This book updates Darwin’s early account of the evolution of morality in light of contemporary theory and research from a wide array of academic areas. The evidence supports two main propositions. First, a capacity for morality evolved in the human species because it helped early humans survive, reproduce, and propagate their genes. Second, traditional psychological accounts of morality can be improved by recognizing that processes such as those that regulate social learning, moral reasoning, empathy, perspective-taking, and conscience, are products of evolution. To account for the sources ... More

This book updates Darwin’s early account of the evolution of morality in light of contemporary theory and research from a wide array of academic areas. The evidence supports two main propositions. First, a capacity for morality evolved in the human species because it helped early humans survive, reproduce, and propagate their genes. Second, traditional psychological accounts of morality can be improved by recognizing that processes such as those that regulate social learning, moral reasoning, empathy, perspective-taking, and conscience, are products of evolution. To account for the sources of morality featured in psychological theories, we must understand the functions that they evolved to serve. Dispositions to exert self-control, to defer to authority, to obey rules that uphold the social order, to punish transgressors, and to behave in altruistic and cooperative ways evolved because they helped early humans advance their biological interests and reap the benefits of group living. Old brain mechanisms that humans share with other primates engender primitive aspects of a sense of morality, such as feelings of moral obligation, sympathy, gratitude, guilt, forgiveness, and righteous indignation. Although new brain mechanisms endow humans with higher-order cognitive abilities that enable them to override primitive impulses, people are only provisionally rational, and often use mental shortcuts that are susceptible to a variety of cognitive biases to make moral decisions in their everyday lives. People are naturally-disposed to be as moral as they have to be to advance their interests, and a little bit more.