A Better Ape

In A Better Ape, Victor Kumar and Richmond Campbell reveal the essential role that morality played in the evolution of human beings. They are the first to argue that morality evolved alongside the other building blocks of human evolution: complex sociality and intelligence. For a long time, human cooperation was stable only because of morality, which limited violence and domination. And so, unless humans had deep-seated dispositions to care about one another, follow moral rules, and exchange moral reasons, our complex sociality would have collapsed, and along with it, the selection pressures in favor of intelligence. So, the authors argue in this pioneering work, it is morality that helps explain not just the evolution of human cooperation, but the very existence of humans as self-aware beings who can grasp their ultimate origins.