What is morality? Where did it come from? And how do humanists today approach these age-old questions? To explore the science of morality, we caught up with our Darwin Day Medallist, Dr Oliver Scott Curry, following our latest event ‘The Nature of Morality’, to talk about his research on the nature, content, and structure of human morality.
Humans are kind because we are an intensely social species. We have lived in social groups for the past fifty million years, and throughout this time we have relied on cooperative relationships with others in order to survive and thrive. Kindness is a way of kick-starting and maintaining these relationships. Thus, we can explain why people are kind to their families, friends, spouses, community members, and even strangers. We can explain why kindness comes in many forms—including love, loyalty, camaraderie, compassion, reciprocity, respect, generosity, gratitude, fairness, forgiveness, heroism, and humility. We can explain why we find investing in these relationships rewarding, and why helping others makes us happy. And we can explain why most people are kind most of the time.
The world faces serious environmental problems. To solve them we must work together. Fortunately, humans are a very cooperative species. We have faced a range of cooperative problems in the past, and have evolved and invented a range of cooperative solutions to them—kin altruism, mutualism, reciprocity, heroism, deference, fairness, and property rights. Here, we illustrate how each of these solutions can be pressed into the service of conservation goals. Unlocking this potential will require overcoming conservationists' current cycloptic focus on only one type of cooperative problem (the prisoner's dilemma) and one type of solution (reciprocity). Only then will policy makers be able draw on the full range of cooperative dispositions and design more systematic and effective environmental interventions.
I try to be a good person. And I'm sure you do too. But figuring out how to be good is not easy. What is the difference between good and bad, right and wrong, moral and immoral? Philosophers have struggled in vain with these questions for millennia. And for many people the nature of morality is so baffling that they assume it must have a supernatural origin. But the good news is that we now have a thriving science of morality – incorporating insights from genetics, animal behaviour, psychology and anthropology. And this science tells us that there is nothing mysterious or magical about morality. Morality is merely a collection of cooperative rules – rules that help us work together, get along, and promote the common good.
Once the exclusive preserve of philosophy and theology, the study of morality has now become a thriving interdisciplinary endeavor, encompassing research in evolutionary theory, genetics, biology, animal behavior, psychology, and anthropology. The emerging consensus is that there is nothing mysterious about morality; it is merely a collection of biological and cultural traits that promote cooperation. Best known among these accounts is Jonathan Haidt’s Moral Foundations Theory (MFT). MFT has had an enormous impact on moral psychology. However, the theory has some serious problems, both theoretical and empirical.
For 50 million years humans and their ancestors have lived in social groups. During this time natural selection equipped them with a range of adaptations for realising the enormous benefits of cooperation that social life affords. More recently, humans have built on these benevolent biological foundations with cultural innovations – norms, rules, institutions – that further bolster cooperation. Together, these biological and cultural mechanisms provide the motivation for social, cooperative and altruistic behaviour; and they provide the criteria by which we evaluate the behaviour of others. And, according to the theory of ‘morality as cooperation’, it is precisely this collection of cooperative traits that constitute human morality.
Parents make sacrifices for their children. Friends drop everything to help friends. Travelers leave generous tips at restaurants. Soldiers risks their lives to save their comrades. How are we to explain such acts of kindness, benevolence and altruism?
Fallibilism is the idea that we can never be 100% certain that we are right, and must therefore always be open to the possibility that we are wrong. This might seem a pessimistic notion, but it is not. Ironically, this apparent weakness is a strength; for admitting one’s mistakes is the first step to learning from them, and overcoming them, in science and society.