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...

iv List of Tables and Figures v What is Morality? 2 Emotion, Moral Motives, and Political Triggers 6 Approach and Avoidance Moral Motives 8 Morality and Political Ideology 11 Framing Political Issues 13 Framing and Moral Motives 15 Method 17 Participants 17 Procedure, Design, Stimuli, and Measures 17 Results 23 Data Preparation 23 Data Analysis 23 Summary 26 Discussion 29 Limitations and Future...

Baumard et al. attribute morality to a naturally selected propensity to share costs and benefits of cooperation fairly. But how does mundane mutualism relate to transcendent notions of morality critical to creating cultures and civilizations? Humans often make their greatest exertions for an idea they form of their group. Primary social identity is bounded by sacred values, which drive individu...

Background: The science of ethics is one of the most complete basic sciences that human beings urgently need, because the subject of knowledge of ethics is the human soul and its inner construction. The moral thinking of the thinkers of the Frankfurt School, as one of the ideas of the twentieth century, is based on the ethics of virtue; because the moral act is known as the act which is the res...