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12 - The Evolution and Function of Third-Party Moral Judgment

from Part IV - Group Living

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 March 2020

By
Will Reader  and
Sara Hughes
Edited by
Lance Workman ,
Will Reader  and
Jerome H. Barkow
Lance Workman
Affiliation:
University of South Wales
Will Reader
Affiliation:
Sheffield Hallam University
Jerome H. Barkow
Affiliation:
Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia
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Summary

There has been much recent research activity on the evolution of morality (Chapters 10 and 11, this volume; Haidt, 1993; Hauser, 2006; Krebs, 2011; Kurzban & DeScioli, 2009; Ridley, 1996; Wright, 1994), with most tending to focus upon the paradoxical behavior in situations in which a moral actor incurs a personal cost in order to help nonrelatives. This is paradoxical because, from an evolutionary point of view, any genes that produce a behavior that benefits nonrelatives at the expense of the individual in which those genes reside should find themselves at a fitness disadvantage and therefore would die out. In short, such behaviors should not evolve. This is, of course, a familiar problem, one that was discussed at length by Trivers (1971) under the guise of the evolution of altruism.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Behavior , pp. 150 - 157
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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