Recent years have seen a flowering of interest in the evolution of morality, an interest that is also expressed in several popular and scholarly books discussing its implications. Since direct empirical evidence is scarce, authors use various studies as indirect evidence and make use of fictional models and analogies. The resulting theories entail different kinds of explanations ranging from causal-historical, to functional, and ‘how-possibly’ explanations. This methodological eclecticism, in turn, involves different ideological assumptions about what kinds of beings we are or what abilities we need to be moral.

My project aims to investigate the role and legitimacy of such assumptions and how-possibly scenarios combining resources drawn both from philosophy of science and ideology critique. During my stay in Greifswald, I will focus on the historical dimension of this kind of genealogical reasoning about the origins of morality. Historical or genealogical explanations of morality can be traced back to the 19th century and range from Darwin to Nietzsche. The focus of my research lies on the development of genealogy as a method and the diverging assumptions about human nature and human morality that we can find in the different approaches to genealogy.

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