Michael Stingl

Location of death in Canada. A comparison of 20th-century hospital and nonhospital locations of death and corresponding population trends.

This report compares 20th-century Canadian hospital and nonhospital location-of-death trends and corresponding population mortality trends. One of the chief findings is a hospitalization-of-death trend, with deaths in hospital peaking in 1994 at 80.5% of all deaths. The rise in hospitalization was more pronounced in the years prior to the development of a national health care program (1966). Another key finding is a gradual reduction since 1994 in hospital deaths, with this reduction occurring across all sociodemographic variables. This suggests nonhospital care options are needed to support what may be an ongoing shift away from hospitalized death and dying.

Evolutionary naturalism and the objectivity of morality

We propose an objective and justifiable ethics that is contingent on the truth of evolutionary theory. We do not argue for the truth of this position, which depends on the empirical question of whether moral functions form a natural class, but for its cogency and possibility. The position we propose combines the advantages of Kantian objectivity with the explanatory and motivational advantages of moral naturalism. It avoids problems with the epistemological inaccessibility of transcendent values, while avoiding the relativism or subjectivism often associated with moral naturalism. Our position emerges out of criticisms of the contemporary sociobiological views of morality found in the writings of Richard Alexander, Michael Ruse, and Robert Richards.

Moral distress: an emerging problem for nurses in long‐term care?

Nurses and other professional caregivers are increasingly recognising the issue of moral distress and the deleterious effect it may have on professional work life, staff recruitment and staff retention. Although the nursing literature has begun to address the issue of moral distress and how to respond to it, much of this literature has typically focused on high acuity areas, such as intensive care nursing. However, with an ageing population and increasing demand for resources and services to meet the needs of older people, it is likely that nurses in long‐term care are going to be increasingly affected by moral distress in their work. This paper briefly reviews the literature pertaining to the concept of moral distress, explores the causes and effects of moral distress within the nursing profession and argues that many nurses and other healthcare professionals working with older persons may need to become increasingly proactive to safeguard against the possibility of moral distress.

All the Monkeys Aren't in the Zoo: Evolutionary Ethics and the Possibility of Moral Knowledge

The error theory of moral judgment says that moral judgments, though often believed to be objectively true, never are. The tendency to believe in the objectivity of our moral beliefs, like the beliefs themselves, is rooted in objective features of human psychology, and not in objective features of the natural world that might exist apart from human psychology. In naturalized epistemology, it is tempting to take this view as the default hypothesis. It appears to make the fewest assumptions in accounting for the fact that humans not only make moral judgments, but believe them to be, at least some of the time, objectively true. In this paper I argue that from an evolutionary perspective, the error theory is not the most parsimonious alternative. It is simpler to suppose that mental representations with moral content arose as direct cognitive and motivational responses to independent moral facts. The argument will not address several large and important questions. First, it will not address the question of whether primates other than humans can really possess mental states that might reliably represent the world around them; nor will it address the questions of whether these representational states, should they exist, must be

Evolutionary ethics and moral theory

ConclusionThis example, like the others, demands further discussion. My conclusion must therefore remain modest: an agent-neutral theory of our moral competence is not biologically implausible. Agent-centered rules like tit-for-tat, prerogatives, special obligations, and duties not to harm others might be best regarded as belonging to the theory of moral performance rather than the theory of moral competence. For biologists who may think otherwise, the general argument of this essay is that any claims to the contrary must be based on more empirically well-developed theories of our moral competence and moral performance.More adequate theories of both kinds are worth developing, even if by themselves they determine nothing about how we ought to live our lives. Biology may help us understand the broad taxonomical categories of moral performance. It may also explain why, at the deepest levels of our moral thinking, we so easily slide into agent-neutral ways of reasoning. But how we ought to live our lives is something that must be determined by social experiment and moral argumentation. Discoveries regarding the empirical nature of morality cannot be made independently of the actual workings of our moral competence, which is itself only one factor in broader social and psychological processes that are capable of leading human beings down any number of more or less morally laudable paths.For a similar conclusion, see John Collier and Michael Stingl, “Evolutionary Naturalism and the Objectivity of Morality,” Biology and Philosophy, 8 (1993), pp. 47~0. The current essay owes much to discussions with John Collier, as well as to comments from several anonymous referees.

After the fall: Religious capacities and the error theory of morality

The target article proposes an error theory for religious belief. In contrast, moral beliefs are typically not counterintuitive, and some moral cognition and motivation is functional. Error theories for moral belief try to reduce morality to nonmoral psychological capacities because objective moral beliefs seem too fragile in a competitive environment. An error theory for religious belief makes this unnecessary.

Evolutionary Moral Realism

Evolutionary moral realism is the view that there are moral values with roots in evolution that are both specifically moral and exist independently of human belief systems. In beginning to sketch the outlines of such a view, we examine moral goods like fairness and empathetic caring as valuable and real aspects of the environments of species that are intelligent and social, or at least developing along an evolutionary trajectory that could lead to a level of intelligence that would enable individual members of the species to recognize and respond to such things as the moral goods they in fact are. We suggest that what is most morally interesting and important from a biological perspective is the existence and development of such trajectories, rather than the position of one particular species, such as our own, on one particular trajectory.