Evolutionary ethics rests on the idea that ethics expresses a natural moral sense that has been shaped by evolutionary history. It is a scientific understanding of ethics as founded in human biological nature.

The first full development of evolutionary ethics came from Charles Darwin (1809–1882) and Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) in the nineteenth century. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Darwinian theory of ethics was renewed and deepened by Edward Westermarck (1862–1939). At the end of the twentieth century, this Darwinian tradition of ethical philosophy was reformulated by Edward O. Wilson, Robert McShea, Frans de Waal, and others.

Philosophers arguing over the ultimate grounds of ethics have been divided into Aristotelian naturalists and Platonic transcendentalists. The transcendentalists find the ground of ethics in some reality beyond human nature, while the naturalists explain ethics as grounded in human nature itself. In this enduring debate, proponents of evolutionary ethics belong...