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"Me" First or "We" First?: Literature and Paleomorality
- Philosophy and Literature
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 35, Number 1, April 2011
- pp. 150-167
- 10.1353/phl.2011.0004
- Article
- Additional Information
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Bernard Malamud's God's Grace (1982) is a neo-Darwinian Beast Fable about morality in a thermonuclear age. It serves me as a starting point for a fresh look at the fundamental questions surrounding morality and altruism. There is no doubt any more that, from the standpoint of multilevel selection, morality is a form of compromise among competing spheres of genetic self-interest. The result is a tug-of-war between two adaptive vectors: the egoistic and competitive "me first" versus the prosocial and cooperative "we-first."