Biologizing Ethics: Analysis and Critique of Edward Wilson's Evolutionary Ethics

Evolutionary ethics is a metaethical theory that aims to biologizing ethics within the framework of evolutionary theory. The purpose of this study is to explore the roots of ethics - one of the most important issues of meta-ethics in human evolution.

In this analytical study using the philosophical and biological data in the literature, the essential components of evolutionary ethics have been extracted from Wilson's point of view and the role of each in shaping this theory is explained. Then, the strengths and weaknesses of Wilson's evolutionary theory in solving ethical problems are discussed.

Ethics, like any other evolutionary phenomenon, traverses the path of natural selection and its associated genes remain when ethical species are under the pressure of natural selection. From Wilson's point of view, the roots of ethics can be traced to the autocracy of genes, and find moral characters and behaviors such as sacrifice and altruism in them. But this theory, in addition to problems such as genetic alienation and human devaluation that other researchers have introduced, has other drawbacks and deficiencies, such as being incompetent in explaining all ethical principles and inability to explain absolute moral judgments.

The results showed that Wilson's explanation of ethical roots faces considerable difficulties and cannot be regarded as a comprehensive theory and therefore needs to be repaired and reformed.