This View of Life
Magazine

cultural practices, just like biological and psychological traits, are incomprehensible unless we understand their evolutionary origins and raisons d’être.

You don’t need much in the way of normative assumptions to convert facts into values. Consider the assertion: "All else being equal, more wellbeing is better than less." Who could object? It’s all but definitionally true.

If you want to think about language and evolution, about language and experience, about language and almost anything, or about almost anything in language, then start, or start all over again, with Daniel Dor’s The Instruction of Imagination.

Properly understood, morality is not a burden; it is an effective means for increasing the benefits of cooperation, especially emotional well-being resulting from sustained cooperation with family, friends, and community.

“…ethics has to do with how to arrive at as harmonious social interactions as it is humanly possible.”

Life arose as a cooperative effort among diverse molecule types in catalytically closed and self-sustaining chemical reaction networks. There is grandeur in this view of (the origin of) life.

The outer limits of moral possibility are established by the emotional tendencies that prepare us to be morality-making beings.

As a marketer, I obviously value any opportunity better to understand ourselves and our true, evolved social nature. It is potentially a huge source of competitive advantage and differentiation.