Hanno Sauer, "The Invention of Good and Evil: A World History of Morality " (Oxford UP, 2024)

Aug 10, 2025

Hanno Sauer, an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Utrecht University, dives deep into the evolution of morality in a rich discussion. He explores how moral values have transformed over five million years and the impact of modern challenges like globalization on our ethical frameworks. Sauer discusses the tension between individualism and collectivism, the morality of punishment, and the historical shift from egalitarianism to inequality. He advocates for understanding our shared moral grammar to navigate today’s divisive landscape, emphasizing universal values that bind humanity.

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INSIGHT

Grounding Morality In Evolutionary Science

Hanno Sauer grounds his history of morality in multiple disciplines, especially evolutionary theory and psychology.
He argues we should use empirical evidence instead of inventing stories about moral origins.

INSIGHT

Cooperation Is Fragile Not Inevitable

Hanno Sauer emphasizes that cooperation is fragile and always vulnerable to collapse through free-riding and defection.
He frames human cooperation as an achievement that required specific mechanisms, not an evolutionary inevitability.

INSIGHT

Killing Bullies Led To Self‑Domestication

Hanno Sauer describes punitive coalitions that removed particularly violent individuals over generations, producing 'self-domestication.'
This selection against aggression increased docility, impulse control, and cooperative capacity in humans.

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In this sweeping new history of humanity, told through the prism of our ever-changing moral norms and values, Hanno Sauer shows how modern society is just the latest step in the long evolution of good and evil and everything in between.

What makes us moral beings? How do we decide what is good and what is evil? And has it always been that way? Hanno Sauer's sweeping new history of humanity, covering five million years of our universal moral values, comes at a crucial moment of crisis for those values, and helps to explain how they arose -- and why we need them.

We humans were born to cooperate, but everywhere we find ourselves in conflict. The way we live together has changed fundamentally in recent decades: global mobility, demographic upheaval, migration movements, and digital networking, have all called the moral foundations of human communities into question. Modern societies are in crisis: a shared universal morality seems to be a thing of the past. Hanno Sauer explains why this appearance is deceptive: in fact, there are universal values that all people share. If we understand the origin of our morality, we can understand its future too.

With philosophical expertise and empirical data, Sauer explains how processes of biological, cultural, social, and historical evolution shaped the moral grammar that defines our present. Seven chapters recount the crucial moral upheavals of human history showing how the emergence of humankind five million years ago, the rise of first civilizations 5,000 years ago, and the dynamics of moral progress in the last fifty years are interrelated. This genealogical perspective allows us, on the one hand, to see the contradictions and potential conflicts of our moral identities; on the other, it makes clear that we share fundamental values that apply to all human beings at all times. Sauer's elegant prose, translated into English by Jo Heinrich, brings the history of humanity to vivid new life.

Hanno Sauer is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Department of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Utrecht University. He teaches ethics, metaethics and political philosophy.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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