The morality that everybody was born with
On the moral modules that all people have in common. About kin selection, cooperation, empathy and much more. This is an important article, you should definitely read it.
Finally, we come to describe genetic morality. In the series on human rights, I announced this article several times. This is a very important subject, with major consequences. Oddly enough, the interest among ethicists in this subject is still substandard, while they have been speculating about the state of nature of man for hundreds (if not thousands) of years.
Why this is such an important topic
Toleration is about consciously allowing things that we have a negative opinion about. Things that we actually disapprove of. Let's take a fundamental approach: why do we disapprove of some things and not of others? As far as behaviour is concerned, we then enter the realm of ethics. Ethics is about right and wrong: how to determine what is right or wrong?
We can approach that question in a number of different ways. Ethics is a philosophical discipline, so a philosophical approach is obvious. But sociologists, anthropologists, ethologists and psychologists also offer interesting perspectives. An important difference is that philosophers are more likely to treat the question normatively than the other disciplines. The latter approach the question rather descriptively: they mainly describe why people consider some things as good and others as bad.
Before we get to the normative questions of good and bad, it's good to consider what makes us think some things are good and others are bad. We have a rudimentary morality that seems partly genetically ingrained, and partly the result of a cultural evolution that humanity has collectively undergone over the past tens of thousands of years.
What are we going to do in this article?
We start with the morality that is genetically ingrained in us. We have part of our morality because we are an organism. But man is not only an organism, but also an animal, a mammal, a social mammal, a social primate, a social primate with consciousness. If we want to understand our genetic morality, we will discover elements in each of those layers that influence our morality.
Then we look at specific human characteristics and how they influence our morality. Then you soon end up with culture. We will talk about cultural morality in future newsletters. At the end I make two concluding remarks: one on the overwhelming influence of moral beliefs on our lives, and one on social Darwinism, which has long given genetic morality a bad reputation.
Man as an organism: kin selection
First of all, man is an organism. As an organism, we all are first and foremost egoists. I don't mean anything unkind, but that's just how we as an organism are programmed. We constantly compete with all other organisms for the raw materials we need for our survival. The water we drink, the air we breathe, the tomato or the chicken we eat; they are all molecules that we use for our existence. At the expense of other organisms. The rose bush in your garden didn’t get the water that you drank. For the bacon you eat, a pig has had to die.
But with that selfishness, something special is going on in an evolutionary sense. In an evolutionary sense, we are not so much interested in taking in as many molecules as possible ourselves, or of living as long as possible, and certainly not of leaving as few molecules as possible to other organisms. No, our ingrained egoism is merely aimed at spreading our own genes.
In his book The selfish gene (1976), the ethologist Richard Dawkins described the theory of evolutionary kin selection in a compelling way. Following the evolutionary laws, he says, organisms are focused on spreading their own genes. This was already the case with the creation of DNA, and perhaps even earlier. The organisms that are less capable of doing so simply die out, because they spread less well. As a result, the entire world is now populated with organisms that each follow their own strategy to outwit the molecules they need to spread their own genes.
Spreading our DNA only happens in one way: through reproduction. In the case of reproduction, we (usually) pass on half of your DNA, along with half of the DNA of the organism with which you reproduce. If you have found a partner with ‘strong’ DNA, the chance increases that your offspring will in turn also be successful in spreading their DNA, which therefore partly contains your DNA. Evolutionarily, we are all working to have as many offspring as possible, preferably with as strong partner DNA as possible, and to keep the offspring viable as carriers of our DNA.
Once we have passed the reproductive phase, our evolutionary task is only to put our offspring in the best possible position to reproduce. In the case of our own children through a good upbringing, through healthy food, and material prosperity. In the case of grandchildren, perhaps with parenting advice, a helping hand in the household, and if possible, with a great legacy.
In an evolutionary sense, you would have to sacrifice your life if that would save the lives of two or three of your children. Because that's how you let your DNA survive. Sacrificing your life is a very extreme example, but it illustrates that in an evolutionary sense we should pay a price to improve the lives of your children. This can also involve small sacrifices to give our children a small advantage. In decadent terms: we deny yourselves an expensive car to let our children walk around in designer clothes.
But it's not just our kids who have 50% of our DNA; our siblings have it too, for example. And with their children, and with our cousins, we also have quite a bit of DNA in common. They too can count on our altruism in an evolutionary sense, although it is not as much as one would have for our own children.
As I said, we are talking about humanity as an organism. Not only humans give preferential treatment to the carriers of their own DNA, but also animals.
And trees do, too, described Canadian zoologist Suzanne Simard. Trees communicate with each other via underground mycelium networks by exchanging certain substances. If a tree needs help, for example because it does not receive sunlight, it sends out a distress signal. Surrounding trees respond by returning auxiliary materials.
Especially 'family members' are very conscientious about this, but also peers do so. And there are even tree species that help strange species, although the adage 'own people first' usually applies to tree species.
Animals also usually sacrifice themselves mainly for their children. Other family members and members of their own herd or group are also often helped.
Outside of that, help occurs less often. Conspecific species that are not related to us, and sometimes even other species, can also sometimes count on a certain form of altruism. But at the same time they are our rivals in the struggle for resources and breeding partners. This trade-off is regulated by a number of moral 'modules': grouping in and out, cooperation, hierarchy, ownership and division, friendship, and compassion.
Man as a group animal
There are species that hardly work together, such as bears. With solitary animals there is usually still help from mother to child, but once an adult a bear really has to stand on its own; it should not expect anything from its fellow bears. Solitary animals, such as bears and tigers, have other evolutionary advantages: few natural enemies, for example.
There are also species that work together so much that together they form almost one organism, such as bees and ants. It's called eusociality. Cooperation can also be intense among animals living in herds. For example, by raising the little ones together, distributing the food or having fighters to protect the entire group.
We owe much of our morality to the fact that, genetically, we are group animals. In terms of cooperation, group animals are between solitary animals and herd animals. Group animals have an evolutionary interest in working together. But this collaboration is by no means smooth. Individuals always have the ability and inclination to withdraw from cooperation if it is of individual benefit to do so. This leads to conflicts that are inherent in group life. These conflicts are, of course, at the expense of the group's interests. However, due to the following moral modules, group animals are evolutionarily quite successful.
Reciprocity and retribution
If group animals were mere relatives of each other, kin selection would determine behavior in the first place. But herd animals form groups that transcend family ties. To make that work, there are a number of mechanisms to promote cooperation within the group. The first is reciprocity and retribution.
Reciprocity means that I only do something for you if you do something for me. I'll only flail you if you flail me too.
Retribution means punishment, or one's just deserts. Anyone who behaves like a dick will be punished.
Reciprocity and retribution are not free: they are accompanied by small sacrifices. Let's say you're standing in line for the cash register. Next to you is another line. Now you see someone skipping the queue next to you. If you say something about it, you make a (small) sacrifice to restore order. You risk a conflict in the interest of the group, while your interest is not directly affected. Cooperation means putting your self-interest aside for the sake of the group.
According to the principle of kin selection, you would want to make the sacrifice of reciprocity and retribution only for family members. But groups aren't just made up of family members; there are also group members with whom you have little DNA in common. So you also benefit them, at the expense of your self-interest. In addition to kin selection, we therefore have ingrained tendencies to make sacrifices in order to promote cooperation within the group, even if our genetic relationship is rather weak, or even non-existent (such as in the supermarket).
Hierarchy
In addition to retribution and reciprocity, we have other ingrained tendencies to promote cooperation. Another characteristic of group animals is hierarchy. Leaders can enforce cooperation, punish selfish behaviour, and settle conflicts between subordinates. Contrary to what you might think, hierarchy dampens conflicts within the group.
Leadership changes can be violent. And a group leader can become a tyrant, violently oppressing all group members. But that would be an exception. Group leaders who behave tyrannically quickly lose the support of the group. We are better off with leaders than without them.
The most stable leaders are those who behave moderately and also give space to the weakest in the group. In experiments with macaques, all dominant group members were removed from the group by researchers. Violence soared. In peaceful groups, there are leaders who control rivals, cut some slack to the non-power-hungry connectors within the group, promote cooperation and are lenient towards the rest of the group. And in which the members of the group act submissively where necessary. Both dominant behaviour, such as courage, and submissive behaviour, such as obedience, are rewarded in successful groups.
Outgroups
That group animals want to advance their own group and consider outsiders a priori as the enemy is almost a tautology. Cooperation with the group benefits from the existence of a common enemy, an outgroup. A multitude of socio-psychological experiments show that cohesion within the group is strengthened when an external threat is identified. In another series, we will dwell extensively on in-group and out-group thinking. The implications for toleration are far-reaching.
Property and distribution
The phenomenon of property in the animal world has strangely not been systematically investigated, as far as I could see. In general, the law of the jungle applies: take what you can grab. Certain animals, including many birds and solitary mammals, maintain their own territory: everything within their own territory counts as property, at least towards conspecifics.
With group animals, things are more complicated because things are shared to a greater or lesser extent. But in general: food under hand or trunk range is personal property for a group animal. De Waal describes the norm that in principle every ape takes care of its own food. In principle, food is not shared, and theft of food is subject to severe penalties.
Property is — except in the case of eusocial animals — a central concept in the animal world. Food that you have grabbed is yours: everyone should keep their paws off it. That's a central moral rule in the animal kingdom, and one that's presumably genetically programmed.
The fact that certain things are shared among group animals will also be genetically programmed. The exact amount of redistribution, and the rituals associated with this distribution, will differ per species and may also depend, for example, on the natural conditions. The degree and manner of (re)distribution is also likely to include cultural elements. But sharing in one way or another within groups is a law.
The club of Economo
With elephants, dolphins and great apes, we form a special club. (Dolphins are certainly members of the club, other cetaceans probably as well. But whale behaviour is harder to observe.) Specifically in this group, there are mechanisms that give cooperation an extra boost. It concerns a very select group of animal species that consistently recognise themselves in the mirror and that maintain a personal relationship with each individual member of the group. They’re all mammals, all group animals.
We may owe these special characteristics to the presence of Von Economo neurons in our brains. We don't yet know exactly what those neurons do, but they have an effect on our social behaviour. Certain cetaceans in particular have a lot of them, but also great apes and elephants.
Identity memory
You've probably heard about elephant memory. Elephants not only recognise individuals and their identities, they also remember who has been cooperative, and who have left them out in the cold. Elephants treat cooperative individuals more favourably than egoists. This behaviour is also observable in dolphins, great apes, and humans. This will also affect our reciprocity and retribution.
Where we will discuss game theory in a following newsletter, we will see that this mechanism has a substantially beneficial influence on cooperation within groups. Specifically in humans, this effect is reinforced by our advanced communication: unlike elephants, we can, for example, gossip about our group mates. We then warn each other about third parties that you better not trust, or recommend others as a reliable group member.
Friendship
The club of Economo maintains friendships with peers who are not related. Friendship means that some animals spend a lot of time together and make sacrifices for each other that are neither conditional nor romantically motivated. Friendship transcends reciprocity. We choose certain peers with certain characteristics and we have an alliance with them. We usually make friendships with peers that we regularly encounter, with whom we have certain similarities (age, status or personality traits) or who have complementary characteristics. Because almost every group member has a handful of friends, a network structure is created within the group. Even if the cooperation within the group is poor, each group member still has one or more friends to fall back on.
Empathy and compassion
We have another mechanism to promote cooperation: empathy. Both great apes and homo sapiens are able to put themselves in someone else's shoes, and they can show compassion. This property is also only shared with dolphins and elephants. Empathy in this context should not be seen as co-suffering. It's not about other people's grief being your grief, but feeling compassion for other people's suffering. If someone is suffering, or struggling, we want to comfort and help them.
According to De Waal, thousands of cases of empathic reactions in the animal world have been recorded in the scientific literature. The lion's share occurs among elephants, dolphins and primates.
Scientists do not yet agree on the evolutionary background of empathy. It could be that we subconsciously come to regard our group members as family members as well. Traditionally, you didn't even know exactly what the family relationships were like within the group.
It is also possible that it is a form of conditional reciprocity: if you can assume within the group that you will be helped when you are in need, you will also help others who are in need. That benefits the collaboration. It is not for nothing that applies in military circles: leave no one behind. If you can assume that, it's good for morale and good for fighting spirit.
But why does our empathy sometimes transcend our own species? Why do we have a problem with animal suffering? Consider, for example, the empathic reactions of pets when the owner is in trouble. Why are people sometimes rescued by wild animals? While humans may not have a stellar reputation among great apes, dolphins, and elephants, numerous incidents have been recorded of humans being rescued by these species specifically.
We don't really have a satisfactory answer to that yet. If neither kin selection nor any other moral module can account for this, then we will have to regard selfless help to outsiders as an innate tendency towards empathy and compassion. To which I immediately admit that empathy and compassion in the animal world is rather haphazardly applied; when you're in need, don't count on anything.
Tolerance in the animal world
Does the great ape ethic also have traces of tolerance? There are certainly indications of this.
Chimpanzees and capuchin monkeys—the two species I work with most—are special, as they are among the very few primates that share food outside the mother-offspring context (…) Members of both species are interested in each other’s food and will share food on occasion—sometimes even hand over a piece to another. Most sharing, however, is passive, where one individual will reach for food owned by another, who will let go. But even passive sharing is special when compared to most animals, for which a similar situation would result in a fight or assertion by the dominant, without any sharing at all.
- Frans de Waal, Primates and philosophers. How morality evolved (2006)
Thus, where the norm is that no food is stolen, it is condoned if it happens with the knowledge of the owner, who can turn a blind eye. De Waal also regularly notes reconciliation rituals and comfort behaviour. It is not helpful for the group if it is torn apart by internal conflicts, although these do occur regularly, and can be very violent.
Our ‘animal’ morality
This gives us a very good idea of the 'animal' moral qualities that we have been genetically handed down. Schematically, it looks something like this:
I have to be honest. There are several such lists circulating. They all overlap somewhat, but there are also differences. I drew this list mainly from the work of the Greek-American sociologist and physician Nicholas Christakis, director of the Human Nature Lab at Yale University. But there are differences.
Christakis is not so much looking for our genetically transmitted morality, but for the ingrained human qualities that create successful societies. He therefore also includes human learning capacity and knowledge transfer in his list. There is not much to argue with that, but I do not include that element, because the moral dimension of knowledge transfer is not so prominent. However, do not underestimate its significance: it is the catalyst for the development of culture. And culture, in turn, has added a crucial ethical layer to genetic morality. More on that later.
One element that Christakis doesn't mention, but I did include, is the tendency toward empathy and compassion. The ethologist Frans de Waal is committed to this.
The American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt also includes empathy and compassion in his own list, which is known as the moral foundations theory. Broadly speaking, the same elements occur, except that he also includes a 'module' for religious feelings of purity and holiness. But that module is controversial. In fact, the whole moral foundations theory is controversial. In both empirical and genetic research, Haidt's theory does not hold up well.
And then there's the British research group led by anthropologist Oliver Scott Curry, which published a study by a group of anthropologists from Oxford University in February 2019. There were 60 different cultures around the world examined for their moral codes.
To test the outcomes, the research group conducted an extensive twin study in Australia. We can assume that there is a cluster of genes that determine our apprehension to morality. The twin study showed that certain combinations of genes influence how sensitive we are to each of the seven identified moral codes. For example, one person appears to find ownership important and dominant behaviour much less so, and the other finds dominant behaviour very important but is less susceptible to 'fair sharing'. These preferences appear to be genetically fixed. What just hasn't happened yet, is to pinpoint the set of genes that determines your precise preferences in this area. But that's being worked on...
These moral codes identified in Oxford, known as Morality as cooperation, are roughly similar to the list I keep, except that empathy and compassion are not on the list, and friendships and social networks as well as identity memory neither. The explanation is presumably that the research was anthropological in nature, and the research was not informed in advance by ethological insights. I think the research group has simply overlooked ethological morality because it is so self-evident to us. Maybe it was hidden in plain sight.
When do we help or punish others?
Before I get to the closing remarks, I'll take a step back and focus on help and punishment. Providing aid or meting out punishment involves great or small sacrifices. When are we willing to make those sacrifices?
In the first place, of course, the carriers of our DNA can count on our help. The more DNA we have in common, the more willing we are to sacrifice.
But there are more motives, and they can interfere with each other.
If someone from our (in)group needs help in a conflict with an outgroup.
Because by definition there is cooperation within groups. In any case, we are more likely to help people from our own (in)group than complete strangers, even if there is no outgroup to be seen.
Out of reciprocity: we feel that we owe the other something because he has done something for us before.
Out of empathy: we instinctively want to help people (and animals) in need.
Because we have something to gain from it. Helping another invites reciprocity: the other will hopefully return the favor one day. Helping another person can also invite friendship.
Hierarchy also plays a role. Strategically administered help to others within the group can benefit or confirm your hierarchical position within the group. In this sense, help can be a form of dominance. But helping can also be an act of submission: you help someone else because it is expected of you or because that is your role within the group.
Redistribution also plays a role. You share with someone else because it fits within the pattern of redistribution that is the norm within your group.
Out of friendship. Outside the close family ties, help to others is applied quite haphazardly: you should not count on anything. Friendship reinforces the motives of reciprocity, empathy and redistribution. With friends, those motives carry more weight.
If you are helped, it is therefore difficult to determine the motive for this. The motifs often overlap. The same goes for punishment (punishment is basically reverse help). And we are only talking here about innate motives. Cultural motives also play a major role, of course, but more on that later.
What distinguishes humans?
Are there any specific human ingrained traits that promote cooperation within groups, and that are not shared by our kindred spirits, the great apes, dolphins and elephants? There certainly will be. I already mentioned speech and language. In line with this, Christakis mentions knowledge transfer.
We share 98 to 99 percent of our DNA with great apes. Most with bonobos. That sounds impressive, but don't jump to conclusions. For instance, we share about 50 percent of our DNA with the banana. About 7 million years ago, there was a species of ape that both we and the great ape descended from. Since then, we have grown genetically apart. The physical differences between bonobos and humans are clearly discernible. For example, we walk consistently upright, our spine has an S-shape instead of a C-shape, we no longer have a tail, our arms have become shorter, our jaws have evolved, our pelvis is larger, and so is our brain content.
The moral genetic development of man relative to the great ape over the past 7 million years is much more difficult to observe. Our genetic knowledge is still insufficient to clearly map moral deviations. Of course, we do recognise moral differences, but it is hard to pinpoint which differences are genetic in nature, and which are cultural.
More easily identifiable are the cognitive differences. Unlike other primates, we can categorise objects, think abstractly, imagine nonexistent things, and reason logically in an advanced way. And so, we can anticipate future events and do things with a view to effects in the distant future. We are aware of our own mortality; we are much better at inventing tools and technology. Our advanced use of speech and language allows us to communicate very complex ideas.
And we have created cultures over the past millions of years that have become increasingly complex due to cultural evolution: we are capable of very complex forms of cooperation and social organisation, including legal, political, ethical and religious institutions. One might argue about the extent to which great apes can also do this, but it is certain that humans can do it (much) better.
We do not know exactly the genetic moral development of humans over the past 7 million years. Especially because we do not yet have a clear picture of our current genetic morality. But it is very obvious that our increased cognitive capacity, our capacity for complex communication and our ability to form complex cultures have played a decisive role.
Cultural morality
It is not plausible that we have developed entirely new genetic moral modules over the past 7 million years. The new moral modules that we have at our disposal (perhaps religion, legislation and art, for example) may have mainly a cultural origin. It is plausible that we have further refined the morality already ingrained in us, especially with a view to better mutual cooperation in a community context. Our reciprocity and retribution mechanisms have become more sophisticated, culminating in more complex forms of (conditional or deferred) altruism for the benefit of the community as a whole. As a result, the importance of kin selection may have become relatively smaller.
But: what I have written in this paragraph is very speculative. We know more about the development of humans in the past 50,000 years. We will discuss this in a next newsletter. In an evolutionary sense, that's a blink of an eye: genetically, little can have changed in such a short period of time.
The power of moral convictions
This is a good time to reflect on the unprecedented power of moral convictions. Even if they are beliefs with little genetic basis and that a person has only developed in the course of his life, those beliefs can form the basis for breaking friendships, to fighting divorces, to wars even. Think, for example, of terrorists who put their lives on the line: not infrequently these are late converts in the name of Allah, anarchism or animal welfare. Whoever can influence morality has a powerful weapon, even if we can only influence reasoned, cultural morality.
Moral psychology distinguishes moral intuition from reasoned morality. Neuropsychologists describe that our decision-making process is determined, on the one hand, by the evolutionarily newer parts of our brain — over which we have control, but which is motivationally weaker. The older part of our brain is motivationally stronger, responds faster and is not easy to control.
Moral intuition is an automatic process that we are not aware of and leads to an intuitive judgement (like — not fun; good — bad; dirty — tasty; pathetic — not pathetic). Moral intuition also includes heuristics: rules of thumb that we are usually not aware of but that guide our moral judgement on an unconscious level, such as: whoever makes mess must clean it up himself, pathetic people should be helped, wrong behaviour must be punished, what goes around comes around. Moral intuition is largely biologically ingrained. Genetically transmitted social traits are the result of millions of years of evolution. We can't undo it, even if we wanted to.
Sometimes behaviour comes about without reasoned morality, for example if we protect your children out of a reflex or give someone a blow back. More often, our moral intuition ‘directs’ our reasoned morality without knowing it. Our moral intuition is constantly at work so that in a flash we already have our intuitive judgement ready about everything we perceive: images, words, smells, people, situations. Based on that intuitive judgement, we put our cognition to work to justify that judgement. It is only when we fail to cognitively justify our intuitive judgement that we sometimes become susceptible to reasonable arguments to the contrary.
But our moral intuition can be manipulated to a certain degree. An intuitive judgement about a politician can hardly be changed on a reasoned level, let alone by the persuasiveness of his rational arguments. But the intuitive judgement itself can be influenced. Especially in advertising, politics and in jury trials, a lot of research has been done on this. People judge more mildly if you first show them a funny video or you feed them cookies. People become stricter and more intolerant if you subconsciously influence them with nasty images or put them at a dirty table. The latter applies more strongly to people who are more sensitive to physical stimuli ("private body consciousness"). Those who are more sensitive to filth, foul smells, aches and pains or nasty images are more likely to have a negative moral judgement about abortion and homosexuality.
There are techniques to give our reasoned morality more influence over our final judgement, but the possibilities are limited and most people don't like it: it makes us feel uncomfortable. Possibilities to influence heuristics through cognition are limited. Our heuristics are partly ingrained in our brains and partly mainly developed early in our childhood. Education, upbringing and culture do have an influence, but the older someone gets, the more difficult it is to influence their heuristics.
Social Darwinism
We also need to talk about the times when research into genetic morality had a bad reputation. For a long time, it has been thought that morality is purely cultural in nature. Animal morality was considered a ridiculous idea, let alone traces of it in human morality. In left-wing circles, especially in communism, it was considered a dangerous idea.
And that was not surprising, because the proponents of genetic morality were mainly in the Social Darwinist movement, in a tangle of theories until the end of the Second World War. The survival of the fittest became not only an explanation of social behaviour: the mechanism of cooperation as the ultimate morality also had to be helped. Humanity would benefit if peoples were bred with outstanding qualities, who would compete with each other. Humanity had to be cleansed of bad genes. The feeble-minded had to be euthanized, the world had to be rid of parasitic peoples. It is not for nothing that until long after the Second World War there was a taboo on research into the genetic origin of our morality.
The mistake that the Social Darwinists made is that we are concerned with description and understanding, not with prescription. We may be biologically programmed with the spread of our genes and cooperation as our goal. But that does not mean that we should blindly and indiscriminately regard our genes and cooperation as the ultimate moral end goal.
To conclude
For those who think that there are many things wrong with our morality: our cultural morality can be influenced to some extent. Our genetic morality can’t. But because our genetic morality concerns 'modules', which can sometimes conflict with each other, they can be filled in and arranged in all kinds of ways. The fact that hierarchy, redistribution and friendships exist, for example, does not say how they are filled in and which module has priority in which case. That's where culture comes into play. Genetic morality then forms the foundation of our morality: the cultural development of our morality in roughly the last 50,000 years has had a substantial influence on our behaviour. More about that next time.
For further reading
Edward O. Wilson, On human nature (1978)
Richard Dawkins, The selfish gene (1976)
Frans de Waal, Chimpanzee politics (1982)
Frans de Waal & al., Primates and philosophers. How morality evolved (2006)
Frans de Waal, The age of empathy: nature's lessons for a kinder society (2009)
Alex Mesoudi, Peter Danielson, Ethics, evolution and culture, Theory in Biosciences (2008)
Francisco J. Ayala, The difference of being human: Morality, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (2010)
Jonathan Haidt, Selin Kesebir, Morality, Handbook of Social Psychology (2010)
Philip Kitcher, The ethical project (2011)
Camilla Butti et al., Von Economo neurons: clinical and evolutionary perspectives, Cortex (2013)
Suzanne Simard, How trees talk to each other, TED Talk (2016)
Nicholas Christakis, Blueprint, the evolutionary origins of a good society (2019)
Oliver Scott Curry c.s., Is it good to cooperate? Testing the theory of morality-as-cooperation in 60 societies, Current Anthropology (2019)
Oliver Scott Curry, What’s wrong with Moral Foundations Theory, and how to get moral psychology right, Behavioral Scientist (2019)
This was the first episode in the series on morality and toleration. The episodes so far are:
The morality that everyone is born with
About the moral modules that all people have in common. About kin selection, cooperation, empathy and much more.Playing games with morality
Our ingrained moral modules interact. With simple games you can simulate how people in societies interact with each other. About dealing with power, division, revenge and trust.The morality of our inner hunter-gatherer, farmer and citizen
Our morality is layered: every phase of human history has left its mark. Culturally, there are still layers of hunter-gatherer, farmer, and citizen in our ethics.Annoying questions about good and bad
Is there such a thing as moral knowledge? And how do we find out? About self-doubt, man-eaters, emotional judgements, and the difference between theft and vegetables.Good people are happier. But how to become a good and happy person?
Aristotle's virtue ethics along the empirical ruler. Do we even need an ethical system if everyone is virtuous and happy? And positive psychology: how to become a happier and better person?