Can You Be Both A Moral Rationalist & A Moral Sentimentalist?

Andrew Kemle says that evolutionary forces give us the answer.

- ANDREW KEMLE

One of the major discoveries in the social sciences over the past few decades has been that people have innate other-regarding preferences. This means that we generally take other people’s interests and well-being into account when making decisions, and that although socialization can affect the strength of these preferences, we have them as part of our genetic make-up. We are born with them. Other-regarding preferences, in fact, appear to have a deep evolutionary history. Not only do other primates display signs of empathy and concern for their peers, but so do animals separated from us by hundreds of millions of years of seperate evolutionary development, such as some insects and possibly certain species of octopi (Peter Godfrey-Smith’s 2016 book Other Minds is highly enlightening in this regard).