Maggie's Farm

James Q. Wilson's The Moral Sense made plenty of sense to me: the notion that moral considerations are hard-wired parts of human nature. Harvard's Marc Hauser is working on the inborn "moral grammar," and he is interviewed here, in Am. Scientist. He even gets into the animal precursors of moral behavior:

In many ways, our understanding of animals is not even ripe for the picking, because almost all of the work that is relevant to morality entails studies of what animals do as opposed to how they judge what others do. Thus, we have beautiful accounts of how animals behave during cooperation and competition, including observations of how individuals respond to personal transgression, such as taking food in the presence of a more dominant animal. But what is missing are observations and experiments that systematically address what counts as a transgression or expectation for helping or harming, when the observer is not directly involved. In the same way that we can judge an act as gratuitously violent even when it doesn't concern us directly, we want to understand how animals perceive violations of social norms, including what they expect and what they consider anomalous.