THE NATURE AND ORIGIN OF MORALS: AN ENQUIRY

By Anashya Ghoshal, UG-2, BA (History), Roll No. 63

Introduction Before one can begin any study, sociological, legal, or philosophical, in Crime and Deviance, one must first answer the question: How is a crime defined? Or more fundamentally: What is a crime? As with many other terms, in modern times, there exists not a simple and universally accepted definition.1 However, a definition that exists which has substantially widespread acceptance is this: An act (or sometimes a failure to act) that is deemed by statute or by the common law to be a public wrong and is therefore punishable by the state in criminal proceedings.2 Very importantly, the entry goes on to say Some crimes are serious wrongs of a moral nature (e.g. murder or rape); others interfere with the smooth running of society (e.g. parking offences).3 It would seem, therefore, that crime as an act (or an omission) would be impossible to delimit without having first a coded system of behaviour which would be at its core, moral. This paper shall attempt to trace the nature and origins of morality from an evolutionary perspective, i.e., to see it as it is rooted in neurology and biology, to see the evolutionary benefits in such behaviour, and to understand whether such modes of behaviour could be attributed to our evolutionary heritage, seeing as we do that like all living beings, we belong to a species that has evolved through natural selection. This shall contribute to a discussion of the nature of morality itself, which will ultimately be related to the notions of crime and deviance. The methodology shall consist of drawing parallels with the social behaviour of other nonhuman animals, and seeing how far they can be seen as analogues of human moral behaviour and how far as simply common expedient behaviour. This operates from the observation that all human societies and cultures have as common some very basic guidelines of behaviour and conduct which separate the acceptable from the unacceptable.4 Universal Morals? Lessons from History Almost all philosophers, thinkers, theologians, and educators across the ages and cultures, have had, I believe, ideas about what character and morality consist of, and few have resisted the temptation of writing down a definitive list of virtues and morals that constitute the well-lived life.5 When undertaking this project, I started by creating my own list, asserting that it contained the morals and virtues valued across all cultures across the world in contemporary times. Upon reading further, almost immediately objections were encountered, to the effect that there were, and could be, no such list of morals valued across all cultures; morals were locale- and historyspecific, and thus contingent. This line of argumentation has some merit, of course. One need only look at the contemporary United States: the subcultural variations on the lines of ethnicity, socioeconomic positioning, religion, et c., would seem to preclude a universal list even in the

here and now.6 One must take criticisms such as this seriously; it is an imperative to avoid reifying values valued only at the turn of the new century by Christian British intellectuals. However, is it really the case that there is no consensus about the morals and virtues that are most valued? Undertaking a thought experiment, I tried to envision a culture or subculture that did not stress the cultivation of honesty, kindness, or altruism, or courage. Done another way, this experiment requires that we try to imagine parents who would want to see their children grow up to be thieving, dishonest and cruel. Perhaps there are some ubiquitous, if not universal, morals. D. A. Kramer sets as a prerequisite of wisdom: exposure to alternative knowledge, contexts, or perspectives, [which] would facilitate the ability to accept multiple perspectives and critically evaluate human truths.7 Without much further ado, then, we shall enumerate the morals and virtues listed in world cultures, based on their enduring and extensive impact on human history and philosophy (taking a cue from N. Smarts World Philosophies8): Confucianism and Taoism in China, Hinduism and Buddhism in India, and ancient Greece and Rome, Christianity and Islam in the West. Searching for expository discussions of virtue and morals, we found some core morals that were valued across all cultures, namely: 1. Honesty and Justice: These core virtues prefer that which make life fair. Intuitively these would mean non-deception, equality (or at least equity), and a regard for and adherence to behaviour that are civic and pro-social.9 2. Altruism: By altruism we refer to the peculiarities of interpersonal relations which demand doing more than only what is fair, showing generosity when even an equitable exchange would suffice, kindness even if it cannot be returned, and understanding even when punishment is due.10 3. Courage: One need remember that while fears and the acts to defeat them differ from society to society, the capability to overcome fear is always desired over faintheartedness.11 There is naturally a typology of courage: physical, moral and psychological.12 Having thus established the assumption that there are some universal, ubiquitous morals, we can now proceed with our exercise in tracing the origins of morality from an evolutionary perspective, as made (in)famous in the field of Sociobiology. Moral Behaviour in Non-Human Animals This section will go over very briefly the basic hypotheses that sociobiological and neoDarwinist research has made as regards the evolutionary genealogy of moral behaviour. What they have famously concentrated on is selfishness and altruism. This derives from the neoDarwinist root of Sociobiology, popularized by the selfish gene metaphor.13 The idea of the selfish gene seems to be a reflection upon the selfish individual, and would appear to suggest

that natural selection helps those who help themselves. By that definition, every individual of every species would have the greatest chance of success to pass on his genes if he acts selfishly (or recognizably in his own interest).14 But this is not what the Sociobiological theorists postulate. What they say is that the evolutionary process operates in a way that is geared to maximize genic propagation. This leads to the creation of behavioral patterns which help individuals get an edge over their competitors in the competition over natural resources. These may take the form of either altruistic behaviour or selfish behaviour, and would be scenariospecific.15 We can look at a large variety of social mammals, reptiles, insects, et c., for instances of altruism, kindness, and cooperation. I shall mention such an instance: In a 2012 study, the philosopher Mark Rowlands observed that hungry rhesus monkeys would not electrically shock their fellows even when it meant getting food in exchange.16 It is interesting to note the trajectory such behaviour might take, and parallels of this kind of behaviour in humans (the notion of not selling ones pals out), and how it may have been derived and strengthened. The question is how far these actions are genetically determined, as upon observation, one shall note that ones genetic interests arent ones own. When one sees the degree to which actions are contingent, one will wonder if genetically programmed patterns of behaviour are simply that, patterns, and are influenced equally by environmental conditions. This remains to be seen. In The Case of Humans: A Moral Organ? In the case of humans, ecological conditions, accidents of history, and cultural practices result in striking diversity in social organizations, including that aspect we refer to as morality. Even so, at a general level of description, there are obvious common themes among social organizations regarding values. On the face of it, these appear to reflect similar general strategies for solving rather similar problems of living together: courage in defense, cunning in the hunt, honesty in transactions, tolerance of idiosyncrasies, and willingness to reconcile these are values touted in the stories not only of aboriginal tribes, but of agricultural and post-industrial people as well. Many groups share similar stories of vices: aggression gone sour, lust overwhelming good judgment, self-indulgence bringing ruin, ambition wreaking havoc, and miserliness leading to loneliness.17 The generality of these themes does not entail that humans have a hard-wired module specifying particular kinds of social behavior, where the wiring-up is controlled by genes dedicated to producing that behavior. Although such a hypothesis cannot be absolutely ruled out, the complexity of gene-behavior relationships illustrated by The Parable of Aggression in the Fruit Fly18 suggests that aggression in the human, not to mention cooperation in the human, is unlikely to be associated with a few large-effect genes. Granting individual human differences, similarly organized brains facing similar problems are likely to land on similar solutions. Wood works well in boatbuilding, merriment eases social tensions; competitive games are less costly than fights. Languages may have emerged from similar pushes and pulls, without the help of a dedicated, new language gene.

Recently, Marc Hauser, a psychologist and animal behavior scientist, defended the innateness approach to morality. Hauser thinks there are universals in human moral understanding views about what is right and what is wrong that obtain in all societies. These universals are, he contends, visible in the unreflective intuitions that people summon in addressing a specific moral issue. For example, Hauser finds that there is widespread agreement that incest is wrong, and that drinking apple juice from a brand-new bedpan is disgusting. Marc Hauser is of the opinion that, given the generality of reactions of these types, there must be some innate physiological organization in the brain that, given a normal development, yield these types of intuitions. Call these moral intuitions, conscience, or perhaps, as is the case with Hauser, products of the moral organ. Hausers own view and research programme are modelled on those of linguist Noam Chomskys views on language acquisition and development. Chomsky believes that the human brain is genetically equipped with a unique language organ which enables it to absorb (for the lack of a better word) abstract principles of language and syntax, that become more concrete with sustained exposure to language. From this flows our grammatical intuition, and our ability to learn specific languages. Hauser argues that humans likewise have a moral organ, specifying the abstract universal principles of morality, from which originates our notions of right and wrong: we are born with abstract rules or principles, with nurture entering the picture to set the parameters and guide us toward acquisition of particular moral systems.19 In emphasizing the hardwired aspect of the system, Hauser says Once we have acquired our cultures specific moral normsa process that is more like growing a limb than sitting in Sunday school and learning about virtues and viceswe judge whether actions are permissible, obligatory, or forbidden, without conscious reasoning and without explicit access to the underlying principles.20 As we have already spent some time looking at the possible evolutionary trajectories that may have led up to this point where there exists possibly a moral organ, we now must clarify the meaning of the expression innate in its relation to the context of behaviour. Like so many other words, innate is a word with a tortured history, having been used to refer to a wide or a narrow range of phenomena, or much in between. A concertina concept a meaning that fluctuates, expanding or contracting as the criticisms and objects ebb and flow innateness impedes clarity. As compactly stated by Flint, Greenspan, and Kendler,21 one needs to identify the genes involved, show how they help in the relation of the creation of the neural circuitry that operate, and then show the relation of the neural circuitry to the behaviour. Lacking that and invariably that is lacking in social studies social scientists resort to identify what is innate by studying human behaviour. This is, of course, where the problem starts. Sometimes the specification rests on the idea that the capability for anything that can be easily learnt, rests on an innate capacity of the brain - a structural readiness provided by human genes via evolution. Anything? Even reading, milking goats, or riding a bicycle all of which are typically easily learnt, but which could not have been selected for in the evolution of the brain? Because such generality seems to bleed the meaning out of the term, a more specific filter than anything is required. On a more restricted use of innate, it would refer to those behaviours that are both genetically programmed and universally displayed by all individuals carrying the relevant genes (and easily learnt). Generally, of course, which genes are implicated is not known, and easily learnt, as noted, has its own problems, so the difficult work falls on universality. Because there are not only gene-environment interactions, but also brain-intrauterine interactions, some scholars are

opposed to this modification of innate, which they find is too fraught with categorical imprecision and historical errors to be useful.22 According to Hauser, our moral faculty is equipped with a universal moral grammar, a toolkit for building specific moral systems. Hauser states further, Our moral instincts are immune to the explicitly articulated commandments handed down by religions and governments.23 Hausers optimism with respect to innate moral foundations and generalities is inspiring and hopeful, but too often we have learnt quite the opposite from history and anthropology. One need only remember the child sacrifices of Carthage, the tragic history of slavery (both black and white slavery), the brutalities committed during wars, and the last, cruel, bloody century: wholesale genocide of Jews, Poles, Armenians, Lithuanians; the mass murder of Russians and Chinese, very often by their own countrymen; one can reflect on how many times nations have gone to war in drummed-up jingoistic frenzy: there is almost no end to the count of atrocities committed in violation of our innate moral principles. One cannot but conclude that our moral behaviour seems more susceptible to explicitly articulated commandments handed down by religions and governments than what, Hauser says, can be expected from a properly functioning moral organ. The evidence for Hausers hypothesis is pressing. Towards a Recognition and Codification of Morality What does one mean when one says that moral behaviour stems from primate behaviour or that morality is a direct outgrowth of animal trends, or that morality is there deep down, and that the building blocks of morality are evolutionarily ancient?24 Indeed, recurring to the simple, reductive sociobiological accounts of E. O. Wilson is not enough. The next logical step would be a towards a more nuanced understanding, which is provided by the neuroethologists such as Franz de Waal, Patricia S. Churchland, and Marc Hauser. But even that is not enough, for it does not deal with (or where it does, only cursorily) the unique factor of human consciousness. One can look to Nietzsche for a very interesting conceptual treatment of the matter. In his Second Essay of On the Genealogy of Morality,25 Nietzsche develops quite an extraordinary understanding of the origins and development of feelings of responsibility and debt (personal obligation), qualities we chiefly associate with conscious human beings. Nietzsche here is concerned with nothing less than a complete understanding of how the human mind functions and how Nature can breed an animal with the prerogative to promise.26 What he goes on to explain, even if it is not directly concerned with consciousness, is highly important, as it calls to our attention the inherent paradoxes of such a breeding: namely, that of breeding an animal that is sanctioned to promise and so exist as a creature of time, a creature that can remember the past and anticipate the future, a creature that can in the present bind its own will relative to the future in the certain knowledge that it will in the future effectively remember that its will has been bound. For this cultivation of effective memory and imagination to be successful, culture, he says, must work against the active force of forgetting, which serves an important physiological function.27 The exercise of a memory of a will requires that the human be able to distinguish between intentional and accidental acts, which makes necessary an understanding of the principles of causality, i.e., to causally understand how to make possible an anticipated future. Nietzsche here says that a species which is intended and sanctioned to promise, but which, being inattentive and a little dull, must have some coercive force acting on it, so that the human agent

is turned into something which is regular, reliable, and uniform. Nietzsche calls this the morality of custom and a social straitjacket, and assigns this motive force to a singularly human creation, culture, while at the same time divorcing it from the irrational and sometimes stupid human will. He goes on to describe just how culture (that is to say, religion and other codified systems of morality) achieves this: A thing must be burnt in so that it stays in the memory28 that is to say, through coercion, manipulation, and cruelty, or as he puts it: disgusting mutilations, blood and horror, which lie at the basis of all good things. While Nietzsches exposition is interesting to say the least, it is often more indicting than instructive, and more rambling than explanatory. The key points where one wishes to differ are these: one, Nietzsches view of the nature and function of morals as being too pessimistic and partisan and not enough empirical and rational one need only study the works of St Augustine, or Kant, or even the great Greek philosophers, Plato or Aristotle, to see the benefits of having a public morality; nay, one can achieve an understanding of that through only an exercise in unaided common sense. The second objection is a tad more epistemological than the first: Nietzsche very interestingly and not uncommonly divorces the social from the personal; here the object of derision is morality, which is seen as operated and enforced from outside (which affects its control, indeed, through an internalization) by society or culture, and therefore follows that it is external to the human condition. However, saying this is problematic: one, it would seem to suggest that morals have an intentionality of their own. However, that is not so, morals not existing outside of the human mind. The obvious objection is that there are institutions where morals are codified and preserved. Of course, that is so. But remember: these institutions signify transferred intentionality; and even that has no meaning or purpose (directly or by itself; its creators/inscribers had a tangible purpose) unless it is recognised and decoded by a discerning and conscious human being. An illustration of this would be so: suppose one asks a friend to give him directions to a nearby city. The friend obliges and writes down the directions on a piece of paper and gives the paper to him. The instructions on the paper could be said to tell him the directions to the city. Indeed, this is how a situation is often described as. But one must note that the paper derives its intentionality from the obliging friend, and its existence is likewise given purpose by the consciousness of the friend. It cannot be said to be consciously providing the information to the bearer; its position is limited to being a passive bearer of information, and then only, as long as it is being perceived by the bearer. The piece of paper can be said to be a cultural artefact, a product of human culture, where the culture actively exists causally in the human consciousness, and can be applied to produce artefacts which derive whatever intentionality they have from their conscious creators, and that too, only when they are being/have been (herein comes in the memory of human beings) actively perceived by conscious individuals.29 When culture or society is being said to be oppressive, therefore, is only an instance of individuals being consciously oppressive or cruel (please note how in almost every judicial system, perpetrators of crime may be let off if they plead insanity and/or dispossession of their rational, conscious faculties); another objection saying that they are acting on enshrined principles or codified social norms may be addressed by saying that, seeing how enshrined morals or injunctions are enshrined, i.e., products of a human consciousness, it would not be a mistake to say that the conscious actors-out of these injunctions are deriving their instructions from another individual, but only indirectly.

That being said, I would now recur to the Sociobiological and Neuroethological accounts of the evolution of recognizable moral behaviour and see if it cannot be reconciled with consciousness. As always, morality here means very broad, general patterns of behaviour that can be seen in societies all across the world. These patterns or guidelines are not absolute, as is obvious. Applications of moral behaviour depend on the capability of the individual to discern: remember Socrates dialogue with Euthydemus about the relativity of the morality of truthfulness30: one could avoid following this moral tendency (which is how largely the neuroethologists see morality as consisting of: tendencies) if it were to harm someone whom one valued; an illustration of this would be if one lied to a friend about the diagnosis if the friend were diagnosed with a terminal form of cancer, on the hope that perhaps the lack of the knowledge of her terminal illness would prevent her from morbidly worrying and perhaps add more months of life. Indeed, this is largely how I see the origins of morality to be. Our evolutionary past inculcated through genes and neural and hormonal structure broad, general dispositions to behave in particular ways that have discernible advantages in social cohesion and increased chances of survival and reproduction, ways that could be recognized as moral, or at least incipiently so.31 Consciousness is what changes all of this, conferring a degree of plasticity and adaptation not seen before or since. There is of course no way of understanding by Darwinian methods just how this consciousness came to be, or why, notwithstanding Dawkins claim that cumulative selection, once it has begun, seems powerful enough to make the evolution of intelligence probable, if not inevitable.32 Nonetheless, I imagine, at the risk of sounding fanciful, that consciousness, when it came on to the scene, gradually (implying that it did come about by degrees33) found itself inhabiting bodies and minds with strong impulses and tendencies towards certain patterns of behaviour,34 which it strove gradually, over the years, to identify, to recognize, to record and to come to terms with, never mind whether it was already executing those patterns itself. Here it would do to understand that consciousness not only passively watched and recognised, but also interacted with it, weakened, strengthened or otherwise modified it, and encoded it in cultural memories, passed down through generations. Here it should be understood that there is not much information to get about the state of such a preconscious time, except as captured in tantalising hints in the mythologies of certain cultures,35 which one must exploit to reconstruct the course of mans engagement with his tendencies to behave in ways which might be construed as moral. Certainly, the development of the idea can by no means end here: there are alternate, equally interesting theories, such as the meme theory,36 which can also explain crime as a phenomenon, not as an act. In the next and last section, we shall follow this line of thought to understand whether morals should be binding or not. Conclusion: Should Morals Be Binding? Keeping in mind our views from the last section, we shall now deal with the question: Should morals be binding? Indeed, this is a question which, in addition to its corollaries, has intrigued philosophers for thousands of years. In contemporary times, this grave issue has been addressed by a number of philosophical positions in different ways. The more important of these positions are, namely, those of the moral relativists, the atheists (the term atheist here is taken to mean those who reject, among other things, the revealed moral codes which are to be found in the Semitic religions, among others), and the class of philosophers who believe in the concept of the tabula rasa, the Blank Slate (a strict translation would be: scraped tablet), as regards the human

mind. Very, very briefly, let us go over these positions: the moral relativist argument37 actually stems from a well-placed anthropological concern (conscious or not): seeing as one does the selforganising nature of complex cultures and societies, one wonders if the moral codes dominant in those societies are contingent themselves, i.e., if they have evolved in conditions particular only to that society, and if that makes plausible the concern that morals do not have any basis outside of the specific societies that produce them. It has been combined with illustrations of the diversity of moral values and practices. While this is a very legitimate concern and indeed, noble, as it logically follows from their position that we should view the moral beliefs of other cultures with tolerance it should not be taken as an absolute position (which it often is). The reasons for this are the following: evidence, previously referred to, of the universality of some moral values,38 their biological basis,39 and the logical mistake of understanding the fact-value distinction as fundamental. There are naturally other criticisms of this position: moral relativism applied intellectually and socially leads to a case of reductio ad absurdum where every action of a person can be taken to be socially informed and determined, and each society being equal to the other in value, no action is thus morally repugnant of itself this would seem to imply that the beliefs of slave-owners and Nazis should be deemed true and their practices right relative to their conceptual-moral frameworks; and it is not possible for anyone to prove that their views are false or morally misguided, or that there are better points of view.40 Another very persistent criticism has been that while the moral relativists stress that there are no universal moral values, they are themselves appealing to a moral value as universal, which, however, according to their epistemology, should be an Enlightenment value: that of enlightened tolerance. (To be fair, even though this is pragmatically self-defeating, they may argue that the same case of social constructivism applies to their case; and that their implicit acceptance of moral values does not necessarily entail a duty to follow or accept them). The atheist view is similar to this; it rejects the encoded moral values that religions guard and enforce. This is based on their suspecting that these moral values are only perniciously guarding the power of the organised religious/moral institutions and the other power structures in league with them.41 It is interesting to note that they do not absolutely reject moral guidelines their diatribes are directed against only those moral injunctions that they hold to be intellectually and logically unsound and are not evidentially backed, and they also subscribe to some form of human decency as the basis for their moral behaviour.42 The most withering critique of morality, however, is that stemming from the notion of the tabula rasa state of the human mind at birth. Proponents of this view claim that since the human mind is a Blank Slate at birth and all behaviour, opinions and values are socially learnt, and that therefore, every value or moral socially learnt is serving to perpetrate the concealed interests of society and preserve the present state of power relations. Morals are viewed as oppressive and restrictive, and as essentially corrupt, keeping humans from returning to their primeval Natural State. Understand that this is only broadly illustrative of only some of the positions arising out of notions of a tabula rasa (most notably the Foucauldian and the Nietzschean): there are many differences and dissenting voices, as one could expect to have. This is not the place for a full-length critique of this position and its intellectual failures and contradictions, and the social disintegration and problems that it has caused when applied in practice.43 But one must recognise the difficulty in continuing to posit something of this sort: when the notion was first formulated by John Locke in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding in 1689 (though conceptual antecedents may be found as far back as in Aristotle)44, the state of neurological understanding of the brain was one of non-existence. But now, research is being carried out which is slowly leaving evidence of the innateness of talents,

knowledge, or at least reflexive capacities for attaining, specializing in and storing knowledge.45 This can be combined with anthropological researches which stack the deck in favour of the innateness (the term is problematic, as discussed before) of some knowledge and mental structures and programmed modes of behaviour.46 Regardless, the arguments of the believers of tabula rasa go that morals should not be/are not binding, and should be overcome through the use of various means that they advocate. What none of these positions address is the problem of human consciousness, but that has been addressed in the previous section. What I shall do here is to ask this question of my view of the problem: should morals be binding? I would say that I feel that morals are, at a level, binding. What I mean is that we are predisposed to act in some particular way in particular situations, and it takes effort and power of will to overcome that predisposition. This calls for conscious application of our neural flexibility, for reason, to judge the effects of acting on such a predisposition. Whether morals should be obeyed or be binding or not is therefore a question of contingency, for the most part. However, it is interesting to note that our conscious judgement of whether a moral is to be obeyed in a particular situation is itself informed by another overarching sense of morality, which one can call conscience, or as I see it, urgings of the fundamental guideline of our embodied moral system. The question, I think, that everyone asks in our contemporary world is whether specific injunctions from authorities or institutions are to be obeyed or not. The very fact that this question is asked reveals the inherent tensions between the transferred intentionality that exists in the institution/authority and our natural predisposition to a moral behaviour which informs our conscious, discerning judgement. Like all examples of Darwinian evolutionary behaviour, this predisposition to moral behaviour is ultimately selfserving. In our case, however, the issue is complicated by consciousness, which itself poses a seemingly intractable problem to philosophers; however, I have a feeling that we would do well to follow the urgings of our moral system, verifying it, of course, with our faculties of discerning judgement. Although I am not in agreement with Marc Hausers statement that explicit, intentional orders have no effect on our moral instincts, I believe that we must temper that intentionality which issues immoral orders with the awareness of the rationality of his moral instincts. We are a unique species. We have had a difficult, troubled past; the impulses we have to destroy, to injure, to maim, to torture, to kill, aided and sometimes strengthened by our misled consciousness might all be a result of that we will never know for certain whether it is our evolutionary journey or, indeed, a Manichean struggle between impersonal forces of good and evil that act through us and make us moral or immoral. When I notice the immense good that our morals have done us, whatever their origins may be, I question the wisdom of willfully abandoning morals altogether, as many have prescribed. My sentiment here would sound most similar to that expressed by Pavel Petrovitch Kirsanov in Turgenevs Fathers and Sons. I wonder if our being the only species that possesses consciousness confers on us a telos that is different from all the others. -----------------

ENDNOTES

1. Lindsay Farmer, Crime, definition of, The New Oxford Companion to Law, Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2008: p. 263.

2. Elizabeth A. Martin, Oxford Dictionary of Law (7th ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003: p. 128. 3. Ibid. 4. See for a very detailed analysis Christopher Peterson and Martin E. P. Seligman, Character Strengths and
Virtues. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

5. See for example the works of such great moralists as C.S. Lewis, Appendix. Illustrations of the Tao, The
Abolition of Man, 1943. Edition used: HarperOne (Paperback), HarperCollins, 2009.

6. J. Donnelly, Cultural Relativism and Universal Human Rights, Human Rights Quarterly, Vol. 6, 1984:
pp. 400419.

7. D.A. Kramer, Wisdom as a classical source of human strength: Conceptualization and empirical inquiry,
Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, Vol. 19, 2000: p. 84. See for a more expanded explanation pp. 83-101.

8. Ninian Smart, World Philosophies. New York: Routledge, 1999. 9. John Rawls, E. Kelly (ed.), Justice as fairness: A restatement. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2001. See also E. Walster et al, Equity: Theory and research. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1978; and M. J. Lerner. The belief in a just world: A fundamental delusion . New York: Plenum Press, 1980 for discussions on the universality of the moral imperatives of justice and honesty across cultures.

10. See mainly C. D. Batson. "Addressing the altruism question experimentally." In S. G. Post, L. B.
Underwood, J. P. Schloss, & W. B. Hurlbut (eds.), Altruism and altruistic love: Science, philosophy, and religion in dialogue. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001: pp. 89105.

11. A. Comte-Sponville, C. Temerson (trans.), A small treatise on the great virtues. New York: Metropolitan
Books, 2001: p. 48.

12. D. Putnam, "Psychological courage". Philosophy, Psychiatry and Psychology, Vol. 4, 1997: pp. 1-11. 13. Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene. USA: Oxford University Press, 1990. (Edition Used). Originally
published 1976.

14. G.C. Williams, Adaptation and Natural Selection. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966.

15. Linda Mealey, Sex Differences: Developmental and Evolutionary Strategies. New York: Academic Press,
2000. See also Mary Midgley, Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1978, for an approximation of this view.

16. See Mark Rowlands, Can Animals Be Moral? USA: Oxford University Press, 2012. Also see the online
article by Tia Ghose Animals Are Moral Creatures, Scientist Argues, at URL: http://www.livescience.com/24802-animals-have-morals-book.html, Date Accessed: 9/11/2013.

17. See Patricia S. Churchland, Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us about Morality. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2011, pp. 12-26.

18. Ibid. pp. 97-101. Also see Herman A. Dierick and Ralph J. Greenspan, Molecular Analysis of Flies
Selected for Aggressive Behavior, Nature Genetics, Vol. 38, No. 9, 2006: pp. 1023-31.

19. Marc D. Hauser, Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong . New
York: Ecco, 2006, p. 165. (For Chomskys language organ, see Noam Chomsky , Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. USA: MIT Press, 1965.)

20. Ibid., p. xviii. 21. Jonathan Flint, Ralph J. Greenspan, and Kenneth S. Kendler, How Genes Influence Behaviour. USA:
Oxford University Press, 2010.

22. See Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd, Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human
Evolution. University of Chicago Press, 2006. This is a compelling introduction to the nature versus nurture problem, and explains how it came off the rails.

23. Hauser, Moral Minds, p. xviii. 24. See Philip Kitcher, Stephen Macedo and Josiah Ober (ed. and intro.), Primates and Philosophers: How
Morality Evolved. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006, pp. 120-139.

25. Friedrich Nietzsche, Carol Diethe (tr.), On the Genealogy of Morality, 1887. Edition Used: Cambridge
Texts In The History of Political Thought, Cambridge University Press, 2006.

26. Ibid. Second Essay: Guilt, bad conscience and related matters, p. 35. 27. Ibid., p. 36-37, also 133-137. 28. Genealogy, II, 3. 29. John Searle, Mind: A Brief Introduction (Fundamentals of Philosophy). USA: Oxford University Press,
2005. See Ch. 6. Intentionality, pp. 159 -193.

30. Plato, Euthydemus, c. 380 BC. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. Translation can be found at URL:
http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/euthydemus.html Date Accessed: 9/11/2013.

31. Patricia S. Churchland in Braintrust would seem to suggest as such. 32. Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker. W. W. Norton & Company, 1996: p.146. 33. See Raymond Tallis in The Explicit Animal: A Defence of Human Consciousness. Palgrave Macmillan,
1999.

34. See again Raymond Tallis in The Kingdom of Infinite Space: A Fantastical Journey Around Your Head .
Atlantic Books, 2009. A brilliant introduction to the problems of consciousness, embodiment, morals, and so on. See specifically Introduction and Ch. 1.

35. The Dreamtime of Australian Aborigines. See for a basic explanation Fred Alan Wolf, The Dreaming
Universe: a mind-expanding journey into the realm where psyche and physics meet . New York, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1994. Also Aeschylus Prometheus Bound is instructive.

36. See for a general discussion Kate Distin, The Selfish Meme: A Critical Reassessment. Cambridge
University Press, 2004.

37. See Neil Levy, Moral Relativism: A Short Introduction. Oneworld, 2002. 38. See Richard T. Kinner, Jerry L. Kernes, Therese M. Dautheribes, "A Short List of Universal Moral
Values", Counselling and Values, Vol. 45, October 2000. Also look at Joseph Campbells analysis of the universality of hero narratives: The Hero With A Thousand Faces, 1949. Consider Christopher Peterson and Martin E.P. Seligmans Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

39. See E.O. Wilson, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press; TwentyFifth Anniversary Edition, 2000.

40. See Levy, Moral Relativism, 2002. 41. See Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion. Mariner Books, 2006. And for a rather amusing book-length
reply to Dawkins, see Alister McGrath, The Dawkins Delusion? Atheist Fundamentalism and the Denial of the Divine, IVP Books, 2010.

42. See Albert Camus in The Plague. Stuart Gilbert (tr.), First Vintage International Edition, 1991. 43. See for an extremely witty polemic: Theodore Dalrymple, Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes
the Underclass. Ivan R. Dee, 2003. Also consult in general Andrew Roberts and Ibn Warraq.

44. See in general Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate. New York: Viking, 2002. 45. Ibid., Part IV: Know Thyself, p. 195-218. 46. Phony science wars (Review of Ian Hacking's The social construction of what?), Atlantic Monthly,
November 1999. See also John Searle, The Construction of Social Reality. New York: Free Press, 1995.