Who Invented Good and Evil?

Philosopher Hanno Sauer has written several interesting books on morality. You might not agree with everything in his newest book—The Invention of Good and Evil: A World History of Morality (2024), but it is an ambitious work and well worth a read.

Sauer’s approach to organizing a comprehensive summary of morality’s global development is a chronological one. Chapter 1 is entitled “5,000,000 Years”; it sketches out a rough history of our earliest human ancestors and their morality as they descended from the trees and began wandering around on the open plains of Africa. Living in small groups and competing with other groups for resources, our ancestors increased the odds of passing on their genes by maintaining social cohesion within their little bands. Like most thinkers with a scientific bent, Sauer believes that morality, like religion and law, evolved to strengthen intra-group cooperation.

Sauer believes that “the emergence of human cooperation was the first crucial moral transformation of our species.” (p. 14) What gave human cooperation an edge was our willingness to “put aside the interests of the individual in favor of a greater common good from which everyone can benefit.” We were safer as our groups grew larger, but that required greater cooperation. Our moral rules rewarded cooperation and punished free-riding. Humans have managed to “cooperate more, and more flexibly, more generously, with more discipline and with less suspicion, even with strangers” (p. 25) than any other species.

Chapter 2, “500,000 Years,” emphasizes the role of punishment, including the death penalty, in enforcing the group-oriented moral rules rewarding cooperation and punishing defection that enhanced any group’s survival chances. Rewarding cooperators was key to survival, but so was punishing (and even killing) repeat violators of moral standards and unduly violent members. Only relatively recently in the great span of human history have most societies started to turn away from the death penalty and torture that were previously ubiquitous means of producing compliance with moral rules.

Chapter 3, “50,000 Years,” addresses among other subjects how our Homo sapiens ancestors managed to survive while our Neanderthal competitors did not. Sauer suggests:

The dominance of humankind, deficient as we are [given our relative physical weakness compared to the great apes], depends essentially on our ability to cooperate in large groups. Without morality, this level of successful cooperation would be unthinkable. Moral norms and values are the way that otherwise deficient beings with poor resources like us manage to achieve a level of cooperation that is nowhere to be found in non-human wildlife – except in some social insect species, the difference being that these follow rigid genetic programs, whereas we can establish flexible cooperative structures. This makes morality a crucial factor in the evolution of our human nature and in the culture in which it is embedded. (p. 99)

As his discussion gets closer to the present day, Sauer addresses specific issues that our evolving morality has not necessarily resolved satisfactorily. Chapter 4, “5,000 Years,” examines inequality, which he believes became a much bigger problem when much of humanity transitioned from being hunter-gatherers to being farmers. Sauer quotes Jared Diamond’s conclusion that the invention of agriculture was “the worst mistake in human history.” There is evidence that agriculture motivated slavery and other forms of inequality. Sauer observes: “Unfortunately, [even today] our cultural evolution has not yet found a way to organize large societies in a truly egalitarian way.” (p. 157)

In Chapter 4 (“500 Years”), Sauer begins by observing that most research in moral psychology focuses on WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, and Democratic) people, whose WEIRD moral culture is often different than other cultures that have evolved around the planet:

WEIRD people have an atypical moral psychology: they are moral universalists who cooperate with strangers, regardless of personal relationships, comparatively speaking. They consider the individual as the key moral unit that willingly enters into cooperative relationships with others, and they judge a person’s actions according to their intentions. They associate a person’s identity with their personal achievements and character traits rather than family, clan or tribe, and are more patient when it comes to deferred rewards. Although the combination of these traits may seem familiar to those who are WEIRD, it is actually technical unusual, an exception worldwide and historically a very new phenomenon. (p. 189)

In Chapter 5 (“50 Years”), Sauer notes moral progress, though imperfect and incomplete, in the form of many groups trying to expand “the circle of moral community,” by including races, genders, and other groups that might previously have been excluded from that circle. Around the world, the second half of the 20^th Century saw moral progress “with modern societies gradually shifting from conservative to progressive structures. This change consisted of a greater emphasis on emancipative values, which aim at liberation from oppression and disadvantage.” (p. 241)

We’ve also seen “demoralization”—a trend toward recognizing that some acts such as premarital or homosexual sex, previously viewed as immoral, actually are merely violative of social conventions.

Furthermore, Sauer notes the emerging evidence that influences studied by behavioral ethics (see our video at https://ethicsunwrapped.utexas.edu/glossary/behavioral-ethics) such as obedience to authority (https://ethicsunwrapped.utexas.edu/video/obedience-to-authority) and the conformity bias (https://ethicsunwrapped.utexas.edu/video/conformity-bias) often have more influence on a person’s moral decisions than does that person’s inner personality.

In Chapter 6 (“5 Years”), Sauer examines the conflict over “woke” in modern political and cultural circles. Although other authors have written more extensively and insightfully about this focus of the culture wars, Sauer’s position is worth examining. He has criticism for both armies in the war over “woke”:

The paradox of wokeness is that in its most extreme manifestations, spurred on by moral hypersensitization, it could begin to reject the one major form of society that has ever made an imperfect, but at least serious, attempt to overcome the moral deficits it rightly sees….

People who flatly reject wokeness and political correctness make the complementary mistake. The basic paradox of anti-wokeness is that it sees Western civilization’s enemies as being those who insist on the full and complete implementation of the very values and norms that make up that civilization. (p. 275)

Like many others before him, Sauer also shares his thoughts about our post-truth world, again in a worthwhile way but not as thoroughly as many other recent commentators. He ranges widely, opining on virtue signaling, cancel culture, deplatforming, mansplaining, gaslighting, effective altruism, and several other modern cultural phenomena.

The good news, says Sauer, is that members of the two major political schisms in the U.S. overestimate the difference in fundamental moral values they share with their fellow Americans. Less optimistic is Sauer’s assessment, shared by many others, that although we share many of the same values, we still manage to hate each other because of identity politics.

In remembering this book, we focus on this point: “Though the inevitability of moral progress is suspect, the possibility of moral progress remains a useful idea.” (p. 225)