How We Tamed Ourselves and Invented Good and Evil (with Hanno Sauer)

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4.7 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 9 March 2026

⏱️ 74 minutes

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Summary

What if humanity's capacity for cruelty was actually one of our greatest moral achievements? That's just one of the provocative ideas philosopher Hanno Sauer explores in this conversation about his book The Invention of Good and Evil with EconTalk's Russ Roberts. Sauer tackles a fundamental puzzle: in a Darwinian world of selfish genes, how did humans become so extraordinarily cooperative? Sauer traces a fascinating journey from small hunter-gatherer bands to modern civilizations, revealing surprising mechanisms along the way--including the systematic killing of the most aggressive tribe members over millennia, which made humans the "golden retrievers of the primate kingdom." The conversation ranges from whether agriculture was history's worst mistake, to a spirited debate about religion and morality between Sauer (a German atheist who doesn't know any believers) and host Russ Roberts (a person of faith living in Israel).

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.
0:07.9	I'm your host, Russ Roberts, of Sholem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
0:13.8	Go to EconTalk.org, where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links and other information related to today's conversation.
0:21.5	You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006.
0:26.7	Our email address is mail at econTalk.org.
0:30.0	We'd love to hear from you.
0:36.6	Today is January 28, 2026, and my guest is philosopher and author, Hano Sauer, his latest book.
0:44.0	And the subject of today's episode is The Invention of Good and Evil, a World History of Morality.
0:50.8	Hano, welcome to Econ Talk.
0:52.9	Thanks for the invite, Bruce.
0:54.0	Now, your book opens, this is a sprawling book. of morality. Hannah, welcome to Econ Talk. Thanks for the invite, Chris.
0:58.0	Now, your book opens, this is a sprawling book.
1:06.2	It is full of interesting ideas, and it covers an enormous span of human history and human behavior.
1:07.4	So we're going to do the best we can to get at some of the ideas in the book.
1:11.6	It, you open with a passage that reminded me very much of Adam Smith's theory of moral sentiments.
1:19.3	The first sentence of Smith's is, how selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some
1:27.1	principles in his nature which interest him
1:30.0	in the fortune of others and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it
1:36.3	except the pleasure of seeing it. And much of that book is trying to answer the questions,
1:41.8	why do we ever do anything that is not self-interested?
1:46.5	I would not say unselfish. I don't like that phrasing. But Smith starts with the idea that we're self-interested.
1:52.5	So why do we ever do anything that even looks altruistic? Your book starts with the following, or not starts, but early on.
	...

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