'Morality is a mess.' reading  “Evolution and Morality” in 2026

Stewart-Williams, Steve. “Evolution and Morality.”

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780080970868810569?via%3Dihub [via Web]  [entry in International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences (2nd ed.). (2015) ISBN 9780080970875 : Web. ]

2015 was about the year I starting writing down notes about stuff with various thoughts and feelings, about a subject which I would later realise was boxed-in as ‘moral philosophy’. It took ages to realise that. If I had known what I was going to spend so much of my free time on, I would have done some basic research and reading about it (a decade before AI overviews and their sloppy kin). If I had, I would have come across Steve Stewart-Williams and perhaps saved me some time.
This entry in begins “morality is a mess”.
I guess if it was less of a mess I would have known what I was doing.
The entry is an introduction to the subject as far as a more analytic-styled encyclopedic entry will go. Except that opening headliner: “morality is a mess”.

Even Joseph Henrich gets a look in at the end (see my reading of him one and two and three-ish).

Of course I seek to remove that mess by talking about worlding as part of human experience, as much as talking about selfing might remove a blinkered focus on the atomic individual which various social institutions of the individual might provide or inculcate.

Worlding is a part of our human agency, a prosocial outcome in which things like morality, or art, or markets, are outcomes and not things requiring an origin story.

Also Steve Stewart-Williams' term "trolleyology" !

More at Reactions to papers/books on evolution~morality.

Crossposted on substack.com