Richard D. Alexander (1987), Aldine de Gruyter, Hawthorne, N.Y. (Evolutionary Foundations of Human Behavior series, per Routledge; xx + 301 pp.). Reissued by Routledge, 2017 — DOI-10.4324/9780203700976
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-02 at the owner’s request, as one of the evolutionary sources of morality-as-cooperation that the record lacked (ADR-018).
Unavailable because no lawful full text was reachable, so it is not read
and no NOTE is filed.
Contents (chapter titles and pages from Crossref’s records for the 2017 reissue):
- 1 Biology and the Background of Moral Systems (1–76)
- 2 A Biological View of Morality (77–144)
- 3 Morality as Seen by Philosophers and Biologists (145–196)
- 4 Applying the Biological View of Morality (197–252)
- Conclusions (253–258); Epilogue (259–264)
What it is said to argue, attributed:
- Per the publisher’s description (Routledge): moral questions “arise out of conflicts of interest”, and “moral systems are ways of using confluences of interest at lower levels of social organization to deal with conflicts of interest at higher levels”. Moral systems “are described as systems of indirect reciprocity”: people gain and lose “not only by direct transactions, but also by the reputations they gain”. The ultimate interests of humans are reproductive; “the concept of morality has arisen within groups because of its contribution to unity in the context, ultimately, of success in intergroup competition”. Morality “is not easily relatable to universals”, and the last part discusses the nuclear arms race as “the greatest of all moral problems”.
- Per Nowak 2006 (LIT-501, ref. 30): indirect reciprocity “leads to the evolution of morality”.
Bearing on morality-as-cooperation, as far as these sources show. It is the earliest of the record’s sources to make morality itself the object of an evolutionary account. On the description it would ground MAC’s reciprocity domain in its indirect, reputational form, and its group domain through within-group unity for between-group competition. Nothing reachable suggests it treats contests, division or possession. Its claim that morality is “not easily relatable to universals” sits awkwardly with MAC’s prediction of seven universal morals (LIT-047; NOTE-034), and a reading should check what exactly it denies. Curry 2016 (LIT-503) does not cite it; NOTE-034’s lineage paragraph does not name it.
Neighbours. Trivers (LIT-510) supplies the reciprocity it builds on, and his multiparty section anticipates indirect reciprocity. Boehm (LIT-514) also explains morality by reputation and social selection within groups. Tomasello (LIT-504) explains it by collaboration rather than by reciprocity.
Topic. moral-psychology first: the book’s subject is morality as a
biological phenomenon. natural-sciences for the evolutionary biology,
social-science for its anthropology. ethics is not added on what is
reachable; chapters 3–4 engage moral philosophers and apply the view to
a moral problem, and a reading should decide whether they argue what is
owed.
Anthology. No instruction for machine-learning practice; not held there.
What a reading should check. How indirect reciprocity is modelled (verbally, or with the reputational dynamics Nowak later formalized); whether intergroup competition is a group-selection argument; and what “not easily relatable to universals” means for the cross-cultural claims of LIT-047.