Moral Value and the Sociobiological Reduction (IN: Inquiries into Values, edited by S H Lee)

The synthesis of sociology and biology in the new science of sociobiology provides decision-theoretical explanations of social phenomena in terms of the reproductive self-interest of the individual members of a society. Sociobiology further projects the reduction of normative value, ethical choice, and moral belief as aspects of learned cultural practices under sociobiological principles. There is however an asymmetry in the kind of explanations that can be given in sociobiology, though this problem has been overlooked by even its most severe critics. It is argued that the theory cannot support satisfactory teleological explanations of reproductively unsucessful social behavior, and that this limitation in particular undermines the effort to advance a sociobiological interpretation of ethics. The difficulties encoutnered by sociobiological reductions of moral value are explored in connection with practical reasoning about the genetically self-defeating social mechanisms of mass celibacy, abortion, suicide, and global nuclear war.