A Natural History of Human Morality

“This capacity enables children fi rst to understand each person ’ s role in a collaborative activity and later to understand what ‘ we ’ , qua group, demand from each other (Schmidt & Rakoczy, 2019; Tomasello, 2016 a , 2019).”

“…relatives, the dominant view being that psychological capacities for social norms, normative evaluation and motivation evolved uniquely in the human lineage, after our last common ancestor with chimpanzees and bonobos (e.g., Kitcher 2011; Henrich 2015; Tomasello 2016; Schmidt and Rakoczy 2019).”

“For example, chimpanzees and bonobos can negotiate unequal reward distributions in the Snowdrift game (Sudgen, 1986) and avoid the complete breakdown of cooperation and thus avoid complete loss of rewards (Melis, Hare, & Tomasello, 2009; Sánchez-Amaro, Duguid, Call, & Tomasello, 2016, 2017).”

“It is dual level because it encompasses a shared focus on something and individual perspectives upon the same thing (Tomasello, 2016).”

“There is much evidence (reviewed in more detail in Tomasello 2014 , 2016 , 2019 ) that great apes have not evolved to operate in this way, neither to collaborate with other individuals in acts of joint intentionality nor to identify and commit to their social group in acts of collective…”

“…that prosocial actions are motivated by a complex interaction of intrinsic and strategic motivations (Laffan & Dolan, 2020; Sperber & Baumard, 2012; Tomasello, 2016), some scholars claim that actions such as helping or sharing can be fully accounted for in terms of strategic motivations, and, more…”

“Driving this viewpoint is the assumption that humans have an evolved tendency to seek out ingroup, as opposed to outgroup, members with whom they can forge potential co-operative (vs. competitive) allegiances (Lewis & Bates, 2010; Tomasello, 2016).”

“…collaboration in a mutualistic 580 context is key to fully understanding the evolution of human cooperation (Balliet, Tybur, & Lange; Balliet et al., 581 2017; Tomasello, 2016) and our results contribute to the developing picture of the way chimpanzees and 582 children coordinate their decisions.”

“Ultimately, both norms of welfare and of fairness came to have a particular phenomenology and a “ three ‐ way generality ” that applies to agents, targets, and standards (Tomasello, 2016, 102 – 103).”

“Hence, I use the term “shared intentionality” as generally applying to this range of phenomena, in accord with the philosophical literature, as well as with some of the relevant psychological literature (e.g., Tomasello, 2016).”

“Human communication is also based on acceptance of the reliability of communications (cf. Tomasello 2016), which may explain the readiness of humans to process, and sometimes to automatically accept, incoming statements.”

“Tomasello (2016) gives an overview of these results, several of them produced in his own group (see especially Callaghan et al., 2011).”

“At around 6 or 7 years of age, however, children’s allocation decisions begin to vary across societies and to reflect what adults of the respective populations judge to be the appropriate sharing norm (House et al., 2013, 2020; House & Tomasello, 2018).”

“…have failed to replicate the Brosnan and de Waal (2003) experiment with capuchin monkeys when more stringent control conditions are employed (see Tomasello, 2016, for specific citations), and three studies from a single laboratory have failed to replicate Brosnan et al.’s (2005 ) experiments…”

“Keywords: knowledge-behavior gap, advantageous inequity aversion, disadvantageous inequity aversion, procedural justice, fairness concerns INTRODUCTION Fairness is crucial for maintaining interpersonal relationship and promoting social cooperation (Brosnan and de Waal, 2014; Tomasello, 2016).”

“Tomasello (2014, 2016) has argued that cooperation is fundamental to being human.”

“In addition to the distinctive ability to construct and utilize sophisticated tools (giving rise to complex information- and technology-driven networks), other attributes such as cumulative cultural transmission, social learning, mental time travel, large-scale social cooperation, mind reading, recursion and syntactic…”

“5 Looking beyond disciplinary boundaries, one might also include Jonathan Haidt (2012), Joshua Greene (2013), and Michael Tomasello (2016).”

“Of these, Tomasello’s ‘interdependence hypothesis’ [64] posits that an ecological shift to foods that were not individually obtainable drove increased interdependence and selection for less selfish, more cooperative foraging partners.”

“With development, therefore, there should be a general increase in the enactment of prosocial behaviors, but also a greater selectivity with respect to the recipient (Tomasello, 2009, 2016, 2019; Kuhlmeier et al., 2014).”

“formed both human cognition as well as human sociality and morality (28, 29).”

“Tomasello (2014, 2016, 2020) goes on to 1 3 Shared Intentionality in Nonhuman Great Apes: a Normative… suggest that normative thinking depends upon shared intentionality, and therefore is also human unique.”

“…· Goal-directed behavioral control · Reinforcement learning · Social norm psychology A prominent view of the origins of morality focuses on the evolutionary and developmental interaction between instrumental rationality and shared intentionality (Gonzalez-Cabrera, 2017; Tomasello, 2016, 2020).”

“kin selection, direct (Trivers 1971) and indirect (Nowak and Sigmund 1998) reciprocity, and the interdependency hypothesis (Roberts 2005; Tomasello 2016).”

“…simply ‘fall’ and then form a joint goal given their common interests and common-ground strategic trust that each will act rationally in her own best interests,” even presumably when this is an interest in a joint accomplishment, with Gilbertian “joint commitments” (Tomasello, 2016, p. 64).”

“And even other research highlighted group norms, partly as evolutionary preferences and explained helping by the motivation to avoid punishment (Fehr and Gächter, 2002; Silk and House, 2016; Tomasello, 2016; see also Nook et al., 2016).”

“Over the first year of life, infants ’ social skills expand (Tomasello, 2016), as does the number of people with whom they interact (Helfrecht et al., 2020; Hrdy & Burkart, 2022).”

“This points to a central role for joint action in the story of human evolution (Sterelny 2012; Tomasello 2014, 2016).”

“An alternative interpretation is that intuitive prosociality could be a natural, innate tendency of humans grounded in their evolutionary history [49].”

“Not to mention language and morality (Bekoff and Pierce 2009; Crane 2015; Putnam, Neiman, and Schloss 2014; Rowlands 2012; Tomasello 2016).”

“…belong to the category bad, are aware of the self as an agent who can act in good or bad ways, and spontaneously enforce some of their standards on others (Hardecker & Tomasello, 2017; Hepach, Vaish, Grossmann, & Tomasello, 2016; Kochanska, Gross, Lin, & Nichols, 2002; Schmidt & Tomasello, 2012).”

“At the next stage, according to Tomasello and colleagues, humans, spurred by coalitional competition, began to form larger and more complicated groups with “collective intentions” and group norms, conventions, and institutions (Tomasello 2016; Tomasello et al. 2012).”

“The evolution of these uniquely human adaptations for cooperation took place in two main steps (Tomasello 2016, 2019:10; Tomasello et al. 2012).”

“Welsch (2020) shows that the moral foundations proxied this way have very similar properties (correlations with each other and with sociodemographic variables) as variables obtained from the “Moral Foundations Questionnaire” (Graham et al.”

“34 Tomasello 2016, 40, 80.”

“More recently, and in line with the contributions of evolutionary psychology (Wilson & Wilson, 2008; Wilson, Van Vught, & O’Gorman, 2008) and developmental and moral psychology (Tomasello, 2016), CMT has emphasized the role of safety in connection with the perception of the wellbeing of both the self and significant o…”

“This would be consistent with the view that cooperation in primates is primarily based on affective mechanisms and bonding (Engelmann & Herrmann, 2016; Schino & Aureli, 2009; Tomasello, 2016; Wittig, Crockford, Langergraber, & Zuberbühler, 2014).”

“A number of authors (e.g., Crocker, Canevello, & Brown, 2017; Fowers, 2015; Hare, 2017; Keltner, Kogan, Piff, & Saturn, 2014; Mikulincer & Shaver, 2010; Tomasello, 2016, 2019) provide important support for this anticipation of positive traits or positive potential among others.”

“Researchers have long argued that morality likely evolved as a cognitive adaptation to the challenges of cooperation recurrent in human social life (Alexander, 1987; Baumard et al., 2013b; Boehm, 2012; Curry et al., 2019; Haidt, 2012; Tomasello, 2016; Trivers, 1971).”

“As a result, researchers from multiple fields have taken an interest in the topic, scrutinizing, for instance, the evolutionary roots of moral cooperation (Boehm, 2012; Tomasello, 2016; Sterelny, 2021), the sociobiological and material pressures that have shaped moral systems throughout human history (Kitcher, 2011; M…”