The Design of Morality

Abstract

Morality, like many other complex things in the natural world, can look designed. The moralities that we see humans practicing today are largely designed, designed by humans. Morality did not originate in human design, however; it is not some original invention of ours but a creation of unguided natural evolution. However, by learning how to modify our conduct with our large brains, we now can manipulate what nature created. Morality would not have gradually emerged, grown more sophisticated, and become universally used and redesigned, unless it served some evolutionary purpose for our species. In this functional sense, morality looks designed even though no designer was ever involved. However, ancestors of humans and our species, Homo sapiens, have been gradually modifying moralities using some intelligence but little self-awareness, and more recently, we have been self-consciously and deliberately redesigning our moralities. An account of how humans use and redesign morality should harmonize with an account of how morality gradually came into existence from simpler protomoral modes of conduct. However, this account must not reduce morality to behaviors too simple to be moral nor introduce morality as an abrupt leap above much simpler kinds of behavior. The more complex forms of cooperative social interaction involving non-zero-sum games and indirect reciprocity are the modes of interaction which can supply the continuities required for the gradual biocultural emergence of morality. An analysis of the indirect reciprocity prisoner’s dilemma game, a computer program invented by the author which models large numbers of players utilizing a variety of strategies, suggests how genuinely moral conduct could gradually emerge from the protomoral components of niceness and fairness.