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Review: Michael Tomasello, A Natural History of Human Morality, Harvard University Press, 2016
The dust jacket to A Natural History of Human Morality advertises "the most detailed account to date of the evolution of human moral psychology." Reading this description, you might expect a hefty, multi-volume work filled with mitochondrial maps, genotype to fitness landscapes, and appendix after appendix of experimental results. Thankfully, you will find none of these things within this slim, breezy, 163-page monograph. What you will find could be better described as an "introduction" or an "outline" to an ongoing research program, which may very well become the "the most detailed account.. .of the evolution of human moral psychology" that we can hope for. But the greatest virtue of A Natural History of Human Morality, to my mind, is its merciful lack of detail. Tucked between its narrow covers is a simple yet engaging story about the emergence of a new kind of cooperation among upright apes, which we call "morality."
With its welcomed brevity and immanent readability, this book can be enjoyed by just about anyone. However, it will probably appeal most to readers who have neither the time nor the background to keep up with the many articles that Michael Tomasello publishes every year, but who want to find out what all the hubbub is about. If you've never read a book on the evolution of morality before, there's no better place to begin. For those of you who have kept up with Tomasello's work over the years, you'll find little that you don't already know, but you will walk away with a clearer understanding of what he's up to and where his project is headed.
What is the book about? In Tomasello's own words, the "goal of the current account is to provide an explanation, an evolutionary explanation, for how the human species transformed great ape strategic cooperation into genuine human morality" (147). More specifically, Tomasello identifies a number of moral psychological capacities that are unique to humans, and then defends an empirical hypothesis about how and why these capacities evolved in our genus (and only in our genus).
The story begins with the great apes, or, more precisely, with the most recent common ancestors of humans and great...