Judith Burkart – Evolutionary Origins of Building Blocks of Morality: Insights from Nonhuman Primates

The aim of this presentation is to explore the origins of moral behavior and its underlying moral preferences and intuitions from an evolutionary perspective. Based on experiments with nonhuman primates, I will argue that several elements of morality are not unique to humans, and that the distribution of these elements among primates suggests that they may well follow different evolutionary trajectories. In particular, I will focus on three elements of morality, i.e.  (i) prosocial concern, which likely evolves in the context of shared infant care, (ii) sensitivity to social norms, which may be traced back to the last common ancestors of humans and chimpanzees, and (iii) a concern for reputation, which may be absent among non-human primates. I will discuss these results by suggesting that the unique coincidence of elements of morality in humans and not in any other primate is best understood if human moral preferences are construed as adaptations to the affordances of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle of our hominin ancestors.