We live in tumultuous times. Our contemporary cultural upheaval comes in the wake of scientific discoveries from revolutionaries such as Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, and Albert Einstein. It is fuelled by present biological, sociocultural, economic, and political influences that demand an awareness of the relational connection of all aspects of our planet. This upheaval calls us to a new understanding of morality—one that will equip us to address the moral issues of the twenty-first century.

We define the morality of human beings as our ability to determine whether our actions are right or wrong based both on understanding the impact of our actions on another person and also on following rules. We trace moral development from birth to adulthood. Then we describe the scientific groundwork for our conceptualization of morality. It resides in two areas—that of anthropology and that of neuroscience.

In the area of anthropology we present three anthropologies of humans: humans as individual, humans as person, and humans as image of the divine. The humans-as-individual paradigm uses the words and works of the individual and the context for them as indices of the person. It then considers the interpretation of the words, works, and context by means of relationality. The humans-as-person paradigm considers a person as a knot in a web of relations. And, the humans-as-image-of-the-divine approach consists in sharing not only ideas and ideals but also Being itself.

In the area of neuroscience and building on the scientific discoveries documented in the attachment literature, we describe how our human nervous system is organized through relationship. Our neurobiology depends on intersubjective encounters. We approach how this happens by focusing on two areas: motor cognition and social cognition.

After presenting our scientific groundwork, we discuss how the anthropological and neuroscientific findings affect our understanding of morality. For one thing, morality is both a sensory and a cognitive process. It begins with the earliest caregiver-infant interactions that are non-verbal visual-facial, auditory-prosodic, and tactile-gestural communications. Caregivers shape the neurobiological structural system that mediates the moral functioning of their children directly—by inserting their motor and emotional knowledge into their observing offsprings’ brains. Parents write themselves into the biology of their children. The children live their parents inside themselves. Through continuing moral development—from empathy, to shame, to guilt, to remorse and altruism—we continually build and rebuild each other’s brains and bodies over our lifetimes. These understandings change our moral compass. The question no longer is: What is right or wrong? It becomes: How does my action impact the physiology of the other. How may I damage another? If I do damage another, how can I repair the damage?

We present the implications of our conceptualization of morality on us as moral beings. And, we discuss the implications of our conceptualization on three moral issues facing modern medicine: the Roe versus Wade issue, the Terri Schiavo issue, and the euthanasia issue.

We conclude that our interrelatedness calls us to a morality of co-creating each other in such a way that we all thrive.