Ethics

This is strikingly parallel to modern accounts of cooperation in evolutionary game theory, where agents that recognize their fitness as coupled to the fitness of others outcompete purely self-regarding agents.

The bridge between these evolutionary dynamics and individual moral cognition is moral psychology, which reveals that moral emotions — guilt, shame, gratitude — function as commitment devices calibrated by social interaction. An ethics that ignores how moral cognition actually works is designing for agents that do not exist.