Ruse's Darwinian meta-ethics: A critique

Michael Ruse, in Taking Darwin Seriously seeks to establish that taking Darwin seriously requires us to treat morality as subjective and naturalistic. I argue that, if morality is not objective, then we have no good reason for being moral if we can avoid detection and punishment. As a consequence, we will only continue to behave morally as long as we remain ignorant of Ruse's theory, that is, as long as the cat is not let out of the bag. Ruse offers a number of arguments to show that his theory can overcome such problems. I argue that they all fail. Ruse also argues that he can offer a naturalistic account of ethics which steps around the naturalistic fallacy and avoids the confusion of reasons with causes. His principal argument for this view is an analogy between spiritualism and morality. I argue that this analogy fails.     

Behavioral patterns of two fiddler crab species Uca rapax and Uca tangeri in a seminatural mangrove system

Zoos increasingly transform their exhibitions from traditional one‐species enclosures to more natural exhibits, that is, environments that capture part of an ecosystem including a selection of animals and plants that occur there. Thus, enhancing the experience of its human visitors while also allowing its residents to possibly show more natural behavior. In 2017 Royal Burger's Zoo (Arnhem, The Netherlands) created and opened a mangrove‐like environment containing fiddler crabs. Fiddler crabs display a broad range of behaviors, and this research examines which wild‐type behavior and behavioral patterns can be observed on a seminatural mudflat. The behavior shown by Uca rapax and Uca tangeri on the mudflat was counted each hour between 07:00 and 17:00. An asymmetric tidal regime was present in the enclosure including two high water periods. Various known fiddler crab behaviors, including waving and combat, were observed but no copulation. A clear pattern in exposed crabs on the mudflat was found, with low numbers visible in the early morning and the highest numbers present in the early afternoon, while number of visitors did not have a significant effect on this pattern. Interestingly, the highest abundances were not observed around the ebbing tide (07:00–09:00), as observed in the wild, but somewhat later, possibly due to the asymmetric tidal scheme or the interaction of tidal and daily rhythms. This study shows that in captivity, fiddler crabs indeed show a range of natural behaviors which is linked to the tidal and possibly daily rhythm as well.     

Evolutionary Ethics: An Irresistible Temptation: Some Reflections on Paul Farber‘s The Temptation of Evolutionary Ethics

In his recent The Temptation of Evolutionary Ethics, Paul Farber has given a negative assessment of the last one hundred years of attempts in Anglo-American philosophy, beginning with Darwin, to develop an evolutionary ethics. Farber identifies some version of the naturalistic fallacy as one of the central sources for the failures of evolutionary ethics. For this reason, and others, Farber urges that though it has its attraction, evolutionary ethics is a temptation to be resisted. In this discussion I identify three major, historically relevant forms of the naturalistic fallacy, the (1) the deductive, (2) genetic, and (3) open question forms and argue that none of them pose an intrinsic problem for evolutionary ethics. I conclude that on this score at least there is no reason to resist temptation.     

Interspecific aggression in mixed ungulate species exhibits

Mixed ungulate species exhibits are often plagued with difficulties stemming from interspecific aggression. Several aspects of interspecific aggression were investigated in mixed ungulate species exhibits at the Audubon Zoolnogical Garden in New Orleans, Louisiana. Success of a mixed species exhibit was found to be correlated with the rate of male-initiated aggression, but not with the total rate of aggression. Neither taxonomic relatedness nor size difference between the species could be used to predict the success of a species pairing. The total rate of aggression in an exhibit was related to taxonomic relatedness, aggression being highest between distantly related species. Increases in aggression were triggered by births, mating activity, and introduction of an animal to an exhibit.     

The insufficience of supervenient explanations of moral actions: Really taking Darwin and the naturalistic fallacy seriously

In a recent paper in this journal (Rottschaefer and Martinsen 1990) we have proposed a view of Darwinian evolutionary metaethics that we believe improves upon Michael Ruse's (e.g., Ruse 1986) proposals by claiming that there are evolutionary based objective moral values and that a Darwinian naturalistic account of the moral good in terms of human fitness can be given that avoids the naturalistic fallacy in both its definitional and derivational forms while providing genuine, even if limited, justifications for substantive ethical claims. Jonathan Barrett (this issue) has objected to our proposal contending that we cannot hold for the reality of supervenient moral properties without either falling foul of the naturalistic fallacy or suffering the consequences of postulating inexplicable moral properties. In reply, we show that Barrett's explicit arguments that we commit either the definitional or derivational form of the naturalistic fallacy fail and that his naturalistic intuitions that supervenience explanations of moral properties by nonmoral properties force us into what we call the explanatory form of the naturalistic fallacy also fail. Positively, his objections help us to clarify the nature of the naturalistic fallacy within an evolutionary based naturalistic ethics and to point out the proper role of both supervenience explanations and moral explanations in such an ethics.     

Dopamine Is Signaled by Mid-frequency Oscillations and Boosts Output Layers Visual Information in Visual Cortex

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