Morality as a Biological Adaptation – An Evolutionary Model Based on the Lifestyle of Human Foragers

Abstract

A biologist studying the behavior of a species, when confronted with a seemingly costly behavior that is highly persistent in that species, would certainly entertain as her null hypothesis that this behavior is adaptive, and that the psychological mechanisms underlying it were therefore adaptations put in place by some form of natural selection. The aim of this chapter is to develop the outline of such an adaptive hypothesis (Alexander 1987) for the evolution in humans of our moral psychology, the moral emotions of which it consists, and the moral behaviors it produces. Briefly, we will propose that moral emotions are the subjective side of the proximate rules (motivations) that regulate human cooperation, which in turn is an evolutionarily novel adaptation to enable the uniquely derived lifestyle of human foragers, which requires generosity and sharing due to extreme mutual interdependence.