Professor Richard Joyce, i ”Darwinian Ethics and Error”, publicerad i Biology and Philosophy:

There do not really exist any categorical requirements binding our actions, enjoining cooperation and proscribing defection. It’s all an illusion which, in evolutionary terms, has served us very effectively. Thus all our judgments of the form ‘φ is morally obligatory’ are untrue: moral obligatoriness is a property that no actual action instantiates. In practical terms, cooperation is fostered most effectively if we have a disposition to see it as categorically required: ‘morality simply does not work … unless we believe that it is objective’ (p. 253). But, in metaphysical terms, there is no need to think that there are such requirements: everything that needs explaining is explained by the thesis of evolutionary error. The further hypothesis, that these judgments are true—that there is a realm of moral facts—is redundant.

Med andra ord är bindande moral en fiktion, men enligt Joyce en nyttig sådan, framvuxen genom evolutionen. Läs mer om moralisk fiktionalism i Joyces bok The Myth of Morality (Cambridge University Press, 2001) och mer om moralens evolutionära grund i Joyces bok The Evolution of Morality (MIT Press, 2006). Själv har jag svårt att låta bli att säga att kejsaren faktiskt inte har några kläder, men du kanske gör bäst i att lyssna på dina evolutionärt framvuxna intuitioner, som säger att jag har fel.