Morality is fundamentally an evolved solution to problems of social co‐operation

This debate took place at the Association of Social Anthropologists (ASA) conference in Oxford on 21 September 2018, following the model of the Group Debates in Anthropological Theory at the University of Manchester (GDAT). It brought together and into confrontation two of anthropology's relatively new sub‐fields (new at least in their current incarnations), namely evolutionary anthropology and the anthropology of morality and/or ethics. Although organized by a social anthropology professional body, the conference organizers – in line with the wishes of the ASA committee at the time of the call for conference proposals (in 2016) – sought to encourage participation from all forms of anthropology, including archaeology. It was therefore fitting that the debate should pose a question that is of interest across the broad spectrum of anthropology and well beyond, highlighting, we hoped, the venerable anthropological ambition to contribute to the resolution of long‐standing and intractable philosophical questions.The proposition, ‘morality is fundamentally an evolved solution to problems of social co‐operation’, encapsulates a theory developed by Oliver Scott Curry, along with colleagues attached to the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology (ICEA) and (since 2019) the Centre for the Study of Social Cohesion (CSSC) within the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography (SAME) in Oxford. This theory, known as ‘morality as co‐operation’ or MAC, seeks to explain morality in a systematic cross‐cultural manner by means of controlled and operationalized comparison (Curry 2016; Curry, Mullins & Whitehouse 2019). It seemed appropriate to ask Oliver to propose the motion and to select his own seconder. As prospective chair of the debate, I approached colleagues who might be interested in opposing the motion from the perspective of the new anthropology of morality, and the idea of the debate began to take shape.1