"An infamous Renaissance classic, The Prince shocked Europe upon publication with its ruthless tactics for gaining absolute power and its abandonment of conventional morality. Niccolo Machiavelli even came to be regarded by some as an agent of the Devel, his name taken for the intriguer "Machevill" of Jacobean tragedy. For his treatise on statecraft Machiavelli drew upon his own experience of office under the turbulent Florentine republic, rejecting...

The subject of reconciling our evolutionary past with our sense of right and wrong is undergoing a resurgent wave of interest. The timely Introduction to Evolutionary Ethics offers the first general introductory text to this area, presenting students with three different areas of ongoing research related to evolution and morality: cognitive psychology, normative ethics, and metaethics. The text is divided into two sections. Part I explores the cognitive...