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LIT-503: Morality as Cooperation: A Problem-Centred Approach

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Properties4
StatusProposed — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-408); the founding statement of morality-as-cooperation and the place its predictions are stated most sharply, including the one its own tests have not run: that behaviour unrelated to cooperation will be morally neutral, and that no culture's morality will be about "aesthetics or nutrition" (p. 40). It reports no data. The seven domains are derived from game theory and then illustrated with quotations from philosophers and ethnographers, so the chapter shows the taxonomy is coherent, not that it is the right one. It would be settled by the test LIT-047 lacks: blind coding of all moralized content in one sample, asking whether non-cooperative domains are moralized.
Tagsmoral-psychology, social-science, natural-sciences, game-theory
Cited as “paper” byNOTE-408 — Curry 2016, morality as cooperation: a problem-centred approach
Cited as “source” byTHEORY-468 — Morality is the set of solutions to recurrent problems of cooperation, so each of the seven cooperation problems game theory identifies yields a moral domain valued in every culture, and behaviour unrelated to cooperation is morally neutral, THEORY-632 — Purity is moralized in self-report: in morality-as-cooperation's own questionnaire studies, purity items are rated about as morally relevant as loyalty and authority items, and harmless purity violations are condemned, so that theory's prediction that non-cooperative behaviour is morally neutral fails unless purity is itself cooperative

Graph View

Oliver Scott Curry (2016), in T. K. Shackelford and R. D. Hansen (eds.), The Evolution of Morality, Evolutionary Psychology series, Springer, pp. 27–51 — DOI-10.1007/978-3-319-19671-8_2

Key takeaways

  • Morality is identified with the solutions to recurrent problems of cooperation, so there is one moral domain per type of cooperation game: kin allocation, coordination, exchange, hawk–dove contests (two domains), division and possession.
  • The chapter’s testable predictions (pp. 39–40) include two the later tests never ran: non-cooperative behaviour will be judged morally neutral, and no culture’s morality will be about something other than cooperation.

Standing in the record

Filed on 2026-10-02 at the owner’s request, to fill out the record’s coverage of morality-as-cooperation (ADR-018). This is the statement the whole programme cites as “Curry 2016”. The record already held its main empirical test, Curry, Mullins and Whitehouse’s sixty-society coding (LIT-047), and the reading of that test (NOTE-034) judged it weakly diagnostic.

NOTE-408 is the close reading of 2026-10-02, and it placed the work Proposed. It matters to the record for one reason above the rest. It states the falsifying prediction in its own words: “behaviour that has nothing to do with cooperation … will be regarded as morally neutral”, and “there will be no cultures where morality is about something other than cooperation — say, aesthetics or nutrition” (p. 40). LIT-047’s design coded only the seven cooperative behaviours, so it could not test this. The criticism in NOTE-034 that no comparison domain was coded is therefore not a complaint from outside: it is this chapter’s own prediction, left unexamined by the test meant to support it. The same page also says religious morality, food taboos included, “will turn out to be” cooperative, which is the move Bloom’s falsifiability question in NOTE-034 is aimed at.

The questionnaire that followed (LIT-496), the combinatorial extension (LIT-509) and the machine-read replication (LIT-512) all start from this chapter’s seven domains. Fitouchi, André and Baumard’s “Moral disciplining” (LIT-101) is the record’s strongest cooperative account of the purity norms this chapter sets aside as having “no apparent connection to cooperation” (p. 42).

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