Oliver Scott Curry

But not all morality is co-operation! Pathogen avoidance, as you mentioned, gives rise to morality too.

Would love to see how/if the MAC-Q could be used (or in the future modified?) to address this dimension of specifically human moral psychology.

I think the Purity MFT foundation is really about these subjunctive boundaries and rendering them unquestionable, and so stabilizing the socially constructed world. Which is directly relevant to cooperation for the kind of animal that we are.

We're symbol-using animals that generate subjunctives, like the rules of games or the borders between countries. So in-group identity for humans isn't just, like, extended kin altruism. We have *symbolic* collectives, with subjunctive markers (e.g. moiety totems, national myths)

But in another way, the MAC-Q assumes from the outset that there's nothing qualitatively different between human and animal morality. And that renders a significant domain of human moral psychology invisible.

Of course, maybe you address all this more in-depth elsewhere. But by reducing moral instincts to only those that are grounded in established animal phylogeny, you've done a service to moral psychology in one way. Really important work to advance theoretical integration. Thanks.

Which is a response without any analogue in animals. Animals do not use symbolic language to create subjunctive boundaries and then police those subjunctive boundaries by getting morally incensed when they're violated.

So it seems likely that, in humans, the capacity for symbolic culture led to/was spurred on by an integration of disgust/pathogen avoidance instincts with moral instincts for deference and cooperation. That's why Muslims find it a *moral* offense if you wear shoes into mosque.

But there's a decently convincing, evidence-backed, well-argued whole body of literature on the positive relationship between disgust/pathogen avoidance instincts and conservatism/religiosity. E.g. Thornhill, @CLFincher.