Hidden motives

During the final stages of my Masters thesis, I bought a book called Evolutionary Ethics. Admittedly, part of the reason for buying this book was that I knew a student at that time who was really into the principle of that. I didn't really think she knew what she was talking about, and it sounded like a dead end to me. But she had made me curious about what work was actually being done in that area. The book is a collection of different papers that have been written about the subject in recent times. I didn't read all the essays, but the consistent theme among the ones that I did read was that the field contained many difficulties. One such difficulty was the fact that it tended to produce more or less egoist theories of ethics that no one in their right mind would actually support. One theorist stated the difficulty of formulating an ethical theory based on enlightened self-interest. Although the theory could explain human behaviour very well, people didn't want to support an ethic that sanctioned what they actually were doing. I agree, and find this peculiar and hard to explain, to the extent that it sparked an entire thesis from me. If I am going to read The Moral Animal now, I should also go back and finish Evolutionary Ethics as well. I will not be able to get hold of my copy of Evolutionary Ethics until Sunday, however, as it is still at my parents' place and I will not be able to pick it up until then.

I thought of this from pp.9-10 of The Moral Animal by Robert Wright. He writes that "Natural selection appears to have hidden our true selves from our conscious selves." That this is true seems clear, but what I really want to know is why this is the case, and how it helps produce the image of morality with which we find ourselves. I hope I will have a better idea of this by the time I finish the book.