Tracy Gustilo

There is an incompatibility between a humans-in-nature world view and biocentric ethics. Taking humans as evolved moral agents poses difficulties for an ethical view that would accord intrinsic value and moral status to non-humans. Environmental ethicists' premises about the intrinsic value of humans, the morally relevant relationships between humans and non-humans, and the role of reason in justifying an ethic are all disputed. Nor do ethics based on sociobiological principles resolve the incompatibility. After establishing the incompatibility as both real and potentially devastating to contemporary moral thought , the task is to resolve it by developing a theory of the evolution of moral agency and altruistic ethical systems such that the strong altruism required by biocentric ethics can be accommodated within a naturalistic world view. First, in a completely new approach to the origins of ethics, the theory describes the evolution of moral agency as the evolution of an ability to make decisions based on concepts of good, bad, right, and wrong. Animal precursors to moral agency are described, a seven stage evolutionary path is outlined, and suggestions are made for testing the theory empirically and through mathematical modeling . Second, two forms of imperfect adaptation, due to the "problem redefinition" of culture and limits on the optimality of behavioral mechanisms, are proposed to explain the evolved moral agent's capacity for strong altruism. Ethically motivated strong altruism in belief and behavior is the maladaptive side-effect of an otherwise adaptive decision-making mechanism of moral agency . The work concludes with some philosophical implications of the theory for objective moral agency and ethical justification. Scientists, philosophers, and theologians are all challenged to make the leaps of faith necessary to a full reconciliation of humans-in-nature with the search for moral truth