‘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.