Is morality reducible to evolution and culture? Adam Rochussen and I discuss

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About the Author

Jimmy Alfonso Licon is a philosophy professor at Arizona State University working on ignorance, ethics, cooperation and God. Before that, he taught at University of Maryland, Georgetown, and Towson University. He loves classic rock and Western, movies, and combat sports. He lives with his wife, a lawyer, at the foot of the Superstition Mountains. He also abides.

A few months ago, I sat down with a cancer immunologist from the Salk Institute, Adam Rochussen, to discuss the relationship between ethics and evolution and we we quickly found ourselves in deep waters. Adam advanced a strongly Dawkinsian view: morality, at its core, is an evolved biological trait—a gene-level adaptation that helped our ancestors cooperate and propagate. Ethics, on his account, is the cultural and philosophical overlay: our attempt to formalize and rationalize those inherited instincts. Veganism became our central test case. Adam argued that some forms of ethical veganism are a misapplication of evolved compassion, especially our tendency to anthropomorphize animals whose “cuteness” hijacks psychological mechanisms originally tuned for protecting kin.

I pressed him on what philosophers care most about, namely normativity. Even if evolution explains why we have moral instincts, does it explain why some actions are wrong regardless of survival outcomes or gene frequencies? Our discussion ranged through birth control, demographic decline, self-sacrifice, and Peter Singer’s drowning child argument. If morality is whatever survives evolutionary selection, what work is left for ethics? Is philosophy merely describing biology in slow motion, or does it supply genuine critical leverage over our inherited moral psychology? We didn’t settle the matter—but the tension itself is illuminating. Nothing was settled in our discussion, but it was a fun exchange nonetheless.

Adam Rochussen is a postdoctoral fellow at Salk Institute for Biological Studies working on cancer immunotherapy. He has a great Substack, Fruits of Eden, where he writes about biology, philosophy, and politics, and is always provocative.

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