Evolutionary approaches to the study of emotions have shown us the crucial roles they play in our lives. They can bring into focus the most relevant features of a problem, helping us to deal with complex situations. Bodily expressions of emotions can complement speech, helping to disambiguate and enrich verbal content, making communication faster and more efficient. Innate emotional responses, triggered by the identification of stereotypical situations, can be several times faster than deliberation, providing individuals with a considerable evolutionary advantage when dealing with fast-changing environments. Many evolutionary accounts of morality attribute an important role to emotions. For Ronald de Sousa, here we must be careful not to take the evolutionary story too far. Evolution may have given us these emotions, but we cannot rely on it to fully explain human morality. According to de Sousa, while evolution may help us understand some mechanisms that underlie moral choices, moral value does not boil down to evolutionary advantage.

Topic

This one-day workshop will explore the advantages and limitations of using evolutionary accounts to support emotion theories in moral philosophy. It will be followed by a two-day conference at The University of Manchester specifically focussing on the work of Ronald De Sousa, who will participate in both events.

The workshop will address the central problem of the role of emotions in moral thinking and behaviour. In the history of philosophy, we find a wide range of moral theories that attach an important role to emotions: Humean approaches to moral philosophy, emotivism, expressivism and other variations on the general theme of sentimentalism. They may be internally coherent, but do they need to be integrated and shown to be compatible with evolutionary explanations and backed up by empirical data? Perhaps an evolutionary account of morality cannot tell the whole story, but could it help support sentimentalism?

This workshop aims to build conceptual bridges between philosophy and empirical and evolutionary research fields. We welcome papers that approach the topic from within the fields of meta-ethics, normative ethics, neurology, evolutionary biology, evolutionary game theory, evolutionary psychology, evolutionary anthropology, empirical economy or other appropriate interdisciplinary approaches. Both professional researchers and graduate students are invited to submit proposals.

Format

Individual papers will consist of 20 minute presentations, and there will be plenty of time for discussion.

Submission

Send a 300-500 words abstract to vasco.castela@manchester.ac.uk by 21st January 2006. The subject line of your email should read “Workshop Submission: Emotions, Ethics, and Adaptation”. Notification of acceptance will be e-mailed by the end of January. We would hope that selected papers from the workshop will be published with papers from the conference.