If It Feels Good to Be Good, It Might Be Only Natural

Washington Post by Shanker Vedantam | May. 28, 2007 (News Report)

The more researchers learn, the more it appears that the foundation of morality is empathy. Being able to recognize -- even experience vicariously -- what another creature is going through was an important leap in the evolution of social behavior. And it is only a short step from this awareness to many human notions of right and wrong, says Jean Decety, a neuroscientist at the University of Chicago.

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Posted by Dale Penn

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Chris Finnie
2.8
 by Chris Finnie - Oct. 1, 2008

As most news reports on scientific studies, this is a pretty superficial treatment of a complex issue. While I expect reporters to dumb stuff down, I was surprised to read one of the researchers say aspects of morality could be "automatic." Because of our cultural conditioning, our interpretation of what is moral seems to vary pretty widely. So I'm surprised anybody studying this could not take that into account.

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