Is Moral Judgement Hard-Wired Into the Brain?

A Harvard University researcher believes that moral judgement is hard-wired into the brain:

The moral grammar now universal among people presumably evolved to its
final shape during the hunter-gatherer phase of the human past, before
the dispersal from the ancestral homeland in northeast Africa some
50,000 years ago. This may be why events before our eyes carry far
greater moral weight than happenings far away, Dr. Hauser believes,
since in those days one never had to care about people remote from ones
environment.

Dr. Hauser believes that the moral grammar may have evolved through the
evolutionary mechanism known as group selection. A group bound by
altruism toward its members and rigorous discouragement of cheaters
would be more likely to prevail over a less cohesive society, so genes
for moral grammar would become more common.

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