The project is to traverse with quite novel questions, and as though with new eyes, the enormous, distant, and so well hidden land of morality—of morality that has actually existed, actually been lived.This essay offers a contribution to the consilience of the humanities, social sciences, and life sciences in accord with naturalism (in a spirit closer to Slingerland 2008 than Wilson 1998). Human beings have a shared nature produced by evolutionary history and modified by culture, where 'culture' refers to "information (...) capable of affecting individuals' behavior that they acquire from other members of their species through teaching, imitation, and other forms of social transmission" (Richerson and Boyd 2005, p. 5). .. (shrink)

The relationship between ethics and science has been discussed within the framework of continuity versus discontinuity theories, each of which can take several forms. Continuity theorists claim that ethics is a science or at least that it has deep similarities with the modus operandi of science. Discontinuity theorists reject such equivalency, while at the same time many of them claim that ethics does deal with objective truths and universalizable statements, just not in the same sense as science does. I propose (...) here a third view of quasi-continuity (or, equivalently, quasi-discontinuity) that integrates ethics and science as equal partners toward the uncovering of new knowledge. In this third way, a program envisioned by William James but made practicable only by contemporary scientific advancement, science can and must inform ethics at a deep level, and ethical theory— while going beyond science—cannot do without it. In particular, I identify four areas of ethics-science collaboration: neurobiological research into the basis of moral judgment, comparative anthropol- ogy, comparative evolutionary biology of primates, and game-theo- retical modeling. I provide examples within each of these fields to show how they link to ethical theories (including prescriptive work) and questions. The essay concludes with a brief discussion of the light that a scientifically informed ethics can shed on some classical problems in moral theory, such as the relationships between rational- ity and selfishness, egoism and altruism, as well as the concept of social contract. A joint research program involving both philosophers and scientists is called for if we wish to move ethical theory into the twenty-first century. (shrink)

I discuss controversial claims about the status of non-human animals as moral beings in relation to philosophical claims to the contrary. I address questions about the ontology of animals rather than ethical approaches as to how humans need to treat other animals through notions of, for example, animal rights. I explore the evolutionary origins of behavior that can be considered vices or virtues and suggest that Thomas Aquinas is closer to Darwin's view on nonhuman animals than we might suppose. An (...) appreciation of the complexity of the emotional lives of social animals and their cooperative behaviors in light of the work of animal ethologists such as Frans de Waal and Marc Bekoff suggests that social animals can be considered moral in their own terms. I discuss the charge of anthropomorphism, drawing on the work of archaeologist Steven Mithen, and consider arguments for the evolution of conscience in the work of anthropologist Christopher Boehm. Only the biological basis for the development of conscience and religion has evolved in nonhuman animals, and this should not be confused with sophisticated moral systems of analysis or particular religious beliefs found in the human community. (shrink)

This study examines the principles we apply, when people, objects and animals are to be organized in relation to other representatives of their kind. Most cross-cultural studies on personal space focus on cultural differences, but here we look for proxetics as well as proxemics. 793 subjects from six countries situated in four different climate zones are tested with a projective simulation measure. A number of cross-cultural similarities are documented, and it is suggested that six of these are examples of high-level (...) universals in the sense of Norenzayan and Heine. But spacing also differs, and participants from Greenland, Finland, and Denmark systematically keep a larger interpersonal distance than subjects from Italy, India and Cameroon, which confirms the classic difference between southern 'contact-cultures' and northern 'low-contact cultures'. It is documented how personal space shrinks or expands depending on context and depending on whether a person occupies a territory or arrives at a territory occupied by somebody else. Personal space may even 'rub off ' on a person's belongings, and this opens up for a whole new area of spatial relations not studied before. (shrink)

The sacrifice is a ritualized central structure in religious practice worldwide, but from a psychological point of view it may be much more than that. On the basis of cross-cultural, comparative, and experimental data, where 162 strangers are arranged to meet in twos without knowing that their interaction is being observed, it is argued that the sacrifice is not first and foremost a religious concept, let alone a behavioural structure primarily related to the man-god relation, but rather a key factor (...) in man's sociality and a general evolutionary interaction unit based on a cognitive reciprocity-programme well known in animal life, from sperm whales and vampire bats to higher primates and ourselves. Furthermore, it is suggested that in our species the religious sacrifice becomes a ritualized sacred action, because this act symbolically highlights the natural reciprocity relations that have to prevail among men, if a society is to exist at all. (shrink)

Research suggests that the mind contains a set of adaptations for detecting alliances: an alliance detection system, which monitors for, encodes, and stores alliance information and then modifies the activation of stored alliance categories according to how likely they will predict behavior within a particular social interaction. Previous studies have established the activation of this system when exposed to explicit competition or cooperation between individuals. In the current studies we examine if shared political opinions produce these same effects. In particular, (...) if participants will spontaneously categorize individuals according to the parties they support, even when explicit cooperation and antagonism are absent, and if party support is sufficiently powerful to decrease participants’ categorization by an orthogonal but typically-diagnostic alliance cue . Evidence was found for both: Participants spontaneously and implicitly kept track of who supported which party, and when party cross-cut race—such that the race of targets was not predictive of party support—categorization by race was dramatically reduced. To verify that these results reflected the operation of a cognitive system for modifying the activation of alliance categories, and not just socially-relevant categories in general, an identical set of studies was also conducted with in which party was either crossed with sex or age . As predicted, categorization by party occurred to the same degree, and there was no reduction in either categorization by sex or by age. All effects were replicated across two sets of between-subjects conditions. These studies provide the first direct empirical evidence that party politics engages the mind’s systems for detecting alliances and establish two important social categorization phenomena: that categorization by age is, like sex, not affected by alliance information and that political contexts can reduce the degree to which individuals are represented in terms of their race. (shrink)

Philip Kitcher’s The Ethical Project trios to vindicates ethics through an analysis of its evolutionary and cultural history, a history which in turn, he thinks, supports a particular conception of the role of moral thinking and normative practices in human social life. As Kitcher sees it, that role could hardly be more central: most of what makes human life human, and preferable to the fraught and impoverished societies of the great apes, depends on moral cognition. Prom this view of the (...) role of the ethical project as a social technology, Kitcher derives an account of moral progress and even moral truth: a normative analogue of the idea that truth is the convergence of rational enquiry. To Kitcher’s history, I present an anti-history. Most of what is good about human social life depends on the expansion of our social emotions, not on our capacities to articulate and internalise explicit norms. Indeed, since the Holocene and the origins of complex society, normative thought and normative institutions have been more prominent as tools of exploitation and oppression than as mechanisms of a social peace that balances individual desire with collective co-operation. I argue that the vindication project fails in its own terms: even given Kitcher’s distinctive pragmatic concept of vindication, history debunks rather than vindicates moral cognition. (shrink)

The article approaches the topic of social trust from an evolutionary perspective. It begins by summarising the most influential approaches that have defined specific and social trust and ascertains what causes differences in degrees of trust and how the potential risk of deception might be lowered. It then notes that the basis of morality had already been formed during the era of prehistoric man, who was able to create coalitions against aggressors and to socially control the behaviour of deviants. It (...) points out, however, that having a certain predisposition to behaving cooperatively or an increased sensitivity to recognising and not tolerating behaviour aimed at abusing cooperation is not a sufficient guarantee of the fact that people will always (or at least in the majority of situations) favour cooperation over deception. One of the reasons for this is a tendency to favour short-term gains over long-term ones. The article argues that establishing norms (moral, social and legal) produces a higher level of social trust because it not only “encourages” individuals to behave in certain ways in particular situations but also works as a sanction which “discourages” the individual from socially deviant behaviour. The article then focuses on a debate about the causal relationship between social trust and social capital. It discusses the suggestion that political institutions, government and the judiciary may reduce rather than raise levels of social capital and consequently also the level of social trust. This is partly because of their powerful position and the consequent scope for corruption and partly because of the fact that even when attempting to act honestly, representatives of these institutions cannot sufficiently reflect upon dynamic change at the local level. Finally, the article ends by adopting the position that social trust is built primarily from bottom up and so it is risky to continually doubt the very existence and usefulness of social norms and morality and to be governed simply by legal norms. (shrink)

This paper examines three ancient traits of religion whose origins likely date back to the Upper Paleolithic: ancestor worship, shamanism, and the belief in natural and animal spirits. Evidence for the emergence of these traits coincides with evidence for a dramatic advance in human social cooperation. It is argued that these traits played a role in the evolution of human cooperation through the mechanism of social scrutiny. Social scrutiny is an effective means of reducing individualism and enhancing prosocial behavior. Religion’s (...) most ancient traits represent an extension of the human social world into the supernatural, thus reinforcing within-group cooperation by means of ever-vigilant spiritual monitors. Believing that the spirits were always watching may have helped reduce the number of non-cooperators within a group while reinforcing group behavioral norms, thus allowing humanlike levels of cooperation to emerge. (shrink)

An increasingly popular moral argument has it that the story of human evolution shows that we can explain the human disposition to make moral judgments without relying on a realm of moral facts. Such facts can thus be dispensed with. But this argument is a threat to moral realism only if there is no realist position that can explain, in the context of human evolution, the relationship between our particular moral sense and a realm of moral facts. I sketch a (...) plausible evolutionary story that illuminates this relationship. First, the sorts of adaptive pressures facing early humans would have produced more than just potent prosocial emotions, as evolutionary antirealists like to claim; it would have produced judgments—often situated within emotions—to the effect that others could reasonably disapprove of some bit of conduct, for an early human who cared deeply about how others might respond to her action enjoyed the benefits of more cooperative exchanges than those early humans who did not. Second, according to objectivist versions of moral constructivism, moral facts just are facts about how others, ideally situated, would respond to one's conduct. Thus if any objectivist moral constructivism story is true, then we can intelligibly assert that a) our capacity for moral judgment is the product of adaptive pressures acting on early humans and b) some moral judgments are objectively true. (shrink)

Irish Travellers constitute a pre-demographic-shift population living among a post-demographic-shift one. Their socio-medico profile identifies them as largely on fast life-history trajectories. In addition, they are strongly religious, highly sexually behaviorally dimorphic, with strong traditions of male-male competition and quasi-symbolic bride capture. Their male-male competitions thus allow for the comparative testing of a number of interesting theories pertaining to the nature and function of types of violence in society. As a pilot study, we used expert raters to analyze a number (...) of real-life bare-knuckle competitions in terms of the support said spectacles offered to theories of this sort of violence as reinforcing ideas of antisociality, hierarchical promotion, intersexual signaling, or maintenance of within-group equality. We found good evidence to support theories of within-group, prosocial hierarchical functions for these contests. Limitations and implications for future research, such as direct measurement of fitness, are discussed. (shrink)

This article provides an overview of recent, empirically supported categorization schemes that have been proposed to distinguish different kinds of norms. Amongst these are the moral–conventional distinction and divisions within moral norms such as those proposed by moral foundations theory. I identify several dimensions along which norms have been and could usefully be categorized. I discuss some of the most prominent norm categorization proposals and the aims of these existing categorization schemes. I propose that we take a pluralistic approach toward (...) categorizing norms: Depending on our goals, it may be useful to focus on different features of norms, and as a result, it will be useful to categorize norms in multiple ways. (shrink)

Shame is a painful emotion concerned with failure to live up to certain standards, norms, or ideals. The subject feels that she falls in the regard of others; she feels watched and exposed. As a result, she feels bad about the person that she is. The most popular view of shame is that someone only feels ashamed if she fails to live up to standards, norms, or ideals that she, herself, accepts. In this paper, I provide support for a different (...) view, according to which shame is about failure to live up to public expectations. Such a view of shame has difficulties explaining why an audience is central to shame, why shame concerns the self as a whole, and why the social rank of someone affects their ability to shame others. These features, I argue, are best explained by reference to the descent of shame in the emotion connected with submission in nonhuman animals. The function of submission—to appease relevant social others—also throws light on the sort of emotion that shame is. From the point of view of other people, a subject who experiences shame at her own failing is someone who is committed to living together with others in a socially sanctioned way. The argument is not that we must understand the nature of shame in terms of what it evolved for, but that its heritage is important to understanding the emotion that shame has become. (shrink)

Genes are ‘selfish’ in that they make organisms whose behaviours are shaped, necessarily, to benefit their genes. But altruism and selfishness as we usually think of them have little to do with ‘evolutionary altruism’ and ‘evolutionary selfishness', and the use of these phrases has given rise to much confusion. The most pernicious is the false conclusion that individual altruism is impossible unless it has been shaped by group selection. In fact, human altruism and morality are shaped by genes because individuals (...) with these capacities have a fitness advantage. The advantage may come from sexual selection, social selection, or the advantages of a capacity for commitment, as well as from cooperation, and kin selection. Ironically, morality may be a metaphor so powerful that it inhibits careful thinking precisely because our brains are wired by natural selection to see the world in terms of good and evil. (shrink)

Punitive behaviours are often assumed to be the result of an instinct for punishment. This instinct would have evolved to punish wrongdoers and it would be the evidence that cooperation has evolved by group selection. Here, I propose an alternative theory according to which punishment is a not an adaptation and that there was no specific selective pressure to inflict costs on wrongdoers in the ancestral environment. In this theory, cooperation evolved through partner choice for mutual advantage. In the ancestral (...) environment, individuals were in competition to be recruited in cooperative ventures and it was vital to share the benefits of cooperation in a mutually advantageous manner. If individuals took a bigger share of the benefits, their partners would leave them for more interesting partners. If they took a smaller share, they would be exploited by their partners who would receive more than what they had contributed to produce. This competition led to the selection of a sense of fairness, a cognitive adaptation aiming to share equally the benefits of cooperation in order to attract partners. In this theory, punishment is not necessary for the evolution of cooperation. Punitive behaviours are only a way to restore fairness by compensating the victim or penalizing the culprit. Drawing on behavioural economics, legal anthropology, and cognitive psychology, I show that empirical data fit better with this framework than with the theory of group selection. When people punish, they do so to restore fairness rather than to help the group. (shrink)

Experimental studies on punishment have sometimes been over-interpreted not only for the reasons Guala lists, but also because of a frequent conflation of proximate and ultimate explanatory levels that Guala's review perpetuates. Moreover, for future analyses we may need a clearer classification of different kinds of punishment.

The standard theories of cooperation in humans, which depend on repeated interaction and reputation effects among self-regarding agents, are inadequate. Strong reciprocity, a predisposition to participate in costly cooperation and the punishment, fosters cooperation where self-regarding behaviors fail. The effectiveness of socially coordinated punishment depends on individual motivations to participate, which are based on strong reciprocity motives. The relative infrequency of high-cost punishment is a result of the ubiquity of strong reciprocity, not its absence.

Hunter-gatherer punishment involves costs and benefits to individuals and groups, but the costs do not necessarily fit with the assumptions made in models that consider punishment to be altruistic – which brings in the free-rider problem and the problem of second-order free-riders. In this commentary, I present foragers' capital punishment patterns ethnographically, in the interest of establishing whether such punishment is likely to be costly; and I suggest that in many cases abstentions from punishment that might be taken as defections (...) by free-riders are actually caused by social-structural considerations rather than being an effect of free-rider genes. This presentation of data supplements the ethnographic analysis provided by Guala. (shrink)

For thousands of years, various spiritual traditions and social activists have appealed to humans to adopt compassionate ways of living to address the suffering of life. Yet, along with our potential for compassion and self-sacrifice, the last few thousand years of wars, slavery, tortures, and holocausts have shown humans can be extraordinarily selfish, callous, vicious, and cruel. While there has been considerable engagement with these issues, particularly in the area of moral psychology and ethics, this paper explores an evolutionary analysis (...) relating to evolved resource-regulation strategies that can be called “care and share” versus “control and hold.” Control and hold are typical of primates that operate through intimidatory social hierarchies. Care and share are less common in non-human primates, but evolved radically in humans during our hunter-gatherer stage when our ancestors lived in relatively interdependent, small, mobile groups. In these groups, individualistic, self-focus, and self-promoting control and hold strategies (trying to secure and accumulate more than others) were shunned and shamed. These caring and sharing hunter-gatherer lifestyles also created the social contexts for the evolution of new forms of childcare and complex human competencies for language, reasoning, planning, empathy, and self-awareness. As a result of our new ‘intelligence’, our ancestors developed agriculture that reduced mobility, increased group size, resource availability and storage, and resource competition. These re-introduced competing for, rather than sharing of, resources and advantaged those who now pursue (often aggressively) control and hold strategies. Many of our most typical forms of oppressive and anti-compassionate behavior are the result of these strategies. Rather than (just) thinking aboutindividualscompeting with one another, we can also consider these different resource regulation strategies ascompeting within populationsshaping psychophysiological patterns; both wealth and poverty change the brain. One of the challenges to creating a more compassionate society is to find ways to create the social and economic conditions that regulate control and hold strategies and promote care and share. No easy task. (shrink)

Human cultural life is replete with examples of adaptations to the social, physical, and biological environments that have been built gradually, cumulatively, by hidden-hand mechanisms. The impressive technologies, natural history databases, and exchange networks of traditional peoples have been built in this way. But the ethnological record is also replete with evidence of maladaptive beliefs and practices, and of failures to adapt to changing circumstances. This paper is about such failures. In what ways is cultural evolution constrained, and what explains (...) those constraints? In what ways are those constraints similar to those that affect gene-based evolution; in what ways are they different? In this paper I argue that there are some similar mechanisms of constraint ; there are some differences ; but the major difference results from a division of labor between inheritance systems; the problem of fast change has been offloaded from the genetic to the cultural system. (shrink)

Our research brings to light features of the social world that impact moral judgments and how they do so. The moral vignette data presented were collected in rural and urban Croatian communities that were involved to varying degrees in the Croatian Homeland War. We argue that rapid shifts in moral accommodations during periods of violent social strife can be explained by considering the role that coordination and social agents' ability to reconfigure their social network (i.e., relational mobility) play in moral (...) reasoning. Social agents coordinate on (moral) norms, a general attitude which broadly facilitates cooperation, and makes possible the collective enforcement of compliance. During social strife interested parties recalibrate their determination of others' moral standing and recast their established moral circle, in accordance with their new or prevailing social investments. To that extent, social coordination—and its particular promoters, inhibitors, and determinants—effects significant changes in individuals' ranking of moral priorities. Results indicate that rural participants evaluate the harmful actions of third parties more harshly than urban participants. Coordination mediates that relationship between social environment and moral judgment. Coordination also matters more for the moral evaluation of the harmful actions of moral scenarios involving characters belonging to different social units than for scenarios involving characters belonging to the same group. Participants high in relational mobility—that ability to recompose one's social network—moralize similarly wrongdoings perpetrated by both in- and out-group members. Those low in relational mobility differentiate when an out-group member causes the harm. Additionally, perceptions of third-party guilt are also affected by specifics of the social environment. Overall, we find that social coordination and relational mobility affect moral reasoning more so than ethnic commitment. (shrink)