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 life-sciences 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.