Moralidade como adaptação para a cooperação humana: uma revisão teórica

Abstract

Our ancestors lived in an intensely social world for millions of years, in which group living was crucial to survival. Thus, adaptations were developed, based on the mechanism of natural selection, to deal with the adaptive problems resulting from the interaction between individuals and the pressure exerted by the environment. Thus, it becomes necessary to identify, based on recent literature in Evolutionary and Social Psychology, whether morality can be considered one of these evolutionary adaptations to human cooperative problems. For this, a theoretical review with content analysis was conducted, having selected only theoretical articles from 2010 to 2023 from the online databases: Psycinfo and Google Scholar. With this, a box was structured containing the syntheses of the twelve articles selected for the review, containing: reference, objectives, and conclusions. From the synthesis, it was observed that moral behavior is the name we give to human cooperative traits, which are represented in various mechanisms, such as instincts, intuitions, feelings, and cognitions, which are capable of sustaining, promoting, and regulating cooperation. Furthermore, the behaviors that are seen as morally good around the world are also those that contribute to cooperative behavior. However, it is demonstrated that due to the several types of existing cooperative problems, different moral values corresponding to each context were selected during our evolutionary path.