Did religion play a role in the evolution of morality?

Abstract

ABSTRACT The question of whether religion played a role in the evolution of morality can be interpreted in different ways. I consider three. On the first interpretation, “morality” is understood as an evolved faculty for making moral judgments, where moral judgments are a special category of normative judgments. For seventy years, philosophers and psychologists have sought to characterize this special subset of normative judgments in a well-motivated way. But I maintain that these efforts have failed, and that the likely explanation is that there is no special subset of normative judgments of the sort that philosophers and psychologists have in mind. The upshot is that religion played no role in the evolution of the faculty for making moral judgments because there is no such faculty. A second interpretation of the question asks whether religion played a role in the evolution of norm psychology. I argue that the answer is probably no, because the evolution of norm psychology can be explained without appealing to religion. A third interpretation of the question asks whether religion played a role in the cultural (as opposed to biological) evolution of norms. Here, I contend, the answer is obviously yes.