ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the assumption of reductive naturalism, a foundational philosophical assumption undergirding contemporary evolutionary psychological theories of behavior, as well as some of the logical and practical implications of reductive naturalism. In particular, we argue that reductive naturalism implies necessary determinism, which in turn entails nihilism. Further, the chapter examines how the fundamentally reductive and nihilistic worldview engendered by evolutionary psychological accounts of human behavior not only denies human agency, meaning, and moral significance, but also opens the door for a resurgence of the project of eugenics. The arguments of modern-day advocates of cognitive and moral bioenhancement are explored in some depth. By way of an alternative to the reductive naturalism emblematic of contemporary evolutionary psychological theorizing, the chapter also briefly explores a phenomenological perspective in which human behavior is understood as fundamentally meaningful and agentic in nature. A phenomenological approach, it is argued, offers an account of human action and lived-experience that precludes the possibility of reducing human beings to merely material entities to be engineered for instrumentalist purposes.
