Boston's highly evolved civic morality prescribed certain limits on costume.
People coming from a scientific perspective, who are interested in descriptive evolutionary ethics, speak of morality as something to be explained scientifically as in familiar talk of "how morality evolved".
If humans do have an evolved sense of morality, or indeed of beauty or romantic love, the evidence shows that in practice our standards are remarkably flexible.
Morality evolved because it is a necessary survival strategy for social animals, whose infants require years of care before they are capable of independent living.
First, a sense of morality evolved to ensure human survival.
In other words, we're not moral because we're religious, but rather, we're religious because we're moral - morality having evolved for good Darwinian reasons.
Thus only humans can be cruel, because cruelty is a concept that has meaning only in the context of morality, and morality is an evolved property possessed only by humans (and rudimentarily by our closest evolutionary neighbours).
As a play that traces its roots to medieval morality drama evolved into a more naturalistic revenge play, the motive and role of the Jewish leaders in seeking Jesus' death gradually expanded.
If you think some version of Darwinism provides the best available account of humankind's place in the world (as I do) you will accept that morality has evolved along with the human animal.
It was great to strike fear in the hearts of evil doers back in the day, but today our morality has evolved quite a bit.
So what Jackson proposes is that, instead of taking the input to this analytic procedure to be folk morality in its current state, we should take it to be what he calls "mature folk morality" where by "mature folk morality" is meant what folk morality will have evolved into when critical reflection has done all it can to sharpen it up.
