Sociobiology and the origins of ethics

Julio Muñoz-Rubio

Resumen


According to sociobiology, ethics is an offspring of natural selection and totally explicable through biology. According to this discipline, any individual has reproduction as its supreme life objective, and thus ethical principles are directly originated from such objective. This criterion subordinates choice to “natural” duties and eradicates the power of human free will to generate values. Sociobiology falls into the natural fallacy as it assumes that a moral “duty” derived from a particular behavior is justified by the same existence of such behavior. This paper sustains that humans are qualitative different from the rest of animals since they exist in spheres afar from strict biological ones; sociobiology subjugates human freedom to the necessity realm and build up an ideological discourse.

 

Key words: Ethics, evolutionary theory, ideology, naturalist fallacy, sociobiology, survival, liberty, necessity, dearth, free will.

 


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Referencias


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