Reddit mentions of The Ethical Project

Sure. The basic story is that while I think there are objective ethical truths, I don't really think of ethical statements as being descriptive "facts" in the same way that statements like "lead is denser than water" are. Rather, I think that ethics is a system of conventions and cognitive short-cuts designed to scaffold our ability to behave altruistically toward one another. Living close together in large, sophisticated groups that require us to display certain kinds of behaviors toward tremendous numbers of strangers every day is extremely cognitively taxing, and not the kind of thing that natural selection has shaped us to do. Like both modern non-human primates and our early hominid ancestors, our basic cognitive machinery gives us a certain capacity to cooperate and behave altruistically. As is the case with both those other groups, though, our machinery was tailored by evolution to help us get along in relatively small bands of relatives and close friends; we're not particularly well-suited to cooperation on a large scale with huge numbers of individuals that we don't know well, and who have wildly different priorities, goals, and values than we do. Ethical systems are designed to facilitate that kind of large scale prosocial behavior, reducing the cognitive load on our biologically-based capacities for altruism and cooperation by providing a system of cognitive "shortcuts" and heuristics helping us get along in society.

This view has its basis in the embodied cognition literature, and in the extended mind research program developed by (among others) Andy Clark, as well as in the "instructional scaffolding" theory pioneered by educational psychologists like Jerome Bruner and Lev Vygotsky. Dennett has argued that natural language can be thought of as a kind of "tool for thinking", and my view is that ethical systems should similarly be thought of as "tools for behaving." This short-circuits the naturalistic fallacy line of reasoning, as ethical claims are no longer precisely descriptive claims about wholly mind-independent facts about the world, but rather putative or proposed additions to our cognitive toolbox.

This view avoids the slide into moral relativism in virtue of the fact that these tools play a particular functional role in the operation of our social systems, and various collections of tools can be more or less well-suited to discharging a particular function. This allows us to say, for instance, that contemporary liberal democracy, in which minorities and women enjoy the same civil rights as white males, represents genuine progress from older systems in which slavery was common and women were oppressed. The sense of "progress" there is the same as in "the computer I'm typing this on right now represents progress over the Apple IIGS." In both cases, the notion of progress is keyed to the effectiveness with which a particular tool (either an ethical system or a personal computer) discharges a particular function. Democracy is objectively better than Naziism in the same sense that a Boeing 777 is a better plane than a DC-10. In the same way that it would be silly to object to calling the 777 better than the DC-10 in virtue of the fact that you don't have a deductive argument for why we should value flying, it seems silly to reject the claim that democracy represents progress over Naziism without an independent deductive argument showing why we ought to value a functional society.

This view is obviously controversial (to put it mildly), and there's a lot more to it than this sketch suggests; I'm glossing over many of the details. Philip Kitcher's The Ethical Project defends a view that's in the same family as the one I'm describing, though we disagree about some of the details. He also uses the term "social technology" (at my suggestion) to describe the nature of ethical systems, and the book is worth a read for more details about how such a view might be developed, as well as for a more in-depth discussion about ethical naturalism generally.