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What Makes Us Moral?: Crossing the Boundaries of Biology

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This introductory book, by a moral philosopher, focuses on the implications of evolutionary theory for our view of morality. It deals with such issues as the evolution of morality; the moral implications of evolutionary psychology; social darwinism and eugenics; the naturalistic fallacy; and the role of genes in behaviour. The book gives a comprehensive overview of the controversies, reviews the classical examples, and outlines Levy's own view. It is well written. Levy does a better job than most critics of evolutionary psychology in presenting and discussing this position and carefully analyzes and rejects the simple dichotomies (either genes or environment, either nature or nurture etc.) that so often distort the discussion. Yet, the book is not without problems. At places it lacks analytical depth. A discussion of different notions of altruism (genetic, psychological, ethical etc.) would have been very helpful, and a one sentence rejection of the idea that one commits a fallacy if one replaces 'is' by 'ought to be' is too short, really. Another serious problems is Levy's tendency to conflate evolutionary and genetic approaches. In the first chapter, Levy, erroneously, associates eugenics with Darwinism and later in the book he conflates evolutionary psychology and behavioral genetics. Levy occasionally succumbs to name calling ('Darwinian fundamentalist') and straw man arguments. The views of scientists should not be extracted from news papers, as Levy does in chapter 5. A more serious distortion is the equation of the evolutionary psychologists' view that the alleged fact that behaviours (such as rape) and social inequalities have a genetic and evolutionary background does not justify those behaviours and inequalities, with the straw men's position that the claims of evolutionary psychology are morally irrelevant. Finally, Levy indicates his own position, but his arguments are, imho, underdeveloped. For those who know the subject these shortcomings are relatively minor, but they might mislead beginners.

For fans of evolutionary psychology, this book contains much food for thought. In particular, Levy presents a neat case to be sceptical about heritability as an interesting measure of the degree to which genes influence phenotype. Given that much of the prominent work in evolutionary psychology -- Pinker's The Blank Slate, for instance -- relies very heavily upon heritability figures, this is an important counterbalancing argument which ought to be more widely known.

Moreover, Levy presents reasons to be sceptical of the very strict fact-value gap advocated by Pinker, Gould, and others. This part of the book is especially helpful for non-philosophers, grappling with deep issues in moral philosophy such as the "naturalistic fallacy" and so forth.

At the same time, Levy is not the sort of dreary anti-evolutionist you might have come to expect from other books that are critical of evolutionary psychology. Levy has engaged with the literature in a refreshingly open-minded way, and happily admits a degree of agnosticism about many issues.

Academic philosophers will not find much new here in terms of philosophy of biology or meta-ethics. But the book is a lively read, and is a great way to be introduced to a lot of contemporary evolutionary psychology, with a keen eye for philosophical fallacy along the way.