What makes us moral beings? How do we decide what is good and what is evil? In the vein of Sapiens comes a grand history of our universal moral values at the moment of their greatest crisis.

How did we learn to distinguish good from evil? Have we always been capable of doing so? And will we still be in the world to come?

In this breathtaking book, ethics expert Hanno Sauer offers a great universal history of morality in the era of its darkest crisis. He finds that morality existed long before there was talk of God, religion, or philosophy.

Its history is, first of all, the fruit of a process of natural selection, going back to the dawn of humanity, in the forests of East Africa which, five million years ago, thinned out owing to climate change. Among the early humans that came down from the trees, there were also our ancestors, who adapted to open spaces by organizing themselves into large groups. Under the pressure of environmental factors, morality emerges as the foundation for cooperation, a quality that is as precarious as it is essential to the survival of the species.

Moving between paleontology and genetics, psychology and cognitive science, philosophy and evolutionism, Sauer traces a genealogy of morality and along the journey, marks the main moral transformations in the history of humanity. In the end, he concludes that millions of years of stratifications has led to the moral crisis of our present—and the only way to build a future together is to retrace our history.

“A tour de force through the history of our values.”
— Der Standard 

“One of the best non-fiction books of the year.”  
— El Mundo 

“People are relying increasingly on morality to justify their positions in current social debates. But what is this human ‘morality’ anyway, how did it emerge as a successful concept in human history, what is its universal core, and how does it manifest differently from one culture to another? Sauer’s comprehensive cultural history of morality from the dawn of humanity to the present provides a solid basis for the highly topical moral debates of our time—intelligently written and entertaining, it invites us to question our own convictions.”
— German Nonfiction Prize jury citation
 

“A sweeping history of morality’s growing influence over our lives.”
— The Wall Street Journal

“Hanno Sauer hits the nail on the head of our current times.”
— Galore Magazine

“Very entertaining, versatile, interestingly presented, and full of surprises is this look into our past.”
— Münchner Merkur
 

“In the style of a universal historian. . . . Elegant, confident, [. . .] eloquent, and smart, Hanno Sauer combines [. . .] evolutionary psychology, biology, anthropology, [. . .] and philosophy with storytelling.”
— Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 

“Hanno Sauer […] tells the story of human life so vividly and grippingly, his readers can often feel like they’ve been there themselves.”
— Bibliomaniacs 

“The philosopher Hanno Sauer shows in this book that humans are moral beings through and through—not because of a judgmental God, but because they need to live together with other humans.”
— Neue Zürcher Zeitung