Richmond Campbell

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor Emeritus at Dalhousie University

A Better Ape covers the evolution of morality from the birth of our ape family through the evolution of human species and all the way up to the development of modern societies. In this summary, we highlight several main elements of this account: the co-evolution of morality with intelligence and complex sociality; the role of social institutions an...

We respond to four sets of criticisms of our book, A Better Ape. Against Kristin Andrews, we argue that human normativity is more than just the social maintenance of behavioral conformity, and that one of its functions is to enable humans to adapt to changing environments. Against Jay Odenbaugh, we argue that sympathy, loyalty, trust, and respect a...

Darwin’s understanding of evolution by natural selection changes our view of nature and our place in it. It allows us for the first time to see clearly who we are and why. In particular, Darwinian evolution explains why we are moral creatures. Arising through gene-culture co-evolution, the moral mind is anchored in moral capacities for emotion, nor...

A Better Ape explores the evolution of the moral mind from our ancestors with chimpanzees, through the origins of our genus and our species, to the development of behaviorally modern humans who underwent revolutions in agriculture, urbanization, and industrial technology. The book begins, in Part I, by explaining the biological evolution of sympath...

Some examples of moral exclusivity are: (1) chattel slavery in the British Empire and the United States, (2) anti-Black racism in the United States since the Civil War, (3) homophobia before its decline during the past few decades in North America and Europe, (4) transphobia in these same places, and (5) speciesism in factory farming worldwide. Mor...

Chapter 2 describes the human evolution of the collaborative moral emotions of trust and respect and the reactive moral emotions of guilt and resentment, among other emotions, that together facilitate forms of cooperation that were not possible earlier. Prisoner’s dilemmas, in particular, cannot be resolved without the trust and respect, reinforced...

Chapter 4 describes the early evolution of moral pluralism among humans in which emotions and norms tend to reinforce each other and neither one functions entirely independently of the other. Their interdependence runs contrary to dominant views in the history of moral philosophy. The five core clusters of moral norms are: harm, kinship, reciprocit...

Chapter 7 describes the evolution of institutional morality within family, religion, military, economic, and political institutions. Moral norms of authority evolved within these institutions and were key to the social division of labor that can benefit everyone but often resulted in personal privilege. Norms of purity arose from the need to fight...

Morality evolved in our lineage over four stages. First, in apes and their ancestors, natural selection favored moral emotions that underpin psychological altruism. Second, within the Homo genus, gene-culture co-evolution produced norms, norm learning, and moral reasoning. Third, as humans became modern, social institutions such as religion modifie...

Chapter 8 offers an evaluative theory of moral progress and moral regress that explains how rational moral change is possible. Moral progress, distinct from progress in well-being, is illustrated by key examples, like the abolition of chattel slavery and reduction of gender inequality. The possibility of a traditional global theory of moral progres...

Gender inequality, racial inequality, and class inequality subordinate some groups to others, even when none is excluded from moral consideration. Ideologies that have no factual basis serve to justify the inequalities. Each reinforces the other, creating self-sustaining institutional structures that perpetuate injustice. A similar quandary arises...

Chapter 6 describes the cultural evolution of behavioral modernity that began about 100,000 years ago with hunter-gatherer bands gradually expanding into tribes. Tribes made possible the social institutions and institutional morality described in Chapter 7. Given moral exclusivity among bands, it is puzzling what would have allowed the bands to exp...

Chapter 5 describes how knowledge evolved through socially interactive reasoning that would not have been possible without morality. To overcome confirmation bias and other impediments to knowledge, it is necessary to reason with those with different perspectives who do not share the same biases. Such social reasoning must be guided by mutual respe...

Chapter 1 explains how the altruistic moral emotions of sympathy and loyalty evolved through natural selection in great apes and their ancestors prior to human evolution. Altruism can be biological or psychological. Biological altruism is the sacrifice of fitness by one individual that increases the fitness of another. Its evolution by natural sele...

Chapter 3 is about how norms evolved through gene-culture co-evolution leading up to the speciation of Sapiens. Cultural evolution is a form of natural selection relying on variation, inheritance, and differential fitness. What is differentially inherited is not genes but information transmitted horizontally within the same generation, and also ver...

We will suggest that logic is just one of a set of evolving human ‘projects,’ all of which are rooted in the social character and cognitive capacities of our species. The Logical Project names our collective effort to figure out how to reason well. In this way we offer a kind of naturalized account of logic that places its origins and function in a...

Moral inconsistency is an understudied phenomenon in cognitive moral psychology and deserves in depth empirical study. Moral inconsistency, as understood here, is not formal inconsistency but inconsistency in moral emotion and belief in response to particular cases. It occurs when persons treat cases as morally different that are really morally the...

Western philosophers have generally neglected honor as a moral phenomenon worthy of serious study. Appiah’s recent work on honor in moral revolutions is an important exception, but even he is careful to separate honor from morality, regarding it as only “an ally” of morality. In this paper we take Appiah to be right about the psychological, social,...

It is more than a half-century since Nelson Goodman [1955] applied what we call the Reflective Equilibrium model of justification to the problem of justifying induction, and more than three decades since Rawls [1971] and Daniels [1979] applied celebrated extensions of this model to the problem of justifying principles of social justice. The resulti...

In Kitcher’s ‘pragmatic naturalism’ moral evolution consists in pragmatically motivated moral changes in response to practical difficulties in social life. No moral truths or facts exist that could serve as an ‘external’ measure for moral progress. We propose a psychologically realistic conception of moral objectivity consistent with this pragmatic...

Experimental research in moral psychology can be used to generate debunking arguments in ethics. Specifically, research can indicate that we draw a moral distinction on the basis of a morally irrelevant difference. We develop this naturalistic approach by examining a recent debate between Joshua Greene and Selim Berker. We argue that Greene's resea...

We present a unified empirical and philosophical account of moral consistency reasoning, a distinctive form of moral reasoning that exposes inconsistencies among moral judgments about concrete cases. Judgments opposed in belief or in emotion and motivation are inconsistent when the cases are similar in morally relevant respects. Moral consistency r...

Ecology studies the dynamic interdependence of living systems. Ecological epistemology does the same, focusing on the living systems that generate knowledge. Epistemology, of course, should be ecological, since knowledge is almost always generated in the living systems comprising shared forms of life and we cannot sensibly study such systems apart...

Is moral judgment a state of belief or a state of feeling and desire? Cognitivists about moral judgment answer: true or false belief; non-cognitivists answer: feeling and/or desire. What is at stake in this disagreement is the possibility of moral knowledge, for if moral judgment is not a state of true or false belief, it cannot embody moral knowle...

We attempt a conclusive resolution of the debate over whether the principle of natural selection (PNS), especially conceived as the `principle' of the `survival of the fittest', is a tautology. This debate has been largely ignored for the past 15years but not, we think, because it has actually been settled. We begin by describing the tautology obje...

Without Abstract

A familiar position regarding the evolution of ethics is that biology can explain the origin of morals but that in doing so it removes the possibility of their having objective justification. This position is set fourth in detail in the writings of Michael Ruse (1986, 1987, 1989, 1990a, 1990b) but it is also taken by many others, notably, Jeffrie M...

Despite the emergence of new forms of feminist empiricism, there continues to be resistance to the idea that feminist political commitment can be integral to hypothesis testing in science when that process adheres strictly to empiricist norms and is grounded in a realist conception of objectivity. I explore the virtues of such feminist empiricism,...

We cannot know something unless it is true. The things that we know, therefore, must be logically consistent. Moreover, we cannot know something unless we are justified in believing it. But it does not obviously follow that the things that we are justified in believing must be consistent with each other. For we can be justified in believing somethi...

The theory I want to refute is sometime called Impersonal Ethical Egoism ( IEE ): the view that everyone ought (morally) to do what will benefit him the most in any given situation. It might be thought that this view can be distinguished from Personal Ethical Egoism ( PEE ): the view that I ought (morally) to do what will benefit me the most in any...

Margins of Precision: Essays in Logic and Language. By BlackMax. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970. Pp. 277. $7.50 U.S. - Volume 10 Issue 4 - Richmond Campbell

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Cornell University, January, 1970.