The Limits of Evolutionary Explanations of Morality: The Inclusivist Anomaly and its Implications for Evoconservatism

Traditional conservative arguments against the possibility of major moral progress or fundamental institutional reform relied on under-evidenced assumptions about the limitations of human nature. A number of contemporary thinkers from a variety of disciplines have attempted to fill this empirical gap in the conservative argument by appealing to evolutionary theory. These “evoconservatives” infer from evolutionary accounts of morality that it is unrealistic to think that cosmopolitan and other “inclusivist” moral ideals can meaningfully be realized. In this paper, we argue that contemporary evoconservative arguments are no more successful than their pre-Darwinian predecessors, because they have overstated the explanatory reach of evolutionary theory and underestimated the scope of the explanandum. We argue that no adequate evolutionary explanation has been given for several important features of contemporary human morality, namely the very inclusivist moral commitments that prominent evolutionary explanations appear to rule out. We examine putative selectionist and byproduct explanations of morality and show that they fail to account for significant aspects of the morality of substantial numbers of existing human beings. We argue that to the extent that evolutionary explanations of morality succeed, they do not imply that morality is severely constrained, such that inclusivist morality is a utopian fantasy that is incapable of shaping important moral beliefs, practices and institutions. We go on to attribute the evolutionarily anomalous features of human morality that we have identified to a flexible capacity for open-ended normativity, which we argue presents a serious obstacle to theorists who wish to draw substantive moral and political lessons from human evolutionary history. Finally, we consider the implications of open-ended normativity for empirically informed versions of the “ought implies can” thesis.