Conscience and evolution

A book review at Nature starts:

What is our conscience, and where does it come from? In her highly readable Conscience, the philosopher Patricia Churchland argues that “we would have no moral stance on anything unless we were social”.

That we have a conscience at all relates to how evolution has shaped our neurobiology for social living. Thus, we judge what is right or wrong using feelings that urge us in a general direction and judgement that shapes these urges into actions. Such judgement typically reflects “some standard of a group to which the individual feels attached”. This idea of conscience as a neurobiological capacity for internalizing social norms contrasts with strictly philosophical accounts of how and why we tell right from wrong.

It seems she is very even handed in her criticisms of moral philosophers, hating both Kant:

She eviscerates moral philosophers who believe that moral rules can be utterly divorced from biology and find a foundation based on reasoning alone. She points out that the assumption that morality is not properly philosophically grounded unless it is universal is itself merely a rebuttable stipulation. She notes that decades of attempts to define universal rules have not succeeded. And finally, she shows that most moral dilemmas are just that: dilemmas in which it is impossible to satisfy all the constraints, and which put ostensibly universal principles into conflict with each other.

but she's no fan of utilitarianism too:

Neither does she have much use for utilitarians, with their simple calculus of adding up the greatest good for the greatest number. She rightly points out that living in a utilitarian society would be unsatisfying for most people, because we are not partial to all members of our society equally. We prefer our own groups, our own friends, our own families. For most people, as she argues, “love for one’s family members is a colossal neurobiological and psychological fact that mere ideology cannot wish away”. She concludes that utilitarianism is irresolvably at odds with how our brains function, given that we evolved to care more deeply about people we know than about those whom we do not.

Could be a good read...