Philip Kitcher

There are a number of controversies surrounding the Human Genome Project. Some criticisms are based on the contention that the full human sequence will be scientifically worthless; others stem from short-term worries about the social impact of genetic testing and the release of genetic information about individuals. I argue that, properly understood, the HGP is a valuable scientific project with a misleading name, that the moral issues surrounding the short-term difficulties are relatively straightforward but that there are problems of practical politics in implementing the obvious solutions. Finally, I suggest that the HGP serves as the occasion for raising deeper philosophical questions about our commitment to improve the quality of human lives

Until the late twentieth century social epistemology was a neglected subject. Alvin Goldman was one of the first epistemologists to recognize its importance, and, in a series of essays, he provided a conception of how social epistemology should be pursued and applied that conception to particular cases. Knowledge in a Social World develops the conception more systematically, and considers a broad range of social practices. The scope of Goldman’s discussion and the characteristic clarity with which he approaches the issues make this book the first classic in the field.

Coauthored by Philip Kitcher, deals critically with the view – whose most influential proponent is Bas van Fraassen – that the traditional problems of scientific explanation can be resolved by means of pragmatic considerations alone. This approach, elaborated in 1980 in The Scientific Image, has found much favor among philosophers of science. As this chapter reveals, however, the traditional problems do not disappear when the resources of pragmatics are brought to bear. The authors show that if van Fraassen introduces constraints that allow him to avoid the “anything goes” theory of explanation, then he must face what he would regard as the unacceptable supposition that there is an objective virtue of theories distinct from their saving of the phenomena.

Discussions of altruism occur in three importantly different contexts. During the past four decades, evolutionary theory has been concerned with the possibility that forms of behaviour labelled as altruistic could emerge and could be maintained under natural selection. In these discussions, an agent A is said to act altruistically towards a beneficiary B when A's action promotes the expected reproductive success of B at expected reproductive cost to A. This sort of altruism, biological altruism, is quite different from the kind of behaviour important to debates about ethical and social issues. There the focus is on psychological altruism, a notion that is concerned with the intentions of the agent and that need have no connection with the spread of anyone's genes. Psychological altruists are people with other-directed desires, emotions or intentions (this is a rough preliminary characterization, to be refined below). Finally, in certain kinds of social scientific research, the important concept is that of behavioural altruism. From the outside, behavioural altruists look like psychological altruists, although their motives and preferences may be very different.

I offer some proposals for how human sociobiology might be transformed from a collection of unsupported claims into a rigorous successor discipline. The achievement of behavioral ecology in providing functional descriptions of animal behavior suggest that the goal of human sociobiology ought to be to give functional characterizations of human behavior. Much traditional human sociobiology tries to be more ambitious, attempting to build grand theories of human nature. I argue that these ventures fail, and that pursuit of the more modest task of achieving functional descriptions will require that human sociobiologists undergo a four-stage process. The four stages involve: the liberalization of evolutionary theory, the construction of precise models and the development of systematic data, the recognition of the effects of cultural transmission, and the integration of evolutionary ideas with considerations about proximate and developmental mechanisms. Only the first two stages are treated in any detail