Beyond Bad is the book that promises to do for morals what Dawkins did for God.
From Chris Paley, author of Unthink, comes this latest, which argues morals hinder us from achieving what we want to achieve.
Morality is the driving force in every story worth your time: Cinderella to Crime and Punishment; Macbeth to Breaking Bad. Morality's what we're doing when we shout at the telly, gossip about our boss or leave comments online. It's held empires together, kept soldiers marching under fire, fed the hungry, passed laws, built walls, welcomed immigrants, destroyed careers and governed our sex lives. But what if morality's all meaningless rubbish, a malfunctioning relic of our evolutionary past?
This is the provocative argument that Chris makes. This isn't an attack on one set of moral codes or one way of thinking about ethics: it's a call for abolishing the whole caboodle. He uses evolutionary psychology to show how and why morality emerged: to help tribes and other small groups survive and prosper.
Our morals, he says, constrain us, bias us, and push us in the wrong direction because we fail to understand their limited aims. The biggest challenges our species face, whether global warming, nuclear proliferation or the rise of the robots, are pan-human.
These challenges are beyond what our moral minds were designed to cope with. You can't build smartphones with stone-age axes, and you can't solve modern humanity's problems with tools that are designed to create primitive, competitive groups.