Law and Biology: The New Synthesis?
E. Donald Elliott · bepress Legal Repository · 1997
For the last two thousand years, we have made remarkably little progressin moral philosophy, or its stepchild, jurisprudence, by attacking the field as amatter of a priori philosophy. Recently, a different approach has begun to beused, which is to treat morality as an empirical matter subject to scientificstudy. I am thinking of the work of Carol Gilligan, or Jim Fishkin's BeyondSubjective Morality, or Roger Masters' Beyond Relativism, and some of thework in evolutionary psychology by people like Robin Wright and Matt Ridley. Much of this literature is summarized and extended in Frans de Waal'srecent book, Good Natured, on the evolutionary basis of morality. Theseworks all look at what we previously thought of as abstract issues of moralphilosophy as empirical issues of social science.