Morality: A Natural History

2019-10-17 Social Science

Author : Roger V. Moseley
Release : 2019-10-17
Genre : Social Science
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 30X/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Morality: A Natural History by : Roger V. Moseley

Download or read book Morality: A Natural History written by Roger V. Moseley. This book was released on 2019-10-17. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is morality and what is the source of our moral ideas? Philosophers have explored these questions for centuries, suggesting that both emotion and reason play roles but failing to explain how and why Homo sapiens developed these ideas. Author Roger Moseley argues that evolutionary forces that optimize human welfare provide the missing explanation. Morality: A Natural History presents a multi-disciplinary analysis of the topic and reveals a common thread among the seemingly diverse fields of religion, neuroscience, experimental psychology and game theory, child development, evolution and animal behavior, and anthropology and sociology. When humans first appeared, a simple self-interested survival morality sufficed. As societies became more complex, however, rules of behavior became necessary to limit conflict and promote cooperation. The brain evolved, producing language that allowed the articulation of moral ideas which were codified and enforced by religion and social forces. No species lasts forever, and it is at our peril today that we neglect those evolved moral values of cooperation, altruism, truthfulness, and empathy. Rooted in scientific evidence and interspersed with personal anecdotes and humorous observations, Moseley provides a unique perspective on the natural history of morality – how it appeared, evolved, and continues to evolve today. Morality: A Natural History is essential reading for academics and laypersons alike who seek to understand the origin and essence of human morality.

A Natural History of Human Morality

2016-01-04 Psychology

Author : Michael Tomasello
Release : 2016-01-04
Genre : Psychology
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 646/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis A Natural History of Human Morality by : Michael Tomasello

Download or read book A Natural History of Human Morality written by Michael Tomasello. This book was released on 2016-01-04. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Michael Tomasello offers the most detailed account to date of the evolution of human moral psychology. Based on experimental data comparing great apes and human children, he reconstructs two key evolutionary steps whereby early humans gradually became an ultra-cooperative and, eventually, a moral species capable of acting as a plural agent “we”.

A Natural History of Human Thinking

2018-04-09 Psychology

Author : Michael Tomasello
Release : 2018-04-09
Genre : Psychology
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 830/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis A Natural History of Human Thinking by : Michael Tomasello

Download or read book A Natural History of Human Thinking written by Michael Tomasello. This book was released on 2018-04-09. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tool-making or culture, language or religious belief: ever since Darwin, thinkers have struggled to identify what fundamentally differentiates human beings from other animals. Michael Tomasello weaves his twenty years of comparative studies of humans and great apes into a compelling argument that cooperative social interaction is the key to our cognitive uniqueness. Tomasello maintains that our prehuman ancestors, like today's great apes, were social beings who could solve problems by thinking. But they were almost entirely competitive, aiming only at their individual goals. As ecological changes forced them into more cooperative living arrangements, early humans had to coordinate their actions and communicate their thoughts with collaborative partners. Tomasello's "shared intentionality hypothesis" captures how these more socially complex forms of life led to more conceptually complex forms of thinking. In order to survive, humans had to learn to see the world from multiple social perspectives, to draw socially recursive inferences, and to monitor their own thinking via the normative standards of the group. Even language and culture arose from the preexisting need to work together and coordinate thoughts. A Natural History of Human Thinking is the most detailed scientific analysis to date of the connection between human sociality and cognition.

The Evolution of Morality

2007-08-24 Philosophy

Author : Richard Joyce
Release : 2007-08-24
Genre : Philosophy
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 254/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis The Evolution of Morality by : Richard Joyce

Download or read book The Evolution of Morality written by Richard Joyce. This book was released on 2007-08-24. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Moral thinking pervades our practical lives, but where did this way of thinking come from, and what purpose does it serve? Is it to be explained by environmental pressures on our ancestors a million years ago, or is it a cultural invention of more recent origin? In The Evolution of Morality, Richard Joyce takes up these controversial questions, finding that the evidence supports an innate basis to human morality. As a moral philosopher, Joyce is interested in whether any implications follow from this hypothesis. Might the fact that the human brain has been biologically prepared by natural selection to engage in moral judgment serve in some sense to vindicate this way of thinking—staving off the threat of moral skepticism, or even undergirding some version of moral realism? Or if morality has an adaptive explanation in genetic terms—if it is, as Joyce writes, "just something that helped our ancestors make more babies"—might such an explanation actually undermine morality's central role in our lives? He carefully examines both the evolutionary "vindication of morality" and the evolutionary "debunking of morality," considering the skeptical view more seriously than have others who have treated the subject. Interdisciplinary and combining the latest results from the empirical sciences with philosophical discussion, The Evolution of Morality is one of the few books in this area written from the perspective of moral philosophy. Concise and without technical jargon, the arguments are rigorous but accessible to readers from different academic backgrounds. Joyce discusses complex issues in plain language while advocating subtle and sometimes radical views. The Evolution of Morality lays the philosophical foundations for further research into the biological understanding of human morality.

The Foundations of Natural Morality

2014-05-05 Philosophy

Author : S. Adam Seagrave
Release : 2014-05-05
Genre : Philosophy
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 57X/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis The Foundations of Natural Morality by : S. Adam Seagrave

Download or read book The Foundations of Natural Morality written by S. Adam Seagrave. This book was released on 2014-05-05. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent years have seen a renaissance of interest in the relationship between natural law and natural rights. During this time, the concept of natural rights has served as a conceptual lightning rod, either strengthening or severing the bond between traditional natural law and contemporary human rights. Does the concept of natural rights have the natural law as its foundation or are the two ideas, as Leo Strauss argued, profoundly incompatible? With The Foundations of Natural Morality, S. Adam Seagrave addresses this controversy, offering an entirely new account of natural morality that compellingly unites the concepts of natural law and natural rights. Seagrave agrees with Strauss that the idea of natural rights is distinctly modern and does not derive from traditional natural law. Despite their historical distinctness, however, he argues that the two ideas are profoundly compatible and that the thought of John Locke and Thomas Aquinas provides the key to reconciling the two sides of this long-standing debate. In doing so, he lays out a coherent concept of natural morality that brings together thinkers from Plato and Aristotle to Hobbes and Locke, revealing the insights contained within these disparate accounts as well as their incompleteness when considered in isolation. Finally, he turns to an examination of contemporary issues, including health care, same-sex marriage, and the death penalty, showing how this new account of morality can open up a more fruitful debate.

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A Natural History of Human Morality

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