Survival as a Reason to Live Morally: A Critical Examination of the Evolutionist Perspective

Morality is one of the most important issues for humans and a common concern of human beings. Talking about the importance of morality, prompts people to think about this question: why should we live moral? The answer to this question can be found among the various functions that thinkers have proposed for ethics, because if the subject's knowledge confirms the usefulness of the action, then the subject will be motivated to do it. Therefore, the functions of an action can be an answer to why the action is performed. One of the functions of moral life is to increase the chance of survival, which has been introduced by moral evolutionists. The question of the present article is: how much this function can create motivation for a person to perform a moral act? Can the agent's knowledge that ethical life increases the chances of survival, motivate her/him to observe moral values? By considering the challenge of not believing in resurrection and sacrificing life, and many problems in life and the difficulties of ethical life, this result is obtained that although increasing the chance of survival can motivate a person to live morally, but Just increasing the chances of survival is not worth accepting the costs of being moral and does not provide enough motivation to endure the hardships of moral life. Therefore, evolutionary ethics is facing the challenge of lack of explanatory power for moral motivations and it cannot be accepted as a comprehensive theory in the field of moral motivation.