The moral sense has the signature of an adaptation

Question: What is morality?
Position1 of 3›: Morality is an evolutionary construct
Argument1 of 2›: The moral sense has the signature of an adaptation

The argument

Proponents of this position argue from the shape of the moral sense rather than from the content of any particular code. Humans live by cooperation with non relatives at a scale no other primate manages, and cooperation of that kind is fragile: it pays to be helped and not to help, so any population of helpers is open to exploitation from within. What stabilises it, on this account, is a set of dispositions that make defection costly, including a readiness to return favours, a sharp sensitivity to being cheated, a willingness to punish cheating even at cost to oneself, and a concern for how one appears to third parties. Those are precisely the dispositions we find, and they appear early, before instruction, and in every society examined. The argument is that this bundle has the signature of adaptation rather than of teaching or revelation. It emerges on a schedule, in rough step with other developmental milestones, rather than whenever a given culture gets round to it. Very young children, before they can state a rule, already distinguish helping from hindering, resent unequal division in their own case, and expect others to be held to agreements. The dispositions are hard to unlearn, carry strong affect, and show the lopsided pattern typical of evolved equipment: the sense of having been wronged is far more acute than the sense of having wronged. Holders of the view stress that this is an argument about the faculty, not an endorsement of its verdicts. Inherited moral intuition is expected to be parochial, quick to divide the world into insiders and outsiders, and poorly suited to problems involving strangers or the distant future, because the conditions that shaped it were small in scale and face to face. That the equipment is natural, they argue, is a reason to examine its promptings rather than to trust them.

Premises

[P1]Human cooperation with non relatives is extensive and would be unstable without dispositions that make defection costly. [P2] The moral emotions that stabilise cooperation, such as reciprocity, resentment at cheating, costly punishment and concern for reputation, are found early, across societies, and before explicit instruction. [P3] Traits with that distribution and developmental course are characteristically inherited rather than taught or received. [C] The moral sense is an evolved adaptation for social life.

Counter-arguments

Critics accept much of the biology and dispute its reach. An account of why we have moral feelings, they argue, is not an account of what makes acts right, and the argument slides between the two. They note that the dispositions described, including favouring kin, punishing outsiders and resenting unequal shares in one's own case, underwrite a good deal of what morality is usually invoked to condemn, so the adaptive story cannot be the content of morality without endorsing its worst promptings. Others add that early cross cultural emergence is equally consistent with early learning, since every society teaches the same lessons about sharing and promise keeping.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P2] Early and universal appearance is also what very early and very uniform teaching would produce, since all societies instruct infants in sharing and reciprocity from the start. [Rejecting P3] Many reliably developing capacities are acquired rather than inherited, including the grammar of a particular language, so the developmental signature does not settle the question of origin. [Rejecting C] Even if the faculty is evolved, the position needs a further step to identify morality with its promptings, which otherwise license favouritism and hostility to outsiders.