Moralizing biology: the appeal and limits of the new compassionate view of nature

In recent years, a proliferation of books about empathy, cooperation and pro-social
behaviours (Brooks, 2011a) has significantly influenced the discourse of the lifesciences
and reversed consolidated views of nature as a place only for competition and
aggression. In this article I describe the recent contribution of three disciplines – moral
psychology (Jonathan Haidt), primatology (Frans de Waal) and the neuroscience of
morality – to the present transformation of biology and evolution into direct sources
of moral phenomena, a process here named the ‘moralization of biology’. I conclude
by addressing the ambivalent status of this constellation of authors, for whom today
‘morality comes naturally’: I explore both the attractiveness of their message, and the
problematic epistemological assumptions of their research programmes in the light of
new discoveries in developmental and molecular biology.