By way of background, the idea of the moral has guided human action individually and collectively since the earliest times. Our ancestors strongly linked the idea of morals with religion as a way of preserving and transmitting knowledge from one generation to the next. This worked well until the influence of religion declined to such an extent that it gave birth to the secular society. As a result, interest in morality not only declined but also sank into a sea of relativity.

For our definition of morals we took a different approach by asking the question: What is the cause of human progress? In other words, what has caused humans to go from living in caves to walking on the moon? The answer, we concluded, was our discovery of the efficacy of cooperative effort. As a result, cooperative society has extended from the just the clan to the global village of today. Morals, we discovered, were primarily the rules and guidelines for action which nurture, promote, protect and grow cooperative society. The result, as we show, is not only social progress, but also the greatest happiness and the greatest freedom.