•  88
    Evolution and Moral Diversity
    The Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication 7 1-16. 2012.
    If humans have an evolved moral psychology, then we should not expect it to function in an identical way between individuals. Instead, we should expect a diversity in the function of our moral psychology between individuals that varies along genetic lines, and a corresponding diversity of moral attitudes and moral judgements that emerge from it. This is because there was no one psychological type that would reliably produce adaptive social behaviour in the highly heterogeneous environments in wh…Read more
  •  12
    Over many thousands of years, humans developed mechanisms to help us live together in ever-larger social groups. We developed moral emotions, such as empathy, guilt and outrage, as well as a bias in favour of people in our in-groups, and a propensity to punish perceived wrongdoers. Our culture also evolved, giving us tools like religion and politics that expanded community sizes and maintained moral order. While these mechanisms served our ancestors well, our evolved moral psychology is often ou…Read more
  •  35
    Evolution and Moral Ecology
    Dissertation, The University of New South Wales. 2014.
    Moral diversity is often dismissed as being something to explain away en route to discovering the correct answers to moral questions, particularly by those who adopt a realist metaethical perspective. In this thesis I argue that moral diversity is actually far more interesting than this perspective might suggest, and that understanding the causes and dynamics of moral diversity can tell us something about the nature of morality itself. I draw on the tools of evolutionary biology, game theory and…Read more