Christopher Boehm (2012), Basic Books, New York (vii + 418 pp.; ISBN 9780465020485; ebook 9780465029198) — https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/christopher-boehm/moral-origins/9780465029198/
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-02 at the owner’s request, as one of the natural-history accounts of morality 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 from Open Library; no pages given):
- Darwin’s inner voice
- Living the virtuous life
- Of altruism and free riders
- Knowing our immediate predecessors
- Resurrecting some venerable ancestors
- A natural Garden of Eden
- The positive side of social selection
- Learning morals across the generations
- Work of the moral majority
- Pleistocene ups, downs, and crashes
- Testing the selection-by-reputation hypothesis
- The evolution of morals
- Epilogue: humanity’s moral future
What it is said to argue, attributed: per the publisher, Boehm “finds existing explanations lacking” (nepotism, reciprocation, group selection) and argues “that our moral sense is a sophisticated defense mechanism that enables individuals to survive and thrive in groups”. The risk is “being punished for our misdeeds by those around us”: “bullies, thieves, free-riders, and especially psychopaths … are the most likely to suffer this fate”. “This social type of selection … singles out altruists for survival”, “bred the first stirrings of conscience” and “led to the fully developed sense of virtue and shame”.
Bearing on morality-as-cooperation, as far as these sources show. Boehm’s account is a mechanism, social selection by group punishment and reputation, more than a map of domains. On the description it bears on MAC’s exchange domain (free riders, thieves) and on its contest domains from the opposite side: where MAC predicts that deference to the powerful is moralized, Boehm’s groups punish bullies. The “reverse dominance hierarchy” that Gintis’s commentary on LIT-047 invokes (NOTE-034) is Boehm’s term from his earlier work; whether this book treats the dominance–deference question directly is for a reading to check. The publisher’s line that he “finds existing explanations lacking” places him against kin selection and reciprocity as sufficient accounts, which is MAC’s own starting point.
Neighbours. Alexander (LIT-495) also explains morality by reputation within groups. Trivers (LIT-510) gives the moralistic aggression that Boehm’s group punishment generalizes. Fitouchi, André & Baumard (LIT-101) explain puritanical norms by reputational concern for self-control, a neighbouring reputational account. Nowak (LIT-501) holds that punishment is not itself a mechanism for cooperation, which a reading should set against Boehm’s punishment-driven social selection.
Topic. moral-psychology first. social-science for its
anthropology of foragers, natural-sciences for the primatology and
evolutionary argument, emotion-and-affect for shame and conscience as
its explananda. ethics is not added: the epilogue on “humanity’s moral
future” may be normative, and a reading should decide.
Anthology. No instruction for machine-learning practice; not held there.