The Evolutionary Game Origin of Moral Facts

Chuang Liu

Abstract: 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.