Evolutionary EthicsSUMMARY: Michael Ruse has argued that evolutionary ethics discredits the objectivity and foundations of ethics. Ruse, however, must resort to dubious assumptions to reach his conclusion. We can trace these hypotheses back to GE Moore. Furthermore, part of Ruse's arguments against the foundations of ethics can support objectivity and the foundations of ethics. Cooperative activity oriented toward human flourishing helps pave the way for a naturalistic moral realism and not exclusively for ethical skepticism as Ruse assumes. Introduction: Ruse's Metaethical Assumptions Michael Ruse has argued that evolutionary ethics discredits the objectivity and foundations of ethics (Ruse 1991, Ruse 1993). . Ruse, however, must resort to dubious assumptions to reach his conclusion. Furthermore, parts of Ruse's argument against the foundations of ethics can support objectivity and the foundations of ethics. Ruse's narrow conception of the "foundations of ethics" plays an important role in his arguments against the foundations of ethics. He considers only three possible contenders that could serve as foundations for ethics: 1) Moorean non-naturalism, 2) Platonic forms, and 3) divine command theory (Ruse 1993: 157). For Ruse, each of the three claimants explains how morality can refer to something “out there” (Ruse 1993: 153, 158). Note that for Ruse, one can only maintain the position of moral realism – the idea that at least some moral issues are objective and independent of our moral beliefs – in a non-naturalistic way. His reasoning is clear. He points out that Moore's arguments against Herbert Spencer's evolutionary ethics rested on the is/ought distinction. According to this distinction, we cannot logically ground ethical statements in a naturalistic way, because we cannot infer “ought” from “is.” Moore's arguments against ethical naturalism – the view that moral statements/facts/judgments are nothing more than a special class of natural statements/facts/judgments – help make Moore's arguments in favor of non-naturalism. Plato's unnatural forms and the commandments of an unnatural deity would also avoid the difficult task of deriving values ​​from natural and physical facts that ethical naturalism faces. Philosophers (notably Ruse) commonly claim that Moore's application of the naturalistic fallacy rests on the is/ought distinction. For Moore, we cannot derive moral statements from non-moral statements because "'good' is indefinable or, as Professor Sidgwick puts it, an 'unanalyzable notion'" (Moore 1903: 17). This would, of course, imply that any attempt whatsoever to define or analyze a moral term such as "good" in other terms is fallacious. Moore concedes that we can analyze moral words in relation to each other, but that all reductions of moral terms will eventually boil down to "good" and "bad." ».’.