Discover and read the best of Twitter Threads about #moralityascooperation
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🚨Moral Universals: A machine-reading analysis of 256 cultures🚨Delighted to share this new work, with @MoralPsych & Marc Cheong #dic #LIWC #HRAF #moralityascooperation #ethicalatlas osf.io/86qry 🧵
2. What is the cross-cultural prevalence of the seven moral values (love, loyalty, reciprocity, heroism, deference, fairness, property) posited by the theory of Morality-as-Cooperation’ (MAC)? 2/ 
3. Previous research, hand-coding ethnographic accounts of ethics from 60 societies, found examples of most of the seven morals in most societies, and observed these morals with equal frequency across cultural regions. journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.10…
The philosopher @mpigliucci critiques morality-as-cooperation (MAC) and the 60 culture study here, but I think he misconstrues the central argument. (I hope we can discuss and resolve this interesting issue.) #moralityascooperation
We don't 'confuse descriptive and prescriptive’. MAC is primarily a (meta-ethical, descriptive) theory about the nature of morality (that it is a system of cooperative rules). From this theory we derive predictions about the content of morality (ie what the prescriptions will be)
So, the argument is not 'if universal, then good', it's more like 'if morality is a system of cooperative rules, then these cooperative rules will be regarded as good (universally)’.
1/ What's wrong with Moral Foundations Theory? (And how to get moral psychology right) <a long thread>
2/ Once the exclusive preserve of theology and philosophy, the study of morality is now a thriving interdisciplinary mix of evolutionary theory, genetics, biology, animal behaviour, psychology and anthropology.
3/ On this view, there is nothing mysterious or magical about morality — it is merely a collection of biological and cultural mechanisms for promoting cooperation.
1/ Do you need God to be good? Some thoughts on morality and religion, prompted by debates like this: @RFupdates
2/ There are lots of interesting questions about morality, like (i) what are the origins of morality, (ii) what explains its content, (iii) what motivates people to be moral, (iv) are there objective moral standards?
3/ Natural (scientific, atheist) accounts of ethics answer all of these questions, whereas super-natural accounts (like Christian theology, or ‘divine command theory’) do not.
