Moral Minds

According to Marc Hauser, "morality is grounded in our biology". We've heard this sort of thing before, of course - from evolutionary biologists, for instance, who claim that natural selection favours altruistic behaviour, since acting benevolently towards other people is a way of securing our genetic posterity. Some proponents of the evolutionary explanation go further, and infer from this that what seem to be our moral concerns aren't our real concerns at all, and that what looks like altruism is in fact just a disguise for the operation of selfish genes.

You can read the rest of my review of Marc Hauser's book Moral Minds in tomorrow's Guardian.