According to some evolutionary theorists human prosocial dispositions emerged in a context of inter-group competition and violence that made our psychology parochially prosocial, ie. cooperative towards in-groups and competitive towards strangers. This evolutionary hypothesis is sometimes employed in bioethical debates to argue that human nature and contemporary environments, and especially large-scale societies, are mismatched. In this article we caution against the use of mismatch theories in moral philosophy in general and discuss empirical evidence that puts into question mismatch theories based on parochial prosociality. Evolutionary mismatch theories play at best a rhetorical role in these moral debates and may misrepresent the status of relevant evolutionary research. We finally recommend that moral philosophers interested in the evolutionary literature also engage with dispositions such as xenophilia and social tolerance to counterbalance the focus on psychological mismatches adopted so far.
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A recent turn in the cognitive sciences has deepened the attention on embodied and situated dynamics for explaining different cognitive processes such as perception, emotion, and social cognition. This has fostered an extensive interest in the social and ‘intersubjective’ nature of moral behavior, especially from the perspective of enactivism. In this paper, I argue that embodied and situated perspectives, enactivism in particular, nonetheless require further improvements with regards to their analysis of the social nature of human morality. In brief, enactivist proposals still do not define what features of the social-relational context, or which kind of processes within social interactions, make an evaluation or action morally relevant or distinctive from other types of social normativity. As an alternative to this proclivity, and seeking to complement the enactive perspective, I present a definition of the process of moral sense-making and offer an empirically-based ethical distinction between different domains of social knowledge in moral development. For doing so, I take insights from the constructivist tradition in moral psychology. My objective is not to radically oppose embodied and enactive alternatives but to expand the horizon of their conceptual and empirical contributions to morality research.
ResumenEste artículo pretende realizar un breve análisis conceptual sobre el término Antropoceno, y cuál ha sido la reflexión respecto a su uso como categoría temporal para describir la historia ecológica en general, y humana en particular. Las preocupaciones por la problemática ambiental contemporánea, han conllevado a la concienciación mundial sobre las acciones humanas sobre el medio ambiente, y han permitido el inicio de profundas revoluciones conceptuales que abogan por una transformación en la actitud ciudadana frente a la sostenibilidad del planeta tierra. Se realizará una reflexión desde la ética ambiental, sobre los principios que rigen el cuidado del medio ambiente y el concepto de desarrollo sostenible en el mundo contemporáneo. Los intentos por establecer una actitud ambiental responsable carecen aún de una ética no antropocéntrica, necesaria para una transformación real de los conflictos ambientales.Palabras clave: antropoceno; ecología humana; evolución humana; desarrollo sostenible; ética ambiental. Abstract This article intends to carry out a brief conceptual analysis of the term "Anthropocene" and what has been the reflection in respect to its use as a temporal category to describe ecological history in general
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