I do believe that you can understand most of moral psychology by viewing it as a form of enlightened self-interest, and if it’s self-interest, then it’s easily explained by Darwinian natural selection working at the level of the individual. Genes are selfish,3 selfish genes create people with various mental modules, and some of these mental modules make us strategically altruistic, not reliably or universally altruistic. Our righteous minds were shaped by kin selection plus reciprocal altruism augmented by gossip and reputation management. That’s the message of nearly every book on the
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