Research On Altruism And Environmental Ethics

"Altruism" is an important issue in evolutionary biology that originated from Darwin who concerned about the essence of human morality. The topic for this paper is the significance of research on altruism to plausibility of moral expansion in environmental ethics. The aim of this paper is to form a positive knowledge of altruism which is the nature of human, from the qualitative discussion of the source, characteristic and evolution of altruism, and defend the rationality of expansion of human morality into nature. Briefly discussed four questions about it: Whether altruism is the result of natural selection? Whether altruism is the nature of human beings? How is altruism exist and evolve in the brute environment of struggle for existence? What is the relationship between altruism and moral expansion?Altruistic behavior is the phenomenon which extensively exists in human society and other social animal. It is the selection of social organism in a process of natural selection, which is an adaptive result in environmental alteration on the basis of mutual benefit and collaboration. It is a cooperative relationship which is to realize the heredity of individual and population and the better living environment among individuals or between individual and population, and which is to achieve a superior advantage of struggle for existence.Humans are the highly developed intelligent beings on earth. Ancient ancestors of human beings enter into social relations suffering from the cruel stress of restricted natural resources and competition for existence. Humans are probing into the innate character and evolving regulations of nature and mankind in order to promote the existence and devolopment of population. Thereinto, the knowledge of human nature determines the image of humans and the relationship between humans and nature.Mankind is the moral species in nature, who follows the cultural evolution in the long cource of natural selection. Altruism is the nature of morality, which expanded with the expansion process of human population during the natural history of human beings, which expanded biologicalfamily into individuals within the group of unrelated individuals, and into the nature objects based on the theory of ecology.Environmental ethics tries to establish the universal moral relationship between man and nature through the philosophical reflection of relationship between man and nature. Humans and other non-human beings are the same existential and moral subject. The opinion of moral expansion of human beings into nature is the modern renaissance of philosophical anthropology which research into the essence of human beings. It is the third transcension of human morality. Morality is the life style of human beings, the objective of moral evolution is to ensure the earth's ecological system's value maximization, that is to say, to ensure the steady-state of ecosystem. And then, to propell the harmony and coevlution between man and nature. In realizing the purposes, the expansion of human moral solicitude is the outward manifestation that inhabits in the realization process. As a consequence, the essence of moral evolution is the spatial development of altruistic love over time.