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The concept of the evolution of morality refers to the emergence of human moral behavior over the course of human evolution. Morality can be defined as a system of ideas about right and wrong conduct. In everyday life, morality is typically associated with human behavior rather than animal behavior.
Veneer theory is a term coined by Dutch primatologist Frans de Waal to label the Hobbesian view of human morality that he criticizes throughout his work. Although he criticizes this view in earlier works, the term in this form is introduced in his 2005 book Our Inner Ape, denoting a concept that he rejects, namely that human morality is "a cultural overlay, a thin veneer hiding an otherwise ...
Descriptive evolutionary ethics consists of biological approaches to morality based on the alleged role of evolution in shaping human psychology and behavior. Such approaches may be based in scientific fields such as evolutionary psychology , sociobiology , or ethology , and seek to explain certain human moral behaviors, capacities, and ...
E.O. Wilson applied the term of ″sociobiology″ as an attempt to explain social behavior of insect and thus explored the evolutionary mechanism of other animals including human such as the social behavior, altruism. [13] He argued that human altruistic behavior, as one of the human nature characteristics, is the result of the genetic ...
In contrast to the dominant theories of morality in psychology at the time, the anthropologist Richard Shweder developed a set of theories emphasizing the cultural variability of moral judgments, but argued that different cultural forms of morality drew on "three distinct but coherent clusters of moral concerns", which he labeled as the ethics ...
Darwin suggests sympathy is at the core of sociability and is an instinctive emotion found in most social animals.The ability to recognize and act upon others' distress or danger, is a suggestive evidence of instinctive sympathy; common mutual services found among many social animals, such as hunting and travelling in groups, warning others of danger and mutually defending one another, are ...
Samuel Alexander (1892) discusses the natural selection of moral principles in society. [58] William James (1880) considered the 'natural selection' of ideas in learning and scientific development. In fact, he identified a 'remarkable parallel […] between the facts of social evolution on the one hand, and of zoological evolution as expounded ...
Utilitarian Jeremy Bentham discussed some of the ways moral investigations are a science. [9] He criticized deontological ethics for failing to recognize that it needed to make the same presumptions as his science of morality to really work – whilst pursuing rules that were to be obeyed in every situation (something that worried Bentham).