The Evolutionary Game Origin of Moral Facts

In the backdrop of an evolutionary approach for an expressivist conception of morality (á la Gibbard), we argue that there are moral facts, and they are a species of group or “we” facts that have a separate evolutionary origin and ontological status from the individual or “me” facts. We discuss the empirical evidence for we-commitment or we-identity in the comparative psychology literature.

We then discuss the possibility of designing evolutionary games with certain population structures such that the dynamics leads to the appearance of the we-commit (a how-possible explanation). In the end, we discuss connections of the above with the philosophical literature on group or social ontology.