As a social primate species, we modulate our morals with signals from family, friends and social groups with whom we identify because in our evolutionary past, those attributes helped individuals to survive and reproduce.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
We are naturally moral beings, but our environments can enhance - or, sadly, degrade - this innate moral sense.
A growing body of evidence suggests that humans do have a rudimentary moral sense from the very start of life.
Evolutionary psychologists suggest that humans experienced evolutionary benefits from brain developments that included aversion to loss and risk and from instincts for cooperation that helped strengthen communities.
Humans are born with a hard-wired morality: a sense of good and evil is bred in the bone. I know this claim might sound outlandish, but it's supported now by research in several laboratories.
Through the evolutionary process, those who are able to engage in social cooperation of various sorts do better in survival and reproduction.
Our social life is literally primal, in the sense that chimpanzees and gorillas, our closest relatives among the primates, are also social.
Primate and elephant and even pig societies show considerable evidence of care for others, parent-child bonding, solidarity in the face of danger, and so on.
Morality is not just any old topic in psychology but close to our conception of the meaning of life. Moral goodness is what gives each of us the sense that we are worthy human beings.
Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual.
I don't believe that we evolved moral psychology; it just doesn't seem plausible to me as a biological phenomenon.