A darwinian evolutionary approach can contribute to evaluate philosophical problems in different fields, including ethics and moral theory. Slnce social theory has rejected biological attempts to explain human behavior, the first section of the article aims to discuss the reasons of this rejection and to show how new theories, like dual inheritance theory, have been able to overcome them. The assumptions of dual inheritance theory are debated in section 2. Assuming that culture not only is the outcome from genetic evolution, but also an important force in human evolutionary history, dual inheritance theory addresses human cooperation and the underlying psychological mechanisms in a distinctive way. In contrast with other biological theories that intended to explain human normative behavior, dual inheritance theory innovates by taking into account the evolution of human social psychology and of the instincts responsible for moral reasoning. In this sense, it recognizes that there are innate moral principles nested in human mind that makes impossible the cultural stabilization of moral/legal norms that turn out to be incompatible with them. This hypothesis is discussed in the third section, which deploys further this naturalistic standpoint by applying dual heritance theory to the so-called 'natural right' issue, a classical problem for moral and law.
Dual inheritance; Evolution of cooperation; Moral philosophy; Jus naturalism; darwinism