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• Second premise: The core moral principles have significant consequences for humans’ biological fitness—for our survival and reproduction.

Justifying the first premise is easier than it looks. It looks hard because few moral norms seem universal; most disagree somewhere or other. Some moral values seem incommensurable with each other—we don’t even know how to compare them, let alone reconcile them. Moral norms are accepted in some localities but not in others: some cultures permit plural marriage, while others prohibit it; some require revenge taking and honor killing, while others forbid these acts. Adultery, divorce, abortion, and homosexual relations go in and out of moral fashion. At first glance, it looks like there is a lot of moral disagreement. It’s enough to make some anthropologists into moral relativists (moral codes bind only within their cultures). It makes some philosophers into moral skeptics (there may be an absolute moral truth, but we can’t be certain or don’t know what it is).

On the other hand, in human culture there has long been a sustained effort to identify a core morality—one shared by the major religions, one that cuts across political differences and diverse legal codes. It is a core morality that has held constant or been refined over historical epochs. Soon after the founding of the United Nations in the late 1940s, there was enough consensus on core morality that it was enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Roughly the same core morality has been written into many more international conventions on rights and liberties that have been adopted by varying coalitions of nations ever since. Even countries that decline to be parties to these treaties have at least paid lip service to most of the norms they enshrine. These agreements don’t prove that there is a core morality, but they’re good evidence that most people think there is.

Thus, there is long-standing evidence for the existence of core morality in the overlap of ethical agreement by the major religions and in the lip service paid by international agreements. But wait, there’s more. Neuroscience, in particular the techniques of fMRI (functioning magnetic resonance imaging of brain activity), increasingly shows that people’s brains react the same way to ethical problems across cultures. This is just what the existence of core morality leads us to expect. If you are really worried about whether there is a core morality, you can jump to the next chapter, in which its existence is established beyond scientistic (if not scientific) doubt, and then come back.

At the base of the diverse moral codes out there in the world, there are fundamental principles endorsed in all cultures at all times. The difficulty lies in actually identifying the norms that compose this core morality. What is the difficulty? These almost universally agreed-on norms are so obvious that they are easy to miss when we set about trying to identify them. Instead we think of interesting norms such as “Thou shalt not kill” and immediately realize that each of us buys into a slightly different and highly qualified version of the norm. For some of us, “Thou shalt not kill” excludes and excuses self-defense, military activity, perhaps capital punishment, euthanasia, other cases of mercy killing, and killing other great apes, primates, mammals, and so forth. When we consider how pacifists, opponents of capital punishment, proponents of euthanasia, and so many others disagree on some or all of these qualifications, it’s tempting to conclude that there is no core morality we all share, or else it’s too thin to have any impact on conduct.

A more accurate way to think about core morality begins by recognizing those norms that no one has ever bothered to formulate because they never come into dispute. They might even be difficult to formulate if they cover every contingency and exclude all exceptions. If we set out to express them, we might start out with candidates like