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Several 19th-century philosophers were impressed by the explanatory power of evolutionary concepts and attempted to use them to develop a system of ethics based on scientific methods. This approach, sometimes called evolutionary naturalism, was roundly criticized by others. Among the critics was Cambridge professor William Sorley. Criticism often focused on the distinction between historical or factual information and ethical judgment.

So far the argument has been concerned only with the development of moral institutions and ideas as facts which enter into human life. The question has been purely one of history and fact. But another question remains of deeper ethical import. Even if natural selection could do everything ever claimed for it in the former regard, it would still only exhibit an historical process, showing how moral feelings, ideas, and customs have assumed their present form. But that is not the question before us when we ask how good is distinguished from evil, or what the worth of things or conduct is, or how the ideal of life or ethical end is to be conceived. The question thus expressed in different forms implies a new point of view, and no amount of history can answer it. It is an irrelevant answer to the question 'What is good?' when we are given a mere record of men's ideas about what is good and of the way in which the opinions arose. We ask about the validity of moral judgments, and are put off by speculations concerning their history. The strictly ethical question is thus ignored.

Yet it is not too much to say that evolutionist ethics owes its simplicity and attractiveness to its evasion of the fundamental problem or to its confusion of that problem with a question of history. [William Sorley, The Ethics of Naturalism, p. 320-321.]