THE BEGINNING AND END OF NEGATIVE MORALITY:
AN EVOLUTIONARY PERSPECTIVE
abstract
Morality in its "negative" sense may have arisen in response to a uniquely human evolutionary predicament: the disparity between a level of desire appropriate to the physically harsh environment of our pre-human ancestors (a level that still, by and large, drives human behavior) and that suitable for the physically softer environment produced by human culture. Human cognition may also have engendered a new second-order incommensurate desire and a corresponding second-order negative morality. I explore various ways in which a balance may be restored and the sense in which both such first and second-order negative morality may be made unnecessary as a result. This interpretation is distinct from both evolutionary and more traditional philosophical moral theory, and is parallel in some ways to the perspectives adopted by Nietzsche and Freud.