Description
The origin of morality is a fundamental question in ethics which entangles many critical philosophical discussions. The addition of evolutionary theory has brought new opportunities for this discussion, it switched human ethical quest from philosophical speculation to a scientific explanation with empirical evidence. Explaining human moral phenomena from the perspective of evolution has led to different understandings of human nature and the meaning of morality. By integrating evolutionary evidences, modern decision and game theoretic insights, social contract theory is more and more becoming a unignorable discourses in moral and political studies after John Rawls' revolutionary work Theory of Justice, according to Skyrms' view. while Contractarianism as a member in social contract theory subset is a representative theory that applies contributions from decision theory and game theory to justify its ethical stance, in which evolutionary evidences and facts are also very complementary to the assumptions and claims of this theory in accordance with Binmore's, Trivers' analyses. For instance, as Contractarianism assumes that morality must involve the cooperation among agents and a possibility of the exploitation of others' cooperative surplus, the cooperative game analysis is conducive when considering moral issues, the application of techniques like Nash equilibrium, Pareto optimality, Shapley value and classical case of Prisoners' Dilemma, as kinds of Contractarian formulation, meanwhile are meaningful for the quest of the origin and conditions of morality.| Period | 29 Apr 2022 |
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| Held at | Department of Philosophy |
