Tom Heneghan, the religion editor at Reuters and author of the FaithWorld blog, has posted an insightful review of the recently released book, Wild Justice. The book, which looks like a worthwhile read, is written by evolutionary biologist and animal behaviourist, Marc Bekoff, and bioethicist, Jessica Pierce, and explores the Read more…
‘Cardinal values’ are those values that are fundamental to rest of your moral system, the values from which all other values spring. They’re like axiomatic values, the very ground floor of morality.
Some contemporary moral philosophies state their cardinal values as happiness (hedonism), compassion (Buddhism), altruism (many), the Golden Rule, respect for autonomous rational agents or duty (Kant) – although many moral philosophies simply skip over the question of cardinal values and claim that promoting goodness is good enough (I suspect Rawls suffers from this somewhat tautological approach).
What I’m concerned about is what cardinal values spring from an evolutionary ethics point of view. For evolutionary ethics causes us to question many of the other cardinal values. Let’s take happiness as an example. If happiness truly was a cardinal value, it should be irreducible to other values.