ABSTRACT
I believe that ethics is an adaptation, put in place by our genes as selected in the struggle for life, to aid each and every one of us individually. Because it is a social adaptation, I believe that essentially we (societies, but at some ultimate level the whole human species) share the same ethics, and that charges of relativism are ill-taken. I believe also that ethics is genuine in the sense that people really do do things because they think them right (and conversely), and connected with this I would argue that there is a real difference between the language of ethics and the language of other aspects of human life, specifically those about matters of fact. However, my claim is that ethics is without justification or foundation – in this sense, I am a non-cognitivist – although I do think that an essential component of ethics as an adaptation is that we believe that ethics does have a real foundation (we ‘objectify’).
