A fascinating journey through biology, psychology, philosophy, politics and economics to explain the evolution of human behaviour, from tribal altruism in prehistory to the ethics of respect in contemporary civilisation
How have we gone from small hunter-gatherer societies, in which any member of the outside world was considered an enemy, to coexisting in vast civilisations where we rub shoulders with a multitude of strangers every day? What has stirred in us to go from the xenophobic impulse to wage war on outsiders to living with them, treating them with benign inattention? How has the transition been from the ethics of the savannah to the ethics of civilisation?

There has been a major evolution from the morality that prevailed millions of years ago in the tiny communities of our ancestors to the current morality of extensive civilisations. We have reached what is called ecological dominance: we are at the top of the food chain and we no longer have major predators to worry about. Now, the main selection pressures exerted on our species come from within itself.

In this book, Juan Antonio Rivera addresses, from the perspective of evolutionary ethics, the great changes that human behavior has experienced throughout history, driven by two key factors: the increasing size and complexity of human groups, and the emergence of individualism as a cultural phenomenon in the West. In addition, he reconstructs with incredible mastery the complex history of a foundational idea in the ethics of modern societies: respect.