Wilson mentioned two limited ethical system at present which he believed is inefficient in enabling moral progress. Btw, note 'temporarily'.Scientists and humanists should consider together the possibility that the time has come for ethics to be removed temporarily from the hands of the philosophers and biologicized.
Chapter 27
The second is that of Ethical Behaviorism and countered by Kohlberg's developmental-genetic conception of ethical behavior which is pointing towards biology and genes.The first is ethical intuitionism, the belief that the mind has a direct awareness of true right and wrong that it can formalize by logic and translate into rules of social action.
The purest guiding precept of secular Western thought has been the theory of the social contract as formulated by Locke, Rousseau, and Kant.
The Achilles heel of the intuitionist position is that it relies on the emotive judgment of the brain as though that organ must be treated as a black box.
While few will disagree that justice as fairness is an ideal state for disembodied spirits, the conception is in no way explanatory or predictive with reference to human beings.
Consequently, it does not consider the ultimate ecological or genetic consequences of the rigorous prosecution of its conclusions.
Perhaps explanation and prediction will not be needed for the millennium.
But this is unlikely—the human genotype and the ecosystem in which it evolved were fashioned out of extreme unfairness.
In either case the full exploration of the neural machinery of ethical judgment is desirable and already in progress.
Wilson called for the Genetic Evolution of [Morality &] Ethics.the second mode of conceptualization, can be called ethical behaviorism.
Its basic proposition, which has been expanded most fully by J. F. Scott (1971), holds that moral commitment is entirely learned, with operant conditioning being the dominant mechanism.
Opposing this theory is the developmental-genetic conception of ethical behavior.
The best-documented version has been provided by Lawrence Kohlberg (1969).
Kohlberg’s viewpoint is structuralist and specifically Piagetian, and therefore not yet related to the remainder of biology.
Piaget has used the expression “genetic epistemology” and Kohlberg “cognitive-developmental” to label the general concept.
However, the results will eventually become incorporated into a broadened developmental biology and genetics.
What Wilson proposed is, to enable morality and ethics to progress expeditiously we need to dig deep into biology, i.e. genes, the 'neural machineries' and DNA in addition to all other necessary factors.Even if the problem were solved tomorrow, however, an important piece would still be missing.
This is the Genetic Evolution of Ethics.
In the first chapter of this book I argued that ethical philosophers intuit the deontological canons of morality by consulting the emotive centers of their own hypothalamic-limbic system.
This is also true of the developmentalists, even when they are being their most severely objective.
Only by interpreting the activity of the emotive centers as a biological adaptation can the meaning of the canons be deciphered.
As Wilson mentioned above the above is already in progress; he stated that in 2000. Since then there had been a lot of research on Morality and Ethics in the direction of biology, neurosciences, genetics, genomics and the latest advanced scientific knowledge.
However, while I have been following the evolutionary, biological, neuroscientific trends re Morality and Ethics, NO ONE in this forum is doing so, but rather they are still grappling and stuck with the classical theories of Morality and Ethics.
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