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11 - Can Evolutionary Processes Explain the Origins of Morality?

from Part IV - Group Living

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 March 2020

By
Dennis L. Krebs
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

We humans have been called “the moral animal” (Wright, 1994). We help others, make sacrifices to uphold our groups, treat others fairly, respect authority, exert self-control, and seek to be pure of heart. We experience moral emotions such as sympathy, gratitude, forgiveness, guilt, and righteous indignation. We judge acts as right, wrong, fair, and unfair, and we judge people as good, bad, virtuous, and vicious. We harbor beliefs about the forms of conduct that we and others should and should not enact, and we justify these beliefs with moral reasons. Children react strongly to violations of moral rules at a very young age. We possess a conscience that bothers us when we violate our moral standards and principles. We express moral outrage at acts we consider unjust, and we are willing to make sacrifices – in some cases, even of our lives – to uphold our moral principles and to fight injustice.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Behavior , pp. 139 - 149
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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