Professor Hanno Sauer: The Invention of Good and Evil: A World History of Morality

A critique of Hanno Sauer’s The Invention of Good and Evil: A World History of Morality: cherry-picking instead of scientific reconstruction, false game-theoretical foundations, a utopian basic attitude, and the contradiction to the evolutionary solution of the is-ought problem.

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PhilosophyEthicsBook Review

The Invention of Good and Evil: A World History of Morality – How Professor Hanno Sauer Arrives at Wishful Morality Through Fallacies

Professor Hanno Sauer (2024), in his book The Invention of Good and Evil: A World History of Morality, claims to reconstruct the emergence of morality from evolution, cooperation, and culture in a scientific manner. He promises an objective derivation of how sanctions and norms made us what we are today. The book does not redeem this claim at any point. Instead of an open-ended reconstruction, Sauer engages in extensive cherry-picking among findings and theories in order to support a specific left-progressive moral philosophy. Whatever fits his worldview is elaborated at length; whatever contradicts it is ignored or pushed into psychology.

Sauer apodictically claims that it has been proven that no ought can follow from an is. This claim is false. As I show in The Solution to the Is-Ought Problem based on Critical Rationalism and Evolutionary Theory (Delor 2026), no such proof exists to this day, and no such proof can be provided (Delor, 2026). On the contrary: there is an objective solution, the basic structure of which is already present in Aristotle (2019).

Ironically, Sauer himself constantly violates his own dogma. He continually derives normative judgments such as “required,” “better,” “must,” “necessary,” or “more just” from preselected and distorted empirical findings. Such inferences would be permissible on a correct theoretical basis; in Sauer’s case, they remain unjustified rhetorical posits that he tries to smuggle past the reader as scientific derivation (Delor, 2026).

Biology and Culture: A Misunderstanding of Selection

This methodological weakness runs through the entire book and already appears in Sauer’s treatment of the gene-culture relation. Sauer tries to establish culture as an autonomous evolutionary level equal in rank to genes. That is a biological fallacy. Culture is a store of knowledge carried by organisms; it is not itself a bearer of selection.

Selection always operates on the genetic basis, never on “memes” or cultural traditions as autonomous replicators (Dawkins, 1976/2016; Maynard Smith & Szathmáry, 1995). Cultural rules and culturally transmitted knowledge serve — like cells, organs, the organism as a whole, and the formation of groups — the preservation and increase of the fitness of genes, which alone are the actual bearers of selection. To speak of “cultural coevolution” on the same level as genetic evolution is just as absurd as speaking of a “coevolution of the cell” or an autonomous “evolution of the liver.”

Cells, organs, cognitive capacities, and the formation of groups all serve the same goal: increasing lineage fitness — that is, improving the probability of survival and transmission of precisely those traits promoted by the organism that carries them, or by the group to which it belongs (Delor, 2026).

Stone Age Egalitarianism

Sauer proceeds similarly with “Stone Age egalitarianism.” He selectively picks groups such as the southern African Ju/‘hoansi and stylizes them into the universal primal model of human coexistence. The fact that numerous non-agrarian societies — such as the Tlingit, Haida, or Calusa — were highly hierarchical does not fit his narrative and is therefore omitted (Ames & Maschner, 1999; Kelly, 2013; Widmer, 1988). Even the supposed equality of the Ju/‘hoansi is often the result of active social control and informal rank orders (Boehm, 1999; Kelly, 2013). Sauer turns a carefully selected individual case into a universal origin story that is historically untenable.

Game Theory and the Phantom of Cooperation

The game-theoretical foundations of the book also contradict actual scientific knowledge. Sauer interprets the prisoner’s dilemma and the tragedy of the commons as if defection were fundamentally rational and morality had to laboriously secure cooperation against this reason. But this is true only for anonymous one-shot games with a fixed number of rounds — a situation that played practically no role in human evolution (Axelrod, 1984; Maynard Smith, 1982; Nowak, 2006). Our morality emerged in small groups with repeated encounters, reputation, and an open time horizon. Under these conditions, cooperation is dominant in the long run as long as the others also cooperate; in response to defection, the rational answer is punishment or refusal to cooperate, combined with later readiness to cooperate again. Tit-for-tat and related strategies show this (Axelrod, 1984; Maynard Smith, 1982). Sauer applies the wrong model class and constructs from it a problem that does not exist in the relevant game situation.

Punishment

Sauer’s treatment of punishment points in the same direction. He first plausibly describes that sanctioning was central in the history of morality: dominant, violent individuals were contained by coalitions of weaker individuals, which enabled cooperation and human self-domestication (Boehm, 1999; Wrangham, 2019). He then declares this function historically obsolete, without providing objective standards by which this could be assessed. If sanctioning historically stabilized cooperation, its function cannot be declared finished without argument, especially since the conditions under which it has a stabilizing effect — repeated encounter, reputation, free-rider risk — persist (Axelrod, 1984; Fehr & Gächter, 2002; Maynard Smith, 1982).

The Reversal Test Against the Lindy Heuristic and Chesterton’s Fence

Sauer also commits a serious fallacy in his use of the Reversal Test by Bostrom and Ord (2006). The test demands that whoever rejects a change in a certain parameter — for example cognitive capacities, lifespan, or existing social institutions — should also be able to explain why a change in the opposite direction would not be desirable. If he rejects both directions without being able to justify why precisely the current value is optimal, his resistance is supposed to count as mere status quo bias (Samuelson & Zeckhauser, 1988).

The fallacy is already built into the test itself. Bostrom constructs it in such a way that it prepares the way for his own transhumanist programs: every objection to interventions in grown biological or social structures is forced into a burden of justification that cannot be fulfilled under real uncertainty (Bostrom & Ord, 2006; Taleb, 2012, 2018).

Sauer adopts this error uncritically and uses the test to defend movement toward equality, inclusion, and emancipatory values as moral progress: whoever rejects changes in this direction must be able to explain why a change in the opposite direction would not be better; if this fails, the resistance is supposedly mere status quo bias.

The argument reverses the burden of proof and thereby contradicts two basic principles of rational decision-making under uncertainty. The Lindy heuristic, which Taleb (2012, 2018) describes in Antifragile and Skin in the Game, states that the expected remaining lifespan of a non-perishable structure — norm, institution, behavioral rule — is proportional to its past lifespan. What has persisted for centuries or millennia under changing conditions contains implicit knowledge about antifragility that cannot be fully explicated in any single theory. The burden of proof therefore lies with the reformer, not with the conserver; mere ignorance of the function of a norm is not enough to discard it. This is reinforced by Chesterton’s (1929) fence argument: Whoever finds a fence in the middle of a field and does not understand its function must not tear it down before he has understood it. Long-established practices usually have several parallel functions that are individually difficult to identify; even someone who believes he has isolated and understood one function usually overlooks the others (Taleb, 2012, 2018).

The burden of proof lies with the reformer, not with the conserver. Sauer’s rhetorical trick of deriving a moral obligation to change from the failure of a symmetry question is not a scientific standard, but an illegitimate reversal of the burden of proof.

The Interchangeable Individual, Effective Altruism, and the Utopian Temptation

Professor Sauer’s thesis that the individual is interchangeable and that his significance is overestimated is especially problematic. He frames this idea as a scientifically required insight in the series of “humiliations of mankind” and presents it as the sober consequence of enlightened thought. This thesis is more than merely questionable, analytically and historically.

Analytically, it contradicts the structure of an objective ethics. Ought-statements are goal-relative promotion claims whose goal-anchor — lineage fitness — starts from the individual living being (Delor, 2026). Every person therefore has not only the right but the duty to stand up for his own interests and for the preservation of his lineage. This does not imply a right to prevail against others; precisely the competition of unique lineages is the selective situation in which what proves itself can prevail over what proves itself less. Which variant will prove itself cannot be determined in advance. Every human being is genuinely unique, not an interchangeable cog in a machine whose functioning some planner could survey.

Historically, the consequence of the “interchangeable individual” logic is well documented. As soon as concrete individuals may be relativized in favor of abstract aggregates, class collectives, or future ideal societies, the most important barrier against utopian mass injustice falls (Courtois et al., 1999; Popper, 1945/2013; Snyder, 2010). Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and National Socialism each sacrificed millions of people for the promise of a superior future (Courtois et al., 1999; Snyder, 2010). Karl Popper (1945/2013), in The Open Society and Its Enemies, identified the methodological root of this pattern: Utopian social engineering constructs an ideal society and argues backward as to which means are necessary to achieve it; the concrete people of the present become maneuvering material. Popper (1945/2013) contrasts this with piecemeal engineering: starting from the concrete actual state, improving identifiable ills step by step, and maintaining constant corrigibility in light of actual consequences. Precisely this contrast marks the difference between an objective-liberal ethics and the utopian-left ethics represented by Sauer.

This point becomes even clearer toward the end of the book, when Sauer discusses Peter Singer’s moral philosophy, effective altruism, and longtermism. He does not explicitly declare himself a representative of this movement, but his presentation remains consistently favorable. The couple he describes, who donate a large part of their income to allegedly especially effective causes, appears not as a problematic case of ascetic self-instrumentalization, but as a morally impressive example. Critical counterarguments are absent. Such a presentation is not a neutral reconstruction, but de facto approval through one-sided framing.

Effective altruism and longtermism intensify precisely the error already implicit in Sauer’s devaluation of the individual. The individual human being counts only as an interchangeable utility item within an aggregated total balance. In longtermism, this idea is extended to hypothetical future masses: present individuals, concrete groups, and even entire generations can be morally relativized if this is said to secure some greater future benefit (Singer, 1972, 2015; MacAskill, 2015, 2022; Ord, 2020; Greaves & MacAskill, 2021). Thus the old utopian structure returns in technocratic form. No longer the classless society, the racial future, or the realm of freedom supplies the justification, but “maximized impact,” “existential risk reduction,” and the welfare of countless hypothetical future persons.

The decisive error lies in the presumption of central planning. Effective altruism and longtermism presuppose that scientific committees, expert networks, foundations, states, or future AI-supported decision-making bodies can know better which actions will generate the greatest long-term benefit. But precisely long-term consequences in complex social, biological, and cultural systems cannot be centrally surveyed. Decision-relevant knowledge is distributed, local, tacit, and often stored only in grown practices (Hayek, 1945; Taleb, 2012, 2018). Evolution has, over billions of years, produced not perfect strategies, but decentralized strategies tested under real costs. Longtermism replaces this decentralized corroboration with abstract modeling and moral large-scale calculation.

In this respect, it repeats the central error of socialism at a technocratic level: a small planning authority believes it can determine, from superior knowledge, which sacrifices today are justified for an allegedly better tomorrow. The greater the assumed future benefit, the easier it becomes to sacrifice the concrete individual. Effective altruism and longtermism is not a harmless expansion of moral responsibility, but a dangerous form of utopian thinking. It supplies the moral grammar by which coercion, paternalism, and algorithmic planning can present themselves as rationality. Sauer writes a history of morality without analyzing this line, and even presents this technocratic movement as a possible culmination of moral progress. As a professor of moral philosophy, he cannot not know Popper; to pass over him is a choice, not an oversight.

Belittling Sexual Violence Through False Standards of Comparison

Later in the book, Hanno Sauer tries to belittle crime statistics and sexual violence by comparing them with deaths from cancer and kidney disease. The comparison misses the point. Cancer patients are not a perpetrator group, do not pursue a political-religious ideology, and do not threaten women in public space. Violent and sexual offences, by contrast, are intentional acts by responsible perpetrators with concrete victims. The consequences often extend far beyond the act itself: fear, depression, inability to form attachments, inability to work, and destroyed family prospects.

Moreover, this problem does not stand in isolation. It belongs to a broader cultural conflict when migration from countries shaped by Islam comes with milieus in which sharia, religious codes of honor, and traditional gender roles are placed above Western freedom, equality, secularism, and the rule of law (Brettfeld et al., 2026; Dreißigacker et al., 2024; Pfündel et al., 2021). This is no longer a marginal phenomenon. In western Germany, including Berlin, over 40 percent of children under six had a migration background in 2020 (Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, 2022). Such figures change the cultural and ethnic basis of the next generation.

This does not imply a blanket condemnation of every individual migrant or every individual Muslim. The point is that if a substantial part of a growing population group rejects or relativizes liberal, secular principles and the rule of law, that is enough to constitute a real threat (Brettfeld et al., 2026; Dreißigacker et al., 2024). A liberal order can exist only if it is supported and defended by the majority. Sauer’s comparison with cancer and kidney disease makes these victims, risks, and political connections invisible.

Robert Nozick’s Wilt Chamberlain Argument

Sauer places Robert Nozick’s Wilt Chamberlain argument in the context of his defense of external interventions in distributional outcomes. Nozick’s (1974) argument goes as follows: A famous basketball player plays only on the condition that every spectator pays a small amount directly to him in addition to the normal admission price. The spectators agree because the game is worth this amount to them. After one season, the player is considerably richer than everyone else — through a chain of individual, voluntary decisions, without anyone having been deceived or coerced. Nozick concludes from this that inequality resulting from voluntary transactions cannot be unjust per se; any theory that rejects such distributional outcomes as unjust would have to justify interventions in voluntary actions.

Sauer takes up the argument as material and reverses it: because massive inequality can arise from purely voluntary actions, external regulation is supposedly necessary so that such inequality does not arise in the first place. This argument is flawed on two levels.

First, Nozick’s argument itself is not sound. It presupposes the voluntariness it would actually have to justify. The spectators face an artificially created access barrier — whoever wants to see the game must pay, because the stadium does not belong to them, and alternatives with the same player do not exist. The other players would also have to agree to the star’s special position, although they have practically no choice: either they accept the conditions, or the game does not take place, which also eliminates their own pay and professional success. What Nozick presents as pure voluntariness is a choice under structurally given conditions that the argument presupposes as given but does not analyze.

Second, Sauer’s conclusion is false even if Nozick’s argument is granted. From “voluntary actions can generate inequality” it does not follow that equality is the distributional goal to be pursued. Sauer presupposes this premise without justifying it. Even if Nozick were right, his argument would merely show a difficulty for purely procedural theories of justice — it would provide no positive argument for equal distribution as a normative goal, and therefore no argument for regulating interventions in this direction. Sauer does not refute Nozick; he uses a foreign, internally untenable argument as a vehicle to make his own normative posit — equal distribution as a goal — appear already proven.

WEIRD Morality as a Hidden Norm

A further problematic point lies in Sauer’s treatment of the WEIRD thesis. Henrich describes Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic people as culturally psychological special cases: more individualistic, less bound to kinship groups, more oriented toward abstract rules, equality, and impersonal cooperation. Henrich links this development, among other things, to the Church’s marriage law, which restricted cousin marriage and thereby weakened traditional clan and kinship ties.

As a historical thesis, this may be testable. It becomes problematic as soon as this development is silently treated as moral progress. From the fact that Western societies have become more individualistic, universalistic, and egalitarian, it does not follow that this development is good. For that, a standard would be required. If Sauer simultaneously claims that one cannot simply infer norms from facts, then the decisive contradiction emerges precisely here: a cultural special development is described and at the same time evaluated as morally superior.

Moreover, the costs of this development remain underexposed. A morality that detaches people from concrete bonds can enable larger-scale cooperation across groups. But it can also weaken family, origin, tradition, and cultural self-assertion. If a culture ultimately undermines the lineages and institutions through which it is itself transmitted, it cannot simply be presented as morally superior. Here too, the objective standard is missing by which one could decide whether this development is better or worse.

The Passenger Dilemma

The passenger dilemma shows the same point on a smaller scale. A man is sitting in his friend’s car. The friend drives too fast and causes an accident. The passenger must now decide whether to testify truthfully and incriminate his friend, or whether to protect him out of loyalty.

In WEIRD societies, the first answer is usually regarded as morally correct: truth, law, and impartiality stand above personal loyalty. In other cultures, the bond to the friend is weighted more heavily. From this it follows at first only that different cultures interpret moral conflicts differently. It does not follow that the Western answer is objectively better.

In addition, such surveys often measure moral self-presentation rather than actual behavior. A Western student knows which answer counts as enlightened and law-abiding. Whether he would actually act that way in a serious case remains open. If Sauer interprets such answers as signs of moral progress, he turns culturally shaped self-reports into a normative hierarchy. For precisely this, he provides no standard.

Political Antagonisms

The claim that political and moral antagonisms are less deep than their positions and are basically only camp thinking does not hold either. Sauer relies on psychological experiments in which subjects adopt manipulated positions or defend them retrospectively (Hall et al., 2012, 2013). Such findings demonstrate manipulability, adaptation, and rationalization, but they do not refute genuine worldview conflicts. Whoever starts from different basic assumptions, goal concepts, and consequences does not merely represent another expression of the same morality. Sauer confuses psychological plasticity with theoretical commensurability.

Pathologizing Male Partnerlessness

Sauer’s treatment of incels and the broader manosphere is also problematic. He treats a real social problem as if it were primarily a political or psychological deviation of right-wing men. This shifts the object. Incels are not identical with the entire manosphere, and certainly not every man who suffers from partnerlessness, sexual frustration, or the collapse of stable relationship structures is a dangerous extremist. Sauer thereby pathologizes a natural need: sexuality, bonding, family formation, and recognition are not pathological demands, but deeply evolutionarily rooted human basic motives.

The actual rupture lies in modern mate choice itself. Dating apps, algorithmic visibility, and digital comparison markets generate winner-takes-it-all effects that earlier local marriage and relationship markets did not know in this form. A small proportion of especially attractive men receives disproportionate attention, while a large proportion of average men becomes largely invisible. Women can usually find short-term sexual contacts more easily, but they face the same structural problem when building stable long-term relationships: the especially desired men often have little incentive to commit, because platform logic supplies them with permanent alternatives. The result is not liberation, but instability: fewer marriages, fewer children, more short-term relationships, more single parenthood, and weaker family structures.

The follow-on costs affect not only individual men and not only children, but society as a whole. Children from single-parent households have worse starting conditions on average, even though individual exceptions obviously exist. Women also suffer under this development, because short-term sexual availability does not replace stable attachment. When enduring pair formation, marriage, and family formation decline, the demographic basis of society collapses. In many Western countries, the functioning of the labor market, pension system, health insurance, and elderly care can now be stabilized only through immigration; this conceals the birth deficit, but does not solve it. Japan shows the consequence more clearly because it relies far less on immigration: aging, labor shortages, and rising burdens on the remaining working population. Europe and North America face the same problem, but there it is partly shifted through migration and connected with new cultural conflicts. Sauer ignores this connection. He pathologizes the men who suffer under the collapse of stable bonding orders, while the actually pathological platform logic appears as the modern normal state.

Intersectionality as a Regression Behind Liberal Universalism

Sauer’s postmodern leaning becomes even clearer where he adopts intersectional interpretive patterns. Intersectionality presents itself as a way to overcome racism, sexism, and oppression (Crenshaw, 1989, 1991). In practice, however, it reintroduces precisely the categories that liberalism sought to overcome: origin, skin color, sex, sexual identity, and group membership again become moral-political rank markers. The liberal principle is: the individual counts first as a human being and citizen, not as an exemplar of a group (Mill, 1859). Intersectional thinking reverses this. It evaluates people by group membership and sorts them along assumed axes of oppression.

Evolutionarily and socially, this victim logic is also destructive. Weakness, disadvantage, or vulnerability does not automatically establish truth, right, or moral superiority. What matters is which behaviors and institutions promote cooperation, responsibility, family formation, self-assertion, and cultural stability in the long run (Axelrod, 1984; Maynard Smith, 1982; Eibl-Eibesfeldt, 1989). Intersectional victim politics sets the wrong incentive: it rewards self-description as a victim, weakens personal responsibility, and binds people to a status from which they are supposedly to be liberated (Campbell & Manning, 2014, 2018; Fukuyama, 2018). Whoever has learned to interpret his situation primarily as the result of external oppression has less reason to escape that situation through his own achievement, discipline, commitment, and responsibility; psychologically, this is close to the logic of learned helplessness (Seligman, 1975). Thus this ideology does not help those affected, but stabilizes their dependence on political care and moral accusation. Precisely therein lies its anti-liberal core.

Conclusion: Manipulation Instead of Reconstruction

Although this critique deals with only a small selection of the errors, the result is already sobering. A complete analysis of the book would exceed the scope of this text; the examples discussed are sufficient to make the basic pattern visible.

What remains is a book that convinces neither as a scientific reconstruction nor as ethics. Sauer does not provide a neutral history of morality, but the defense of a political position by means of selective empiricism, numerous fallacies, and rhetorical shifts. He ignores the mechanisms that evolutionarily stabilize morality — lineage fitness, reciprocity, and reputation — and replaces them with a utopian basic attitude that subordinates the individual to the collective. Among readers without a background in evolutionary biology or philosophy of science, this strategy may work. But whoever looks more closely will see: this is not an increase in knowledge, but manipulation. An honest history of morality looks different.

Recommendations for Interested Readers

Anyone interested in the actual biological, social, cultural, psychological, and game-theoretical background of human morality will find better starting points than Sauer’s politically filtered history of morality. Robert Sapolsky’s (2017) Behave offers a broad reconstruction of human behavior from neurobiology, behavioral research, evolution, and social psychology. Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt’s (1989) Human Ethology is the classic human-ethological counter-reading and deals with cross-cultural patterns such as attachment, aggression, ritual, cooperation, rank order, sexual behavior, and group conflicts. A more accessible introduction in the same direction is Eibl-Eibesfeldt’s (1970/1972) Love and Hate. Reinhard Haller’s (2019) Das Böse usefully supplements this perspective from criminal psychology and deals with humiliation, violence, sadism, perpetrator psychology, and responsibility. For aggression, war, and peace from a behavioral-science perspective, Eibl-Eibesfeldt’s (1979) The Biology of Peace and War is also relevant. For the game-theoretical foundations of cooperation, reciprocity, and stable strategies, Robert Axelrod’s (1984) The Evolution of Cooperation and John Maynard Smith’s (1982) Evolution and the Theory of Games are central: cooperation arises here not from moral rhetoric, but from repeated interaction, reciprocity, sanctionability, reputation, and evolutionarily stable strategies. Whoever is interested in cognitive biases should additionally read Daniel Kahneman’s (2011) Thinking, Fast and Slow; for the status quo bias itself, the classic paper by Samuelson and Zeckhauser (1988) is recommended. Whoever finally wants a broad cultural-historical overview can also read Harari’s (2015) Sapiens; it does not replace an evolutionary-biological or game-theoretical explanation of morality, but it is useful as an account of large-scale cultural processes.

Literature and Sources

The Misconception of Utilitarianism How not to Prove Hume's Law
Philosophie-Delor - Frieder Delor