Why are moral things moral?  

 

Thesis

What is moral is what human beings call moral.  People might say, therefore genocide and rape can be moral, because if moral things are defined as what people call moral, then genocide and rape can be labelled as moral.  However, the point is, nobody in reality says that rape, genocide, murder, etc., are moral, apart from a sociopath; except perhaps on religious grounds, which is a different kind of morality with different goals.  The politics of group relations may also come into play as one group can de-humanise and demonise members of another group, removing all sympathy for the other group and rendering them OK to be murdered or otherwise punished by association.  

 

What is moral?  

The word “moral”, when used about an action, whether descriptively or prescriptively, has significance as something distinctive and special: it doesn't just mean “blah”.  

It may be that morality represents in the human mind: 1) regulation towards the achievement of moral goodness; 2) an aspiration; something we strive for; ideal behaviour aimed at ideal goals.  

The present claim is that there is a naturally evolved set of moral goods and methods of achieving them, that humans strive for as praiseworthy "moral goodness".  Humans then give these the name, "moral goodness" (in their own language).  

Moral goods are, minimally, the impartially-bestowed benefits of all concerned.  

In the goals-methods model of morality, the goals are joint goals of fitness, whether thriving, surviving or reproducing; and moral principles or values are methods of achieving these joint goals.  Moral goodness is either 1) how well we cooperate and share on the way to achieving the goal; 2) the ethical light/dark valence of the goal itself – to the benefit of all concerned, and not at someone’s expense.  

 

Is there a natural morality?

In the goals-methods model of morality, there are five evolved moral domains of regulation and a stand-alone incest taboo.  The domains are:

 

• Collaborative foraging for mutual benefit; regulated using principles such as reciprocity, fairness, altruism/sharing, conflict minimisation, etc.  
• Parenting; regulated according to principles of looking after children optimally.
• Pair-bonding; to achieve mate retention, for reproductive purposes, pair-bonding is regulated by values.
• Patriarchy; for males to achieve mate retention, for reproductive purposes, through the domination and control of women’s autonomy and sexuality (Smuts, 1995), patriarchy is enforced as sexism/sexist rules, and punished with misogyny (Manne, 2018).  Reproduction is joint by definition, both sexes are needed; therefore people (women and men, in different ways) are jointly and morally regulated in the achievement of this goal.  Under patriarchy, the well being of women is more or less disregarded.  The alternative mate-retention strategy to patriarchy, is male attractiveness.  
• “Family values”; genetic relatives are supported and protected by the agent because they contain copies of some of the agent’s genes (Hamilton’s Rule; Dawkins, 1976) through values of kin selection: preferentially helping family.  

 

Morality is pro-life; life is an aspirational goal

When we aspire to moral goodness, we are aspiring to the evolutionary fitness: thriving, surviving, and/or reproducing, of all concerned.  There is evolved normative pressure for the individual to promote their own evolutionary fitness and those of collaborative partners.  Aspiring to moral goodness is therefore the cooperativisation of aspiring to “my goods” – when carried out impartially, it can have similar normative pressure.  

If morality promotes personal fitness, then that must be why it has evolved.

 

Cooperation is more moral than competition

There are three ways of achieving fitness benefits, with respect to other people: alone, collaboratively, and competitively.  We will examine each for its suitability as a candidate for being a moral framework.

Working alone, solipsistically, does not invoke morality, as other people are not involved: there is no regulation of interpersonal behaviour required.  

Can it be moral to work competitively – at the expense of others?  This idea seems counter-intuitive, unless military success, dominance, winning in games, etc., are seen as moral goods.  In this case, the desired moral good would be “my interests – and f*** everyone else”.  We do not believe that human beings class this as moral, unless it happens to benefit them or their group.  

The only other candidate for a moral way to achieve fitness benefits is cooperation – collaboration and sharing.  This is not just “for my benefit”, or “for my benefit at your expense”, it is “for our mutual benefit”.  When we work together with other people, even if we do not know or see them, we are collaborating.  Collaboration requires mutual benefit, as by definition, it is carried out by multiple partners, none of whom wants to work without a personal reward.  

 

Natural morality shows up in psychological tests

If there is an evolved “natural morality”, we would expect to find innate moral instincts, or capacities for learning morality, in young children, and this is what we do find (Tomasello, 2016, 2018, 2019a, 2019b); i.e., by the age of three, the normative regulation of the self and others on behalf of “us”, according to fairness, charity, respect and mutual deservingness, based on a sense of shared intentions and self-other equivalence.  By contrast, we do not find these in other great apes when we look for them, although we do find some of their foundational abilities.  

 

Three-year-olds who were party to the joint commitment were much more likely than the other children to try to re-engage the recalcitrant partner [who had withdrawn].  These children seemingly reasoned: if “we” have a joint commitment, then “you” ought to continue as long as needed.  The 2-year-olds, in contrast, did not behave differently when there was or was not a joint commitment.

… Joint commitments thus make partners responsible to one another: each of them feels that each of them is responsible for the other’s fate in the situation.

... they then behaved in response to experimentally induced perturbations in that context [joint commitment] by doing such things as waiting for their partner when she was delayed, repairing damage done by their partner, refraining from tattling on their partner, and performing their partner’s role for her when she was unable (i.e., they did these things more often than did pairs of children who simply played in parallel for the same amount of time).

Michael Tomasello (2018) – “The Normative Turn in Early Development”

 

Mutual deservingness implies mutual owing: each partner feels a sense of responsibility to the other.  The very process of responding to deservingness with owing, may be an expression of the evolutionarily ancient norm of reciprocity.  

 

References

Manne, Kate (2018) – “Down Girl – The Logic of Misogyny”; Oxford University Press

Perry, Simon (2026) – “Understanding morality and ethics”; https://orangebud.co.uk/web_book_2.html

Smuts, Barbara (1995) – “The Evolutionary Origins of Patriarchy”: Human Nature, Vol. 6, No. 1, pp. 1 32

Tomasello, Michael (2016) – “A Natural History of Human Morality”; Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA

Tomasello, Michael (2018) – “The Normative Turn in Early Moral Development”; Human Development 2018;61:248-263

Tomasello, Michael (2019a) – “Becoming Human – a theory of ontogeny”; Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA

Tomasello, Michael (2019b) – “The moral psychology of obligation”; Behavioral and Brain Sciences 43, e56: 1-58; https://www.eva.mpg.de/documents/Cambridge/Tomasello_Moral_BehBrainSci_20 19_3232886.pdf