Sarah Brosnan – A Comparative Approach to Morality

Distinct among animals, humans have the ability to develop and shape systems of morality that guide social interactions.  Although humans’ capacity for morality stands alone, humans are not the only species to have developed rules or norms surrounding social decision-making, and understanding how other species negotiate these interactions provides insight into the evolution of the behavior in humans.  In this talk, I will focus on three key questions.  First, how do we study moral behavior in other species, which do not show morality in the same sense that humans do?  The answer to this question leads into the second topic, which is that there are behaviors we see in other species that relate to moral behavior, which I term precursor behaviors.  These behaviors, such as reciprocity and prosocial behavior, are not in and of themselves moral, but understanding how they manifest in other species provides insight into why and how we evolved moral behavior.  Finally, I consider what understanding these precursor behaviors in other species can tell us about the evolution of human morality.  Throughout I will use as an example decision-making in the context of inequality, a precursor to the human sense of fairness.  Ultimately, I argue that while other species do not show morality in the human sense, there is much to learn about how and why our behavior evolved in the ways that it did from studying other species.