Jonathan Haidt is one of the leading proponents today of Darwinian moral psychology. He takes up many of the themes that I have considered on this blog as he explains morality as rooted in the psychological propensities of evolved human nature. I have...

Gerry Mackie has written me an email message about my two recent posts on female circumcision. He has given me permission to reproduce it here: "Thanks for the accurate account of my views! "I also read your analysis of Fuambai Ahmadu. She is...

When I first wrote about female circumcision in 1998 in Darwinian Natural Right, my thinking was decisively influenced by some writing by Gerry Mackie, who is now a professor of political science at the University of California at San Diego. Now,...

In Darwinian Natural Right, I have a long section on female circumcision (149-60). I use the debate over whether female circumcision should be condemned as a violation of human rights to illustrate the dangers of multicultural relativism in denying...

From its first publication in 1975, Edward O. Wilson's book Sociobiology has stirred disputes over his claim that ethics is rooted in human biology. Our deepest intuitions of right and wrong, he asserted on the first page of the book, are guided by the...