If a person doesn’t give something to me, I won’t give anything to that person. If I’m sitting eating, and someone like that comes by, I say, “Uhn, uhn. I’m not going to give any of this to you. When you have food, the things you do with it make me unhappy. If you even once in a while gave me something nice, I would surely give some of this to you.” Nisa from Nisa: The Life and Words of a!Kung Woman, Shostak, 1981, p. 89 Instead of keeping things, [!Kung] use them as gifts to express generosity and friendly intent, and to put people under obligation to make return tokens of friendship....In reciprocating, one does not give the same object back again but something of comparable value. Eland fat is a very highly valued gift...Toma said that when he had eland fat to give, he took shrewd note of certain objects he might like to have and gave their owners especially generous gifts of fat. Marshall, 1976, pp. 366–369

Recently, intuitionist theories have been effective in capturing the academic discourse about morality. Intuitionist theories, like rationalist theories, offer important but only partial understanding of moral functioning. Both can be fallacious and succumb to truthiness: the attachment to one’s opinions because they “feel right, ” potentially leading to harmful action or inaction. Both intuition and reasoning are involved in deliberation and expertise. Both are malleable from environmental and educational influence, making questions of normativity— which intuitions and reasoning skills foster—of utmost importance. Good intuition and reasoning inform mature moral functioning, which needs to include capacities that promote sustainable human well-being. Individual capacities for habituated empathic concern and moralMoral Complexity 2 metacognition—moral locus of control, moral self-regulation, and moral self-reflection— comprise mature moral functioning, which also requires collective capacities for moral dialogue and moral institutions. These capacities underlie moral innovation and are necessary for solving the complex challenges humanity faces.

The modern world, with its vast nation states peopled with millions of strangers, has little in common with the social world in which humans evolved—a world of tiny bands peopled with a few dozen friends, relatives, and competitors. To negotiate that intimate social world, evolution equipped our minds with moral heuristics: decision rules that generate intuitions about fairness and justice, punitiveness and approval, right and wrong. Each was designed by natural selection to operate in a different type of ancestral social situation, and each is triggered by cues that, in an ancestral past, indicated that type of situation was occurring. Political debate in the present is often a struggle over how to characterize events in terms of these ancestral situation-types, because alternative framings trigger different evolved moral heuristics. Once triggered, a moral heuristic produces intuitions about what course of action would be virtuous or immoral, as well as intuitions about the likely consequences of taking that course of action. These intuitions motivate lawmakers and citizens to enact laws promoting or even mandating certain courses of action. But the mismatch between