ABSTRACT
Darwin remarks at the opening of the fourth chapter of The Descent of Man that philosophers of ‘consummate ability’ have not been short of things to say about our sense of right and wrong. Darwin calls this faculty the ‘moral sense’, which is ‘summed up in that short but imperious word ought, so full of high significance’ (Descent: 120). He sets out to examine the moral sense, partly because it is a human trait of such importance and interest, but also because, as far as he knows, ‘no one has approached it exclusively from the side of natural history’ (ibid.).
