Claims that some sorts of genuine moral behavior exist in nonhuman beings are increasingly common. Many people, however, remain unconvinced, despite growing acceptance of the remarkable behavioral complexity of animals and despite the admission that there may be significant differences between human and nonhuman moral behavior. This paper argues that the rejection of “moral animals” is misplace...

The main thing that prospective readers of a book want to know is whether the book is any good. Christopher Boehm’s book, Moral Origins: The Evolution of Virtue, Altruism, and Shame, is definitely a good read. It is interesting, informative, insightful, full of compelling examples, well-documented, and well-written, though somewhat repetitive in places. We recommend it to anyone interested in m...

Frans de Waal's view that empathy is at the basis of morality directly seems to build on Darwin, who considered sympathy as the crucial instinct. Yet when we look closer, their understanding of the central social instinct differs considerably. De Waal sees our deeply ingrained tendency to sympathize (or rather: empathize) with others as the good side of our morally dualistic nature. For Darwin,...

This paper describes how South African soldiers draw on notions of gender, sexuality and morality in their constructions of identity and heterosexual sexuality. Popular discourses around HIV and AIDS in South Africa and elsewhere have highlighted the centrality of notions of morality, many of them problematic, in the response to the epidemic. In Southern Africa, the centrality of heterosexualit...

Morality is a critical part of human society. This chapter explores the origins of human morality by examining whether nonhuman primate species share aspects of fi ve domains thought to be important in human moral behavior—concerns involving harm, fairness, hierarchy, ingroup allegiance, and purity. Behaviors in the harm domain have received the most attention from researchers, and converging l...

Neural computation has an extraordinarily influential role in the study of several human capacities and behavior. It has been the dominant approach in the vision science of the last half century, and it is currently one of the fundamental methods of investigation for several higher cognitive functions. Yet, no neurocomputational models have been proposed for morality. Computational modeling in ...

Although there is an emerging consensus that disgust plays a role in human morality, it remains unclear whether this role is limited to transgressions that contain elements of physical disgust (e.g., gory murders, sexual crimes), or whether disgust is also involved in "pure" forms of morality. To address this issue, we examined the relationship between individual differences in the tendency to ...

The functionalist “law” that religion sustains the moral order must be amended. As is demonstrated in this study, religion has this effect only as it is based on belief in powerful, active, conscious, morally-concerned gods. Contrary to Durkheim’s claims, participation in religious rituals per se has little independent impact on morality and none when done on behalf of gods conceived as unconsc...

The science of morality has drawn heavily on well-controlled but artificial laboratory settings. To study everyday morality, we repeatedly assessed moral or immoral acts and experiences in a large (N = 1252) sample using ecological momentary assessment. Moral experiences were surprisingly frequent and manifold. Liberals and conservatives emphasized somewhat different moral dimensions. Religious...