- Question
What is morality?
What is the nature of morality and where do its rules come from? This entry maps the competing accounts — that morality is an evolutionary adaptation, that it is a social construct, and that it is a set of spiritual laws.
Morality is an evolutionary construct
This position treats the moral sense as an adaptation: creatures that cooperated, reciprocated and punished cheating left more descendants, so the intuitions we call moral are inherited equipment for social life rather than revelation or convention.
Morality is a social construct
Holders of this position argue that moral rules are made by human communities rather than discovered, varying with time and place because they are the sediment of custom, negotiation and power rather than any fixed order standing outside society.
Morality is a spiritual set of laws
On this account morality is a body of law given by a divine or transcendent source, binding whether or not any society recognises it. Its defenders hold that obligation of this kind must come from outside human choosing to be obligation at all.