"Judgment is morality’s essence, sociality its purpose."

http://www.the-american-interest.com/article-bd.cfm?piece=1378

From the March/April 2013 issue:Moral MatterIAIN DEWITT

"Still, something is missing. In Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite, Robert Kurzban, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, captures the missing element: 

One of the most peculiar things about humans is just how much they care about what other humans are up to. In essentially all of the rest of the natural world, unless one organism’s fate is intimately tied to another organism’s decision . . . organisms typically ignore one another. . . . Organisms should be designed . . . to pay attention only to those things that are directly relevant. We’re different. We seem to care a lot about what other humans are up to. And when other people . . . say some particular magical words, or try to sell (or rent) a body part . . . not only do we care, but we insist that they be punished. 

Judgment is morality’s essence, sociality its purpose. The integrated thesis is then that a judgmental temperament makes it easier for people to live in larger, denser groups, be they denizens of humanity’s first villages in the Neolithic Levant or present-day Manila with 47,000 inhabitants per square mile."