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:
Kin selection explains why we love and care for our families, and feel obliged to protect and provide for them.
Mutualism explains why we form groups, value those groups and our membership in them, and hence value group loyalty, unity and solidarity.
Reciprocity explains why we feel obliged to return favours and punish those that don't.
And conflict resolution explains…why we perform feats of heroism and generosity...
... why we defer to our superiors...
... why we divide resources fairly...
... 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:
Among the Amhara of Ethiopia, “flouting kinship obligation is regarded as a shameful deviation, indicating an evil character”.
In Korea, we found an “egalitarian community ethic of mutual assistance and cooperation among neighbors and strong in-group solidarity”.
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”.
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”.
The Bemba of Zambia exhibit “a deep sense of respect for elders' authority”.
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”.
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.
