Abstract

Humans are a fundamentally ideal-seeking species. We routinely interpret our world not only in terms of how it is, but how it ought to be. We judge our own ideas and actions, those of others, and broader states of affairs. Such experiences perhaps naturally lead us to conclude that we are justified in thinking this way – that reality itself is such that certain ideas, behaviours, and outcomes are objectively better, “more good”, than others, regardless of what any of us happens to think. Much of Western moral philosophy has sought to ground this conviction in a robust conception of reality capable of supporting the idea, for example, that human beings were created for a purpose. But what if, as an emerging biological consensus suggests, our evolutionary origins and nature shed no light on any ultimate purpose to human existence? What if our strong tendency to idealize and moralize can be explained by an evolutionary perspective, while remaining unjustified by that same perspective? If we restrict ourselves to such a view, or even broaden it to include a strong conception of personal freedom, we still find a range of ethical views available to us. Yet all of them, I argue, fail to vindicate our deepest intuitions about purpose and moral reality. Each invite us to endorse an ethic, an ideal, that we have constructed for ourselves, whether individually or collectively. Without a creator God, and a divine plan, no available option can validate or fully make sense of the robust judgements we routinely pass on ourselves, one another, and the state of the world.