Morality is fundamentally an evolved solution to problems of social co‐operation

Three Questions About the Social Life of Values

“…Though not made explicit in any of the contributions, there are important ways in which they speak to a thriving interdisciplinary literature around human cooperation. A number of prominent accounts have sought to tie the emergence of cooperation closely to morality and, especially, fairness, which are posited as having evolved precisely with that function (see inter alia Tomasello and Vaish 2013;Henrich and Henrich 2007;Baumard and Sperber 2013;Stafford, Judd, and Bell 2018;Gellner et al 2020). To take one recent example, Curry, Mullins, and Whitehouse (2019) seek to demonstrate systematically that across a very wide range of cultural contexts, 'specific forms of cooperative behaviour (helping kin, helping your group, reciprocating, being brave, deferring to superiors, dividing disputed resources, and respecting prior possession) will be considered morally good wherever they arise' (48).…”