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The Expanding Circle
Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress
Why do human beings help one another, and how can concern extend beyond family, community, or nation? Peter Singer approaches these questions by bringing evolutionary accounts of altruism into conversation with moral philosophy. Biology, he argues, helps explain the origins and limits of many social impulses: natural selection can favor assistance to relatives, reciprocal cooperation, and loyalty within groups. Yet an evolutionary explanation of conduct does not by itself determine how anyone ought to live. Singer assigns a decisive role to reason, whose demand for consistency can expose the arbitrariness of privileging one’s own group simply because it is one’s own. The resulting image is an expanding circle of moral concern, potentially widening from kin and neighbors to distant strangers and nonhuman animals. Originally published amid intense debate over sociobiology, the book remains a compact argument about human nature, impartiality, and whether moral progress is possible.
