NEW PAPER Moral universals: A machine-reading analysis of 256 cultures

What is the cross-cultural prevalence of the seven moral values posited by the theory of “Morality-as-Cooperation”? Previous research, using hand-coding of ethnographic accounts of ethics from 60 societies, found examples of most of the seven morals in most societies, and observed these morals with equal frequency across cultural regions. Here we extend this analysis, by developing a new Morality-as-Cooperation Dictionary (MAC-D), and using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) to machine-code ethnographic accounts of ethics from an additional 196 societies (the entire HRAF corpus). Again, we find evidence of most of the seven morals in most societies, across all cultural regions. The new method allows us to detect minor variations in morals across region and subsistence strategy. And we successfully validate the machine-coding against the previous hand-coding. These findings lend further support to the theory of ‘morality-as-cooperation’. And MAC-D emerges as the most comprehensive and well-validated tool for machine-reading moral corpora. We discuss the limitations of the current study, as well as prospects for future research.

Alfano, M., Cheong, M., & Curry, O. S. (2024). Moral universals: A machine-reading analysis of 256 societies. Heliyon, 10(6). [Link] [OSF]

Figure 1: Global distribution of societies from eHRAF

This House Believes in a Universal Morality

Proposing the motion at the Cambridge Union (video here).

Good evening everyone, and thank you for the invitation to speak to you tonight.

Is there a universal morality? Yes of course. And we know what it is.

Once the exclusive preserve of philosophy, the study of morality is now a thriving science, drawing on insights from game theory, genetics, animal behaviour, psychology, anthropology and the rest of the human sciences.

This science tells us that there is nothing mysterious or magical about morality, it is merely a collection of cooperative rules – rules that help us get along, work together, keep the peace, and promote the common good.

And game theory – the mathematics of cooperation – tells us that there is not one but many different types of cooperation, at least seven. And these different types of cooperation explain different types of morality, different moral virtues. So:

1. Kin selection explains why we love and care for our families, and feel obliged to protect and provide for them.

2. Mutualism explains why we form groups, value those groups and our membership in them, and hence value group loyalty, unity and solidarity.

3. Reciprocity explains why we feel obliged to return favours and punish those that don't.

4. And conflict resolution explains…why we perform feats of heroism and generosity...

5. ... why we defer to our superiors...

6. ... why we divide resources fairly...

7. ... and why we respect others' property.

So we have The Magnificent Seven: love, loyalty, reciprocity, heroism, deference, fairness and property rights.

These types of cooperation are immensely valuable. Hence people value them. They are motivated to cooperate. They want to cooperate. They think they ought to cooperate. And they think that others ought to cooperate too.

It is these cooperative 'oughts' that philosophers and others have called moral 'oughts'.

And it is these cooperative principles that people use to judge whether something is morally good or bad. A person who follows the rules – who loves their family, helps their group, returns favours and so on – is morally good. A person who breaks the rules is morally bad.

Now, this cooperative theory of morality predicts that, because people all over the world face similar cooperative problems, they will have similar moral rules. And they do.

In one study, my colleagues and I at the Cowley Polytechnic went to the archives, and read through 600 ethnographic accounts of ethics from 60 societies around the world.

We found examples of most of these rules in most places. And we found not a single counter-example – a society in which one of these rules was considered morally bad. And we observed these moral rules with equal frequency across different continents.

For example, and I quote:

1. Among the Amhara of Ethiopia, “flouting kinship obligation is regarded as a shameful deviation, indicating an evil character”.

2. In Korea, we found an “egalitarian community ethic of mutual assistance and cooperation among neighbors and strong in-group solidarity”.

3. In India and Bangladesh, “[r]eciprocity is observed in every stage of Garo life and has a very high place in the Garo … structure of values”.

4. Among the Maasai of Kenya, “warrior virtues are … highly respected”, and “the uncompromising ideal of supreme warriorhood involves …[a] commitment to self-sacrifice…in the heat of battle … a supreme display of courageous loyalty”.

5. The Bemba of Zambia exhibit “a deep sense of respect for elders' authority”.

6. The Kapauku of Indonesia's “idea of justice” is called “uta-uta, half-half…the meaning of which comes very close to what we call equity”.

7. And among the Tarahumara of Mexico, “respect for the property of others is the keystone of all interpersonal relations”.

So these seven moral rules are not Western or Eastern, or Northern or Southern. They are universal moral principles that everyone agrees upon.

In another study, my colleagues and I created a questionnaire to investigate whether people endorsed these seven moral principles. We translated it into 40 languages – from Portuguese to Persian. And we used it to gather data from 12k people. We found that everyone everywhere agreed that it was moral to cooperate in these ways. And their responses were remarkably similar, overlapping 80% across cultures.

So does this mean that moral systems are identical around the world? No, different people in different places face a different range of cooperative problems, and hence they rank or prioritise these moral principles in different ways.

In traditional societies where people are surrounded by their extended families, family values loom large. In agricultural societies where farmers work together to bring in the harvest, mutualism and reciprocity predominate. In pastoral societies where herders must protect their livestock from thieves, we find a culture of honour – encompassing heroism and negative reciprocity, or revenge. And in market societies, reciprocity and fairness take precedence.

So our moral psychology is rather like a graphic equaliser. Everyone has the same knobs, but they get twiddled in different ways. But the underlying principles are the same. And we can use these principles to predict, explain and understand the moral variation that we see. And these principles can even be used to make judgements of other practices in other cultures, as long as we remember that other people might be facing a different range of cooperative problems, and have a different range of solutions available to them.

So yes, there is a universal morality. Morality is always and everywhere a cooperative phenomena. And everyone, everywhere agrees that cooperating is the right thing to do.

Thank you.

NEW PREPRINT Modular Morals: The Genetic Architecture of Morality as Cooperation

Is morality the product of multiple domain-specific psychological mechanisms or one domain-general mechanism? Recent research suggests that morality consists of a range of solutions to the problems of cooperation that are recurrent in human social life. According to the theory of Morality as Cooperation (MAC), this involves at least seven types of cooperation, giving rise to seven types of morality: Family, Group, Reciprocity, Heroism, Deference, Fairness and Property Rights. However, how genes and environments influence these morals is unclear. Here we use multivariate analysis of a large twin sample (N = 1,066 pairs) to determine the genetic and environmental structure of moral values as measured by the Morality as Cooperation Questionnaire, contrasting models in which these morals are the product of either 1) multiple domain-specific psychological mechanisms versus 2) a single domain-general mechanism implementing all forms of cooperation. The results supported multiple heritable moral mechanisms, and models with fewer than the predicted seven factors fit poorly. A domain-general mechanism was also needed, though this showed non-significant heritability and may reflect response bias. We discuss the current study's limitations and suggest future research on the nature, structure, and content of morality.

Zakharin, M., Curry, O. S., Lewis, G., & Bates, T. C. (2023, July 5). Modular Morals: The Genetic Architecture of Morality as Cooperation. [Link]

NEW PAPER Moral Messaging: Testing a Framing Technique during a Pandemic

We experimentally investigated whether appeals to moral principles—as operationalized by the theory of Morality-as-Cooperation—increase pandemic-related public health behavior. Participants (from the USA and India) were presented with persuasive messages, asked about their intentions to follow pandemic-related restrictions, were asked to donate to a charity fighting COVID-19, and completed the Morality-as-Cooperation Questionnaire. We found that moral messages were more effective than non-moral messages in increasing Prosocial Intentions and Donations, especially messages appealing to Heroism. In the US sample, the effect of moral messages was larger when they were concordant with participants’ moral values. We also found that some moral messages were effective only in a particular population. This paper outlines the necessary next steps for using Morality-as-Cooperation for evidence-based communication.

Misiak, M., Curry, O. S., & Turecek, P. (2023). Moral Messaging: Testing a Framing Technique during a Pandemic. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 1-11. [Link]

ACCEPTED COMMENTARY A broader theory of cooperation can better explain 'purity'

Self-control provides one cooperative explanation for ‘purity’. Other types of cooperation provide additional explanations. For example, individuals compete for status by displaying high-value social and sexual traits, which are moralised because they reduce the mutual costs of conflict. As this theory predicts, sexually unattractive traits are perceived as morally bad, aside from self-control. Moral psychology will advance more quickly by drawing on all theories of cooperation.

Curry, O. S., & Sznycer, D. (2023). A broader theory of cooperation can better explain “purity”. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 46, e300 [PDF] [Link] [OSF]

NEW PREPRINT Modular Morals: Mapping the organisation of the moral brain

Is morality the product of multiple domain-specific psychological mechanisms, or one domain-general mechanism? Previous research suggests that morality consists of a range of solutions to the problems of cooperation recurrent in human social life. This theory of ‘morality as cooperation’ suggests that there are (at least) seven specific moral domains: family values, group loyalty, reciprocity, heroism, deference, fairness and property rights. However, it is unclear how these types of morality are implemented at the neuroanatomical level. The possibilities are that morality is (1) the product of multiple distinct domain-specific adaptations for cooperation, (2) the product of a single domain-general adaptation which learns a range of moral rules, or (3) the product of some combination of domain-specific and domain-general adaptations. To distinguish between these possibilities, we first conducted an anatomical likelihood estimation meta-analysis of previous studies investigating the relationship between these seven moral domains and neuroanatomy. This meta-analysis provided evidence for a combination of specific and general adaptations. Next, we investigated the relationship between the seven types of morality – as measured by the Morality as Cooperation Questionnaire (Relevance) – and grey matter volume in a large neuroimaging (n=607) sample. No associations between moral values and grey matter volume survived whole-brain exploratory testing. We conclude that whatever combination of mechanisms are responsible for morality, either they are not neuroanatomically localised, or else their localisation is not manifested in grey matter volume. Future research should employ phylogenetically informed a priori predictions, as well as alternative measures of morality and of brain function.

Wilkinson, J., Curry, O. S., Mitchell, B. L., Wright, M. J., & Bates, T. C., Ph.D. (2022, July 12). Modular Morals: Mapping the organisation of the moral brain. https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/H3N9A

NEW PREPRINT: The Costs and Benefits of Kindness

What is kindness, and what makes an act kind? Previous theoretical and empirical research suggests that the kindness of an act depends not only on the benefits the act provides, but also the costs incurred to provide those benefits. Here we test these predictions by having 1,692 candidate acts of kindness (for family, friends, colleagues and strangers) rated for perceived cost, benefit and kindness, by a large sample of the US & UK public (N=16,064). As predicted, benefit and cost (and their interaction) are positively related to the kindness of the act (pseudo R2≈0.73), for all types of recipients. Less efficient acts are considered kinder than more efficient acts. We discuss the implications of these findings for the effectiveness of altruism, and the prospects for further research on the nature of kindness.

Curry, O. S., Tunç, M. N., Wilkinson, J., & Krasnow, M. (2022, June 7). The Costs and Benefits of Kindness. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/sxwm6

NEW PREPRINT: Morality as Cooperation, Politics as Conflict

What is the relationship between morality and politics? If morality is a collection of cooperative rules, and politics is conflict over which cooperative projects to pursue, then we should expect the two to be related. People who expect to benefit from a particular type of cooperation will be likely to endorse the corresponding moral values and political policies. Here we examine the relationship between moral values and political liberalism-conservatism, with data from the Morality-As-Cooperation Questionnaire and the Social and Economics Conservatism Scale in samples of participants from the USA (N = 518), Denmark (N = 552), the Netherlands (N = 353), and an international online population (N = 1,337). We found that political conservatism was consistently related with deference values. We also found some support for the hypotheses that political orientation has different associations with family values versus group values and has different associations with fairness values versus reciprocity values. However, for most of our hypotheses, the results showed no support or did not reach statistical significance, largely due to poor model fit or measurement error associated with the political scales. We conclude that improved measurement of political preferences is needed to illuminate the relationship between morality and politics.

van Leeuwen, F., Van Lissa, C. J., Papakonstantinou, T., Petersen, M. B., & Curry, O. S. (2022, May 25). Morality as Cooperation, Politics as Conflict. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/wm6rk

From ‘is to ought’

Excerpt from: Curry, O. S. (2022). Seven Moral Rules Found All Around the World. Living together with Ambiguities: Different cultures and common values? (pp48-60) (Conference organised by Fondazione Intercultura, Florence, Italy, 2-4 September 2021). [PDF]

---

What does this new science of morality say about how we ought to behave?

Well, given that morality is a collection of cooperative rules, then of course, it is morally good to follow these rules. It is good to cooperate. You ought to love your family, be loyal to your group, return favours, be brave, respect your superiors, be fair, and respect other’s property. And if these rules come into conflict – if you have to choose between different cooperative opportunities, such as helping your family or helping your group – then you ought to choose the more cooperative option, the greater good.

Hence moral problems are empirical problems; moral questions are empirical questions. The question is always “what is the most cooperative move to make in this situation?” And these questions have objectively correct answers – some behaviours really do promote cooperation more than others. Hence we can solve our moral problems using standard scientific method. Faced with a moral problem, we identify candidate cooperative solutions, and criticise and test them. (And we can apply this method universally, to any culture, as long as we remember that different people in different places might face a different set of problems, and have different solutions available to them.) 

As with science in general, we may never be 100% sure what the answer is. Our current set of solutions are tentative, they are hypotheses about how to solve our problems. Nevertheless through successive rounds of trial and error we might move closer to the moral truth. For we do not have to stick with the cooperative solutions given to us by nature or culture. We can try (and have tried) to invent new and better solutions – for example the Enlightenment idea of treating people as equals, or the cultural invention of queuing. And when our new solutions are successful, when they provide better solutions to our problems – when, in game theoretic terms, they lead to superior equilibria – then we make progress, moral progress.

This cooperative theory explains why previous moral theories have identified cooperation (social contract theory), stable strategies (deontology), specific character traits (virtue theory), and beneficial outcomes (consequentialism) as important parts of morality. And it explains why each of these theories – because they each focus on some parts of morality and omit others – has run into predictable difficulties. For example, Social Contract Theory focusses on only one type of cooperation – reciprocity – and is criticised for ignoring the rest. Deontology advocates stable strategies that can be adopted by everyone, but is criticised for neglecting their consequences. Virtue Theory celebrates various ad hoc lists of character traits – love, loyalty, heroism – but it doesn’t explain why these particular traits are moral, nor does it explain how to choose between them when they conflict. Consequentialism, meanwhile, focusses on the beneficial outcomes, but is criticised for advancing unstable solutions that, because they are not cooperative, are not considered moral. The cooperative approach avoids all of these problems.

So conventional wisdom is wrong to claim that you can’t go ‘from is to ought’ or ‘from facts to values’ (Curry, 2006). You can go ‘from facts to values’ if you start with the right ‘facts’ – facts about the nature and content of our moral values, facts about what morality is (Sterelny & Fraser, 2016). With this discovery we can solve our most important problems using the most successful problem-solving machinery ever invented – science.

Moral Problems: a Popperian approach

From a talk to the Oxford Karl Popper Society.

Abstract
What is morality? And how ought you behave? These questions, until recently exclusively philosophical, are now becoming scientific. According to the theory of 'morality as cooperation’, morality is the name we give to our attempts to solve cooperative problems. This theory makes testable predictions about the nature, content and structure of morality – predictions have been tested, and have (thus far) passed the tests. On this account then, you ought to cooperate; in situations in which you have to choose between alternative cooperative options (as in moral dilemmas) you ought to choose the more cooperative option; and, better still, you ought to search for new and better solutions to cooperative problems. Thus moral problems are empirical problems, with objective answers, that can be solved by standard scientific method. Adopting this method explicitly will make moral discussions more constructive, and accelerate the pace of moral progress.

‘Moral molecules’ – a new theory of what goodness is made of

How many moral values are there? What are they? What does it take to be a morally good person? Over the centuries, philosophers, theologians and others have offered no shortage of answers to these questions…A typical problem with previous attempts to map the moral domain is that they are not based on an underlying theory of morality, and hence they are ad hoc and unsystematic. Recent developments in the scientific study of morality address this problem and offer a more rigorous and expansive approach.…In a recent paper, my colleagues and I show how morality is a combinatorial system in which the seven basic moral ‘elements’ combine to form a much larger number of more complex moral ‘molecules’.…The theory of ‘morality as cooperation’ provides a systematic taxonomy of morals and suggests that there will be as many types of morality as there are types of cooperation (and their combinations). It organises familiar moral concepts and alerts us to unfamiliar ones. It could perhaps even spur the creation of new moral concepts – novel combinations that we’ve yet to invent or imagine. In this way, the theory provides us at last with a scientific guide for how to be good.

Explaining Honesty: A cooperative approach

[Excerpt from an unfunded grant application.]

Introduction

Honesty is one of the most frequently observed and highly regarded moral virtues [1, 2]. But what is honesty? Why is it such an important moral virtue? And when is it permissible to lie?

Previous research suggests that morality is a collection of cooperative rules [3]. There are many types of cooperation, hence there are many types of morality, including: love of family, group loyalty, reciprocity, bravery, respect, fairness and property rights [4]. These morals appear to be evolutionarily ancient, genetically distinct, psychometrically distinguishable, and culturally universal [5, 6]. Further, the theory argues that it will always be morally good to behave in these ways, unless doing so interferes with some other more valuable cooperative opportunity [7].

Here I suggest how this cooperative approach to morality might be applied to honesty.

Communication as Cooperation

Honesty is best understood as the cooperative exchange of information. This explains why telling the truth is not merely an epistemic or prudential virtue but a moral virtue; why there are different types of honesty and dishonesty; and why it is sometimes permissible, even morally preferable, to lie.

First, according to signalling theory, all communication is cooperative: senders benefit from sending information, and receivers benefit from receiving it [8]. (If they didn’t, then they wouldn’t.) And communication is undermined by uncooperative individuals who disrupt or exploit the system by sending false information [9]. Human language is no exception: it relies implicitly on “the cooperative principle” of providing true information; violations of this principle lead to the breakdown of communication [10]. Thus, if morality is a collection of cooperative rules, and cooperating is considered morally good; and if telling the truth is cooperative; then this would explain why telling the truth is considered morally good (and lying is considered morally bad). And the sheer quantity and import of information conveyed by human discourse explains why honesty – and a reputation for honesty – is such a highly valued moral virtue [11-15].

Second, this cooperative theory also leads us to expect that, because different types of cooperation involve the transfer of different types of information, there will be different types of honesty and dishonesty. For example, conventional signals are used to help groups coordinate to mutual advantage [16]; these conventions are undermined, and the mutual benefit is lost, when deviants raise false alarms by ‘crying wolf’. Social exchange is facilitated in part by the promise to reciprocate favours; such schemes are undermined, trust is destroyed, by individuals who make ‘false promises’, and thus cheat. Conflicts can be resolved by displaying costly signals of power and prestige that deter aggression [17]; such schemes are destabilised by individuals who make ‘empty boasts’. Thus the theory gives us a principled ‘taxonomy of truth’; and we should expect there to be as many types of honesty (and dishonesty) as there are types of cooperation (Table 1).

Third, the cooperative theory predicts that telling the truth will always be considered morally good, except when doing so undermines some other more valuable cooperative opportunity, in which case it will be good to lie. And, because there is more than one type of honesty (and dishonesty), there will be more than one type of ‘white lie’ – there may be an entire rainbow. For example, rather than impart the unvarnished truth, parents might lie to their children in order to protect them. Some factually correct statements may be considered heretical and invite sanction, whereas mouthing convenient fictions can signal loyalty and bolster in-group solidarity [18]. And ’speaking truth to power’ can come across as impertinent and disrespectful – indirect speech, that allows the recipient to 'save face’, might be necessary to impart the information [19].

Together, this approach suggests that because ‘honesty’ – the transfer of true information – is an integral part of existing, well understood aspects of cooperation, it is explained by existing evolutionary cooperative theories of morality. It is not some anomalous, distinct form of morality that would require, for example, its own foundation [20].

#	Moral	Honesty	Dishonesty	‘White Lies’
1	Family	Greenbeards	Imposters	'What do we tell the children?''
2	Group	Rallying cries, badges of membership	Crying wolf	‘Blue lies’, heresy, ‘I’m Spartacus’
3	Reciprocity	Promises	False promises	Thanks for unwanted gifts, noble lies
4	Heroism	Costly signals (eg medals)	Empty boasts	‘Yellow lies’, saving face, arcania
5	Deference	Submission cues, etiquette	Trojan Horse	Truth to power, flattery
6	Fairness	Credentials	Embellishing CV	Blind auditions
7	Property	Copyrights, patents	Plaigarism	???

Bibliography

1. Hofmann, W., et al., Morality in everyday life. Science, 2014. 345(6202): p. 1340.

2. Purzycki, B.G., et al., The cognitive and cultural foundations of moral behavior. Evolution and Human Behavior, 2018. 39(5): p. 490-501.

3. Curry, O.S., Morality as Cooperation: A Problem-Centred Approach, in The Evolution of Morality, T.K. Shackelford and R.D. Hansen, Editors. 2016, Springer International Publishing. p. 27-51.

4. Curry, O.S., et al., Moral Molecules: Morality as a combinatorial system. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, in press.

5. Curry, O.S., M. Jones Chesters, and C.J. Van Lissa, Mapping morality with a compass: Testing the theory of ‘morality-as-cooperation’ with a new questionnaire. Journal of Research in Personality, 2019. 78: p. 106-124.

6. Curry, O.S., D.A. Mullins, and H. Whitehouse, Is it good to cooperate? Testing the theory of morality-as-cooperation in 60 societies. Current Anthropology, 2019. 60(1).

7. McManus, R.M., M.M. Krasnow, and O.S. Curry, Moral Dilemmas: A systemetic approach. in prep.

8. Maynard Smith, J. and D. Harper, Animal Signals. 2003: OUP.

9. Dawkins, R. and J.R. Krebs, Animal signals: information or manipulation?, in Behavioural Ecology: An evolutionary approach, J.R. Krebs and N.B. Davies, Editors. 1978, Blackwell: Oxford. p. 282--309.

10. Grice, H.P., Studies in the Way of Words. 1989, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

11. Dunbar, R.I.M., A. Marriott, and N.D.C. Duncan, Human conversational behavior. Human Nature, 1997. 8(3): p. 231-246.

12. Leaper, C. and M.M. Ayres, A Meta-Analytic Review of Gender Variations in Adults' Language Use: Talkativeness, Affiliative Speech, and Assertive Speech. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 2007. 11(4): p. 328-363.

13. Wiessner, P.W., Embers of society: Firelight talk among the Ju/’hoansi Bushmen. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2014. 111(39): p. 14027.

14. Smith, D., et al., Cooperation and the evolution of hunter-gatherer storytelling. Nature Communications, 2017. 8(1): p. 1853.

15. Coupé, C., et al., Different languages, similar encoding efficiency: Comparable information rates across the human communicative niche. Science Advances, 2019. 5(9): p. eaaw2594.

16. Lewis, D.K., Convention: a philosophical study. 1969, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

17. Curry, O.S., The conflict-resolution theory of virtue, in Moral Psychology, W.P. Sinnott-Armstrong, Editor. 2007, MIT Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts. p. 251-261.

18. Fu, G., et al., Lying in the name of the collective good: a developmental study. Developmental Science, 2008. 11(4): p. 495-503.

19. Pinker, S., M.A. Nowak, and J.J. Lee, The logic of indirect speech. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2008. 105(3): p. 833.

20. Graham, J., et al., Moral Foundations Theory: The Pragmatic Validity of Moral Pluralism, in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, D. Patricia and P. Ashby, Editors. 2013, Academic Press. p. 55-130.

Happy Anniversary!

To celebrate my 10th (!) wedding anniversary, I'm re-posting the reading that we used in the ceremony – a heavily-edited excerpt from Edvard Westermarck's History of Human Marriage. It worked on many levels. Please feel free to use it in your own wedding.

---

The History of Human Marriage
Westermarck, E. A. (1891). The History of Human Marriage. London: Macmillan.

Edvard Westermarck was an anthropologist, based at LSE (1904-1930). He was inspired by Darwin to undertake a survey of marriage (and morals). Here is a selection from his major work: The History of Human Marriage (1891).

Marriage -- [the] durable connection between male and female -- is found among many of the lower animals, it occurs as a rule among the anthropomorphous apes, and it is universal among mankind.

[L]ove is the passion which unites the sexes. The stimulating impressions produced by health, youth, and beauty, and ornaments and other artificial means of attraction, are all elements of this feeling. A complete analysis of love would fill a volume. Here I shall discuss only one of [its] most important elements: the sentiment of affection.

Affection depends in a very high degree upon sympathy: affection is strengthened by sympathy, and sympathy is strengthened by affection. Community of interests, opinions, sentiments, culture, and mode of life, as being essential to close sympathy, is therefore favourable to warm affection.

And as affection came to play a more prominent part in choosing a mate, higher regard was paid to intellectual, emotional, and moral qualities, through which the feeling is chiefly provoked.

The affection accompanying the union of the sexes has gradually developed as altruism in general has increased. The feeling which makes husband and wife true companions for better and worse can grow up only in societies where the altruistic sentiments of man are strong enough to make him recognize woman as his equal, and where she is not shut up as an exotic plant in a green-house.

Among the Bushmen, there is love in all their marriages. Among the races of the Upper Congo, love is ennobled by a certain poetry. The Hos are good husbands and wives, and although they have no terms in their own language to express the higher emotions, "they feel them all the same". In Samoa, stories of affectionate love between husband and wife are preserved in song. Among the Eskimo of the north-east coast of North America, "young couples are frequently seen rubbing noses, their favourite mark of affection, with an air of tenderness". And the man-eating Niam-Niam display an affection for their wives which is unparalleled.

It is, indeed, impossible to believe that there ever was a time when conjugal affection was entirely wanting in the human race... it seems, in its most primitive form, to have been as old as marriage itself.

NEW PAPER Gross values: Investigating the role of disgust in bioethics

What is the role of disgust in moral judgements? Previous research found that disgust increases the severity of judgments; but other more recent work has cast doubt on these findings. Here we investigate roles of induced and trait disgust on moral judgments of controversial biological and medical technologies – bioethics – an area rife with proto-typical disgust cues. Participants (N = 600) viewed disgusting, frightening, or neutral pictures, rated the moral acceptability of biotechnologies, and completed questionnaire measures of trait disgust. We found a small negative effect of induced disgust (but not fear) on the acceptability of ‘existing’ biotechnology, but not ‘future’, ‘agricultural’, or ‘termination’ biotechnologies. But this effect was too small to change pre-existing opinions and would not have survived a correction for multiple tests. Although trait disgust had mostly negative relationships with the moral acceptability of biotechnologies, it did not moderate the effect of observing disgusting photos on biotechnology judgments. The larger, more consistent effects for trait disgust suggest that either (a) measures of trait disgust and moral attitudes share a source of method variance or (b) incidental, visual manipulations are too weak to capture the true effect of disgust on moral judgments.

Darwin Day Lecture: Morality Explained

I was delighted to be named the Humanist UK’s 2021 Darwin Day Lecturer and Medallist.

A video of the lecture and Q&A session is available here.

Further details here:

In 1859, Charles Darwin turned humanity’s understanding of our place in the universe on its head. Humans have not existed since the dawn of the universe as we are today, but in fact are among the descendants of an unbroken chain of ancestors stretching back billions of years. The same is true for every living creature on Earth – our extended family tree.

In 1871’s Descent of Man, Darwin applied his theory to human nature, and to morality. He argued that ‘the so-called moral sense is originally derived from the social instincts’, and that ‘any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts…would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well, or nearly as well developed, as in man’.

At the Darwin Day Lecture 2021, in an online lecture on Zoom, Dr Oliver Scott Curry will present the latest scientific explanation of morality.

This new science of right and wrong answers such questions as: How do ‘selfish genes’ make selfless people? Are there ‘genes for’ morality? When does morality emerge in children? How many moral values are there? Are there any universal moral rules, found in all cultures? How and why do individuals and societies have different moral values? And what does science tell us about how we ought to behave?

The answers to these questions show that Darwin was on the right track. Morality is deeply rooted in human nature, part of our evolutionary heritage. A hopeful message in a year when we have relied on one another more than usual, to overcome the common challenge of covid.

The Map: A podcast about morality and politics

The world is a confusing place. We need a map if we are to have any chance of making sense of it. The Map is a new podcast about morality and politics, by Michael Bang Petersen and me, Oliver Scott Curry.

We talk about whatever we are interested in — from ancient and deep philosophical questions, to contemporary trending topics on Twitter, and everything in between. We will sometimes invite guests on to talk about all this too. We expect to record a new episode about once a month.

The Map is currently available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud and Pocket Casts.

A few of my favourite threads

Twitter is great. Here are a few of my threads that you might find of interest:

1. Are ‘just so stories’ unfalsifiable?

2. What do we know about the EEA?

3. Kindness to strangers

4. Is kindness ‘in your genes’?

5. When does morality emerge in children?

6. Group Selection: A guide for the confused

7. Do you need God to be good?

8. What’s Wrong with Moral Foundations Theory, and How to Get Moral Psychology Right

9. The Cooperative Imperative: The normative implications of ‘morality as cooperation’

Moral Molecules: Morality as a combinatorial system

Is morality a combinatorial system in which a small number of simple moral ‘elements’ combine to form a large number of complex moral ‘molecules’? According to the theory of morality-as-cooperation, morality is a collection of biological and cultural solutions to the problems of cooperation recurrent in human social life. As evolutionary game theory has shown, there are many types of cooperation; hence, the theory explains many types of morality, including: family values, group loyalty, reciprocity, heroism, deference, fairness and property rights. As with any set of discrete items, these seven ‘elements’ can, in principle, be combined in multiple ways. But are they in practice? In this paper, we show that they are. For each combination of two elements, we hypothesise candidate moral molecules; and we successfully locate examples of them in the professional and popular literature. These molecules include: fraternity, blood revenge, family pride, filial piety, gavelkind, primogeniture, friendship, patriotism, tribute, diplomacy, common ownership, honour, confession, turn taking, restitution, modesty, mercy, munificence, arbitration, mendicancy, and queuing. Thus morality – like many other physical, biological, psychological and cultural systems – is indeed a combinatorial system. And morality-as-cooperation provides a principled and systematic taxonomy that has the potential to explain all moral ideas, possible and actual. Pursuing the many implications of this theory will help to place the study of morality on a more secure scientific footing.