Volume 54, Number 8 · May 10, 2007
Are We Born Moral?
By John Gray
Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong
by Marc D. Hauser
Ecco, 458 pp., $27.95
Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved
by Frans de Waal, edited by Stephen Macedo and Josiah Ober
Princeton University Press, 209 pp., $22.95
According to a prominent tradition of Western thinking, morality is a thin overlay covering human savagery. Human beings are bestial by nature and ethical codes are curbs on their brutish instincts that enable them to live together in relative peace. Morality is a restraint on natural human behavior. At the same time it is believed to be uniquely human. Only humans possess the intellectual powers that are needed to repress natural impulses, and so only they can be moral.
Review, 4073 words
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