Mesoudi Alex, Danielson Peter
Centre for Applied Ethics, University of British Columbia, 227-6356 Agricultural Rd., Vancouver V6T 1Z2, BC, Canada.
Theory Biosci. 2008 Aug;127(3):229-40. doi: 10.1007/s12064-008-0027-y. Epub 2008 Mar 21.
Recent work in the fields of evolutionary ethics and moral psychology appears to be converging on a single empirically- and evolutionary-based science of morality or ethics. To date, however, these fields have failed to provide an adequate conceptualisation of how culture affects the content and distribution of moral norms. This is particularly important for a large class of moral norms relating to rapidly changing technological or social environments, such as norms regarding the acceptability of genetically modified organisms. Here we suggest that a science of morality/ethics can benefit from adopting a cultural evolution or gene-culture coevolution approach, which treats culture as a second, separate evolutionary system that acts in parallel to biological/genetic evolution. This cultural evolution approach brings with it a set of established theoretical concepts (e.g. different cultural transmission mechanisms) and empirical methods (e.g. evolutionary game theory) that can significantly improve our understanding of human morality.
进化伦理学和道德心理学领域的近期研究似乎正趋向于形成一门基于经验和进化的单一道德或伦理科学。然而，迄今为止，这些领域未能充分概念化文化如何影响道德规范的内容和分布。这对于与快速变化的技术或社会环境相关的一大类道德规范尤为重要，比如关于转基因生物可接受性的规范。在此我们认为，道德/伦理科学可以从采用文化进化或基因 - 文化共同进化方法中受益，该方法将文化视为与生物/基因进化并行运作的第二个独立进化系统。这种文化进化方法带来了一系列既定的理论概念（例如不同的文化传播机制）和实证方法（例如进化博弈论），它们能够显著增进我们对人类道德的理解。
