientific study. I am thinking of the work of Carol Gilligan, or Jim Fishkin's Beyond Subjective Morality, or Roger Masters' Beyond Relativism, and some of the work in evolutionary psychology by people like Robin Wright and Matt Ridley. Much of this literature is summarized and extended in Frans de Waal's recent book, Good Natured, on the evolutionary basis of morality. These works all look at what we previously thought of as abstract issues of moral philosophy as empirical issues of social science.