Jesse J. Prinz prohibition against harm amounts to the platitude “Harm when and only when the pros outweigh the cons.” This is an empty mandate. It is just an instance of a general mandate to avoid gratuitous acts: “For any action A, do A when and only when pros outweigh the cons.” There is no universal prohibition against harm, as such, just a prohibition against l’acte gratuit. The triviality objection also counts against the tempting idea that we have a pro tanto reason to avoid harm. On this construal, the harm norm says, “Avoid harm unless there is an overriding reason to harm.” This injunction is empty unless we can come up with a princip puma store canada led list of overriding reasons. If cultures can “overrule” harm norms mor cheap puma trainers e or less arbitrarily, then the pro tanto rule is equivalent to “Avoid harm except in those cases where it’s okay not to avoid harm.” One can see that this is empty by noting that one can replace the word “harm” with absolutely any verb and get a true rule. The anthropological record suggests that the range of overriding factors is open-ended. We can harm people for punishment, for beauty, for conquest, and for fun. There is lit pumas shoes 2011 tle reason to think these are principled exceptions to a rule that weighs on us heavily under all other circumstances. I suspect that harm avoidance is not even a universal impulse, much less a universal moral imperative. This cynical response to the universality claim does not do justice to the fact that we don’t like to see others in distress. Doesn’t vicarious distress show that we have an innate predisposition to oppose harm? Perhaps, but it’s not a mor puma trainers for men al predisposition. Consider the communicative value of a conspecific’s scream. The distress of others alerts us to danger. Seeing someone suffer is like seeing a snake or a bear. It’s an indication that trouble is near. It’s totally unsurprising, then, that we find it stressful. In response, nativists might reply that vicarious distress promotes pro- social behavior. Blair (1995) argues that vicarious distress is part of a violence inhibition mechanism. When fighting, an aggressor will withdraw when a sparing partner shows a sign of submission, including an expression of distress. Here, vicarious distress directly curbs violence. Doesn’t this show that vicarious distress is part of a hardwired moral capacity? Probably not. Withdrawal of force is not a moral act. Submission triggers withdrawal because conspecific aggressi puma trionfo shoes on probably evolved for dominance, not murder. Moreover, Blair’s violence inhibition mechanism is highly speculative. His main evidence is that we experience vicarious distress when looking at pictures of people in pain; this, I just argued, may just be a danger-avoidance response. Admittedly, we inhibit serious violence when play fighting, but, by definition, play fighting is fi ghting between friendly parties. If you like the person you are roughhousing with, Is Morality Innate? you are not going to draw blood or deliver a deathblow. No special violence inhibition mechanism is needed to explain that. This raises a further point. We are innately gregarious: we socialize, form attachments, and value company. Rather than presuming that w speed cat big 2011 e are innately disposed to avoid harm, we might say we are innately disposed to take pleasure in other people’s company. Gregariousness is not, in and of itself, a moral disposition (“make friends” is not a moral injunction), but it may have implications for morality. We dislike it when our loved ones are harmed. Human friendship promotes caring, which, in turn, promotes the formation of rules that prohibit harm. Prohibitions against harm may be by-products of the general positive regard we have for each other. I am not persuaded, therefore, that we have a violence inhibition mechanism or a biologically programmed prohibition against harm Puma canada . This conclusion may sound deeply unflattering to our species, but that is not my point. As I just indicated, I think we may be biologically prone to care about each other, and I also think there are universal constraints on stable societies, which tend to promote the construction of rules against harm. More generally, it must be noted that other species (e.g., squirrels, birds, and deer) don’t go around killing each other constantly, but we are not tempted to say that they have moral rules against harm. They don’t need such rules, because they have no biological predispositions to aggression against conspecifics. Likewise, we may have no such predispositions, so the lack of a biologically based prohibition against violence does not mean that we are nasty and vicious. I would surmise that our default tendencies are to be pretty pleasant to each other. The difficulty is that humans, unlike squirrels, can recognize through rational refl ection that violence can have positive payoffs. With that, there is considerable risk for nastiness, and that risk, not biology, drives the c puma trionfo onstruction of harm norms. All this is armchair speculation, but it is enough to block any facile inference from pancultural harm norms to an innate moral rule. Harm prohibitions are not universal in form; they can be explained without innateness, through societal needs for stability; and the inna puma speedcat suede te resources that contribute to harm prohibitions may not be moral in nature. In particular, harm avoidance may not be underwritten by moral sentiments. I want to turn now to another pair of alleged moral universals: sharing and reciprocity. Human beings all over the world tend to share goods. Individuals don’t hoard everything they obtain; they give it away to others. We tend to regard this as a morally commendable behavior, and failure to share is morally wrong. We also tend to reciprocate. If someone does us a good turn, we do something nice for them later. This is also moralized, Jesse J. Prinz and it is closely related to sharing. When we share, our acts of charity are often reciprocated, and we expect reciprocation when possible. We condemn free riders, who accept offerings from others but refuse to share. Sharing and reciprocation are nearly universal, but they vary in signifi cant ways across cultural boundaries. In some cultures, men eat meals before women and children, and they are not expected to share to the same degree. In most cultures, there are people who do more than their fair share and do not get adequately compensated. Among the Tasmanians, women apparently did the overwhelming majority of food collection, while men idled (Edgerton, 1992). In our own culture, the wealthy are expected to pay significant taxes, but they are certainly not expected to puma tra Puma online canada iners for men divide their profits. There are even apparently cultures where sharing is very rare. The Sirionó of Eastern Bolivia “constantly quarreled about food, accused one another of hoarding it, refused to share it with others, ate alone at night or in the forest and hid food from family members by, on the part of women, secre puma trionfo uk shops ting it in their vaginas” (Edgerton, 1992, p. 13). To assess cross-cultural differences in conceptions of fairness, a group of anthropologists recently conducted a series of studies in fi fteen s pumas shoes 2011 mall-scale societies (Henrich, Boyd, Bowles, Camerer, Fehr, & Gintis, 2004). They asked members of these societies to play ultimatum games. The rules are simple. One player is given a certain amount of money and then told that she can keep some of it for herself and offer some to a second player (who is not related to the first player); if the second player does not accept the offer, neither player gets anything. The ultimatum game tests for ideals of fairness, because the player making the offer is motivated to make offers that the other player will accept. If the other player considers the initial offer unfair, she will reject it. When done in the West, players tend to offer 45% on average. I am