The Invention of Good and Evil: A World History of Morality

en Limba Engleză Hardback – 11 sep 2024

For almost five million years, humans have been locked in a relationship with morality, inventing and reinventing the concepts of 'Good' and 'Evil', and weaving them into our cities, laws and customs. Morality is often associated with restraint and coercion; restriction and sacrifice; inquisition, confession and a guilty conscience. Joyless and claustrophobic, it is a device used to shames us into compliance. This impression is not entirely incorrect, but it is certainly incomplete. Using our past as a basis for a new understanding of our future, Hanno Sauer traces humanity's fundamental moral transformations from our earliest ancestors through to the present day, when it seems we have never disagreed more over what it means to be good. Our current political disagreements may feel like the end of the world, but where will the evolution of morality take us next?

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Specificații

ISBN-13: 9781800818293
ISBN-10: 1800818297
Pagini: 400
Dimensiuni: 158 x 236 x 44 mm
Greutate: 0.64 kg
Ediția:Main
Editura: Profile
Colecția Profile Books
Locul publicării:London, United Kingdom

Notă biografică

Dr Hanno Sauer is an Associate Professor of Ethics at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies and a member of the Ethics Institute at Utrecht University, The Netherlands. His current research takes an interdisciplinary approach to ethics, involving empirically informed metaethics that blends fields of neuroscience, cognitive science politics and social psychology.

Recenzii

Sauer's comprehensive history of morality from the origins of humanity until today provides a solid basis for contemporary debates - cleverly written, entertaining, and an invitation to rethink one's beliefs
A tour de force through the history of our values
One of the best non-fiction books of the year
Elegant, confident, eloquent and smart
This look into the past is very entertaining, versatile, interestingly presented and at the same time razor-sharp and full of surprises.
Sauer hits the nail on the head of our current times
Hanno Sauer is one of the most astute ethicists of his generation. So far, there has been no history of morality told from the perspective of philosophy. Sauer closes this gap: knowledgeable, funny and entertaining.

Extras

This story is about everything that has ever been important to us: our values, our principles, the roots of our identity, the foundations of our coexistence. It's about working with each other and against each other; it's about judging and being judged; and it's about which of these two sides we'll find ourselves on tomorrow. The story I want to tell is a history of morality. What can give us our bearings? How do we want to live? How can we get along with each other? How did we manage in the past, and how will it be possible in the future? These are all moral questions. Morality can make us think of any number of things. Restraint and coercion; restriction and sacrifice; inquisition, confession and guilty conscience; chastity and catechism. For many, it is a concept that feels joyless, claustrophobic, an admonishing finger to shame us into compliance. And this impression is not necessarily incorrect. But it is most certainly incomplete, just one part of the picture that needs to be filled in. This story will trace humanity's fundamental moral transformations, from our earliest, not-yet-human ancestors in East Africa to the recent conflicts over identity, inequality and oppression which are all being played out online from today's global metropolises. It explains how our human society has changed through the ages, how new institutions, technology, knowledge and economic forms have developed in parallel with our values and norms, and delves into the fact that each of these changes has more than one side: anyone who lives in a community excludes others; anyone who understands rules wants to monitor them; anyone who trusts becomes dependent; anyone who generates wealth creates inequality and exploitation. Every change or welcome development has a hard, dark, cold side and every advancement comes at a cost. Our early evolution millennia ago made us cooperative, but it also made us hostile to anyone who did not belong to our group - by learning how to say 'us', we also needed to be able to say 'them'. The development of punishment was a form of self-domestication and made us friendly and peaceable, but it also gave us powerful punitive instincts that we would use to monitor compliance with our rules. Culture and learning gave us new knowledge and new skills that we learned from others - and consequently made us dependent on those others. The emergence of inequality and domination brought unprecedented wealth but alongside that, hierarchy and oppression surfaced. Modernity set individuals free to bring nature under control with science and technology; in the process, we explained away all the magic and disenchanted our world, as Max Weber put it, and uprooted ourselves from tradition and community, and created the conditions for colonialism and slavery. The twentieth century's aim was to create a peaceful society with the help of global institutions, a society where everyone would enjoy the same moral status, but it brought us some of the most breathtaking crimes in human history and has manoeuvred us to the brink of ecological collapse. Recently we have been trying to finally cast off racism, sexism, homophobia and exclusion. There will be unforeseen aftereffects of this progress too, but it will be worth it. Our morality is a palimpsest: a parchment that's been written over time after time, often illegible and difficult to decipher. But what is morality? How can we define it? It may be better not to: as Nietzsche wrote, 'it is only that which has no history which can be defined'.[1] But our morality does have a history, and it is too complex and unwieldy for the sterile formulas we come up with in our armchairs. But the fact that we have difficulty defining what morality is does not mean it's impossible to say what it is with any clarity. It's just that it can't be said concisely.A history of morality is not a history of moral philosophy. We have been thinking about our values for a long time, but it's only in recent times that we have been writing down our thoughts. The Code of Hammurabi and the Ten Commandments, the Sermon on the Mount, Kant's categorical imperative and Rawls' veil of ignorance all play a part in this story, but only a comparatively minor one. This is the much bigger history of our values, norms, institutions and practices. Our morality is not in our heads, but in our cities and walls, laws and customs, in our rituals and wars. As well as helping us understand the past, this long history of morality will also, I hope, contribute to our understanding of the present. Modern societies are currently under moral pressure to reconcile the prospect of their own existence with the most unpleasant truths of their origins. How can we map out the ongoing changes to our moral infrastructure in a way that makes 'light dawn gradually over the whole'[2]? Where did the dynamic of polarisation we're seeing right now come from? What is the relationship between cultural identity and social inequality? To understand the present, we have to turn to the past. Over the course of this book, we will go on a journey together to chart the evolution of our morality; it made us capable of cooperation, but confined our moral dispositions to those we consider to be from within 'our' group (Chapter 1: 5,000,000 Years). The need for cooperation grew as a result of external environmental changes, which required individuals living together in larger and larger groups. On the one hand, developing and using punishment gave us the self-control and social tolerance essential for this, but on the other, it endowed us with a punitive psychology that would be used with the utmost vigilance to monitor compliance with our group's norms (Chapter 2: 500,000 Years). The dual inheritance of genes and culture turned us into beings who would depend on learning from others to be able to best absorb the accumulated cultural capital of information and skills from previous generations. At the same time, it became essential to be able to decide from whom we would like to learn: in other words, whom to trust and believe, and it would be shared values that would bring about this trust (Chapter 3: 50,000 Years). This species of cooperative, punitive and socially learning beings ultimately managed to build ever larger societies - which threatened to collapse under the pressure of their own headcounts. Strictly hierarchical forms of organisation began to replace our original egalitarianism, in order to contend with this pressure, as a result of which human societies split into groups: socio-economic elites and a majority of politically and materially disadvantaged people. Social inequality grew, as did, conversely, our aversion to it (Chapter 4: 5,000 Years). It was only a matter of time before the historical evolution of morality produced a cultural situation that replaced kinship and hierarchy with cooperative relationships which were voluntarily entered into between individuals, as structural principles of society. This new stage of social evolution unleashed unprecedented forces of economic growth, scientific progress and political emancipation, which resulted in the modern society in which we live today (Chapter 5: 500 Years). At the same time, tensions have increased between our psychological aversions to social inequality and the economic advantages made possible by a social structure based on individual liberties. With increasing material abundance, the demand to finally realise the promise of human equality grew more vocal: the socio-political status of disadvantaged minorities became a moral priority (Chapter 6: 50 Years). The fact that this problem could not be solved as quickly as we had hoped characterises our current situation, with the main elements of the history of our morality combining into a toxic mixture: our morally charged group psychology makes us receptive to social division. The difficulties in overcoming the remaining social inequalities led to suspicion of anyone who isn't fighting for the same cause with the vehemence we perceive as necessary. This reinforces the division of society into 'us' and 'them', which in turn increases our susceptibility to disinformation as we become increasingly dependent on signals of moral belonging when we make decisions about who to believe. Our punitive psychology is now beginning to scrutinise the symbolic markers of our group membership more and more closely and to penalise any non-compliance with the norms in question more and more excessively. The identity conflicts of the present day - both left- and right-wing - are the result of this dynamic (Chapter 7: 5 Years). Today, our political disagreements may feel like the end of the world, but where will the evolution of morality take us next? It doesn't have to end like this: after all, we all share the same history of morality; our political disagreements are often shallow; underneath them are deep-seated, universal moral values that all people share with each other, and that can be the basis for a new understanding (Chapter 8). This story is a long one which starts aeons ago and ends in the future. Its tempo will increase and intensify. Millions of years pass from the first chapter to the second, while the last three span only a few hundred between them. The chronological arrangement I've chosen shouldn't be taken too literally; after all, many of the developments overlap or aren't clearly attributable to specific times. The sections of time this narrative is organised into should be interpreted just as ballpark figures that are intended to bring out the main points and provide an overview.Other divisions might have been possible, and may have been more useful. We could tell the story of our morality as the story of growing human societies: from small family alliances with maybe five members to the first clans and tribes of 50 or 500, early cities with 5000 or 50000 inhabitants to our modern large societies with 5 billion people or more.The history of morality is also a history of various forms of human evolution. It begins with the mechanisms of biological evolution, with our morality contributing to the kind of creatures we became, and how we are designed as a natural species; it traces the forms of cultural evolution we used to create our own world; and it traces the outline of social and political evolution that shaped our current moment in human history.Or it could be told as a history of the fundamental elements of our moral infrastructure, in which our ability to cooperate, our propensity for punishment, trust in and dependence on others, equality and hierarchy, individuality and autonomy, vulnerability, belonging and identity combine to form our particular human way of life. The segmentation I've chosen here is a map, and a map is intended to provide orientation, not to depict reality. The most accurate map isn't always the most useful.Each chapter builds on the previous one and continues the inner logic of the narrative. Yet each section is written so it also stands on its own and can be read separately from the others. If you're interested in humankind's biological evolution and how our morality shaped us as a species, you can focus on the first chapters. If you want to learn about humanity's early cultural history and about how the moral infrastructure of the first civilisations shaped this culture, you'll benefit most from the middle chapters. The last three chapters are aimed primarily at anyone who wants to have a better understanding of the current moral zeitgeist. And anyone who - like me - believes that the best understanding of the present can be obtained from an understanding of the past should read the book in its entirety.It is, in many ways, a pessimistic story of progress. Pessimistic because within every generation there is too much evil. But it is a story of progress because there seem to be mechanisms between the generations that have the potential to gradually improve human morality, and because this potential is sometimes drawn upon. Moral progress is always possible and often tangible. But it doesn't happen as a matter of course: every achievement has to be defended from the regressive forces of a stubborn human nature, the irrationalities of the human psyche and the mercilessness of fate.The idea that we can only understand our morality, with its puzzles and contradictions, if we understand its origin isn't new. Friedrich Nietzsche first referred to this project as 'genealogy', in the style of ancestral research. We can use this approach to ask the question about the origins of morality, and what an answer to this question might look like. To get there, we must go much further back than Nietzsche himself thought necessary, not just focussing on the shift from the worldly, aristocratic and heroic ethics of antiquity to the Christian early Middle Ages, when the values of compassion and humility, sin, renunciation and afterlife began to be emphasised. Instead, we need to look at the much more fundamental problem of how our human sense of morality came into being in the first place. Only then can we understand how our values and the social structures that embody these values have been able to change over time.The history of morality that I have to offer is not a history in the traditional sense, referring to concrete events and developments that may or may not be well documented. It is, instead, a 'deep history' that doesn't use dates or names, sketching out instead a feasible scenario that could have gone along these lines.It will never be possible to fully decipher the precise course of events: deep is the well of the past (and maybe even bottomless). We have to rely on the best possible triangulation of various different disciplines. Genetics, paleontology, psychology and cognitive sciences, primatology and anthropology, philosophy and evolutionary theory each provide their own perspectives that combine to form a picture.Will this story bring to light the pudenda origo of our values, as Nietzsche believed - their shameful origin? Will we still feel the same way about ourselves when it's over? In the cold light of day, will the uncomfortable truth shatter our confidence in our values? Will it show that our morality can stand up to closer scrutiny? Or will it all end in devastation and hatred and shame?We have no way of knowing what the future holds, how we will all live together, and how we'd like to. And we don't have to. Our moral values are like headlights: they don't help us see very far, but if we rely on them, we can go on a long journey. This is the story of that journey. [1] Nietzsche, 2013 (1887), p. 65.[2] Wittgenstein, 1972, § 141.

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