Debating Buchanan’s Our Moral Fate: Why Exercising Moral Reasoning Cannot Be a Luxury Good

In Our Moral Fate: Evolution and Escape from Tribalism, Buchanan’s challenging attempt to account for morality through an evolutionary lens has, as its turning point, the introduction of the key roles of the human capacity for critical, open-ended moral reasoning and the powerful motivating force of moral identity to exercise it, in order to explain the shift from “shallowly inclusive” to “deeply inclusive moralities” and therefore to account for the possibility of the Two Great Expansions of the moral regard. Nevertheless, these two crucial human traits seem to produce those large-scale social-political effects required by these two momentous moral shifts only under certain necessary conditions, specifically because—according to the author—the widespread and relatively unconstrained exercise of the capacity for critical, open-ended moral reasoning is something of a luxury good, namely, something that requires a considerable surplus reproductive success. This contribution aims at highlighting why a real (or morally meaningful) exercise of human moral reasoning (REHMR) cannot be a luxury good, by raising three fundamental points to ground Buchanan’s novel pathway from a moral standpoint. The first section argues for the introduction of a moral justification for the necessary conditions underlying the REHMR. The second section claims the need for an evolutionary or moral foundation of the moral reasons and principles which inform and prompt the affirmation of an authentic moral identity. Finally, the third section motivates the demand for an elucidation on what deep normative source of morality is specifically at stake in Buchanan’s theory.