Philip Kitcher makes a provocative proposal: Instead of conceiving ethical commands as divine revelations or as the discoveries of brilliant thinkers, we should see our ethical practices as evolving over tens of thousands of years, as members of our species have worked out how to live together and prosper. Elaborating this radical new vision, Kitcher shows how the limited altruistic tendencies of our ancestors enabled a fragile social life, how our forebears learned to regulate their interactions with one another, and how human societies eventually grew into forms of previously unimaginable complexity. The most successful of the many millennia-old experiments in how to live, he contends, survive in our values today.

Philip Kitcher, The Ethical Project This is a very substantial book which attempts to re-cast the nature and history of ethics as a form of "social technology", aimed at remedying "altruism failures", and generally moving humanity beyond the kind of social life endured by other primates — nasty, poor, and brutish, but not solitary. (Though he doesn't mention it, this is almost an inversion of Brecht's line "grub first, then ethics".) The guiding stars are Dewey (especially Human Nature and Conduct), John Stuart Mill (especially On Liberty and The Subjection of Women), and modern work on the evolution of cooperation. Kitcher builds from here to an examination of what counts as ethical progress, appropriate method and substance for meta-ethics, and appropriate method and recommendations for actual substantive ethics at the present day. The latter are strongly egalitarian, and not just founded on the "expanding circle" of empathy notion.