Derk Pereboom and Gregg Caruso argue that humans are never morally responsible for their actions and take that thesis as a starting point for a project whose ultimate goal is the reform of responsibility practices, which include expressions of praise, blame, and the institution of legal punishment. This paper shares the skeptical concern that current responsibility practices can be suboptimal and in need of change, but argues that a non-skeptical pursuit of those changes is viable and more promising. The main (...) lines of the argument are developed by assessing the prospects of implementing one of the changes favored within the skeptical project (namely, the reduction of punishment severity) in light of how human moral psychology works. An original vignette experiment (N = 180; participants from Facebook groups related to Brazilian universities) asked participants to recommend sentences for a fictitious criminal after considering alternatives to regular punishment that varied in their effectiveness to prevent reoffending. The results suggest that people can become less punitive even if they continue to believe in moral responsibility and free will. The paper further argues that reforming responsibility practices is more likely to occur without the endorsement of skepticism. (shrink)

What is recognition and why is it so important? This book develops a synoptic conception of the significance of recognition in its many forms for human persons by means of a rational reconstruction and internal critique of classical and contemporary accounts. The book begins with a clarification of several fundamental questions concerning recognition. It then reconstructs the core ideas of Fichte, Hegel, Charles Taylor, Nancy Fraser, and Axel Honneth and utilizes the insights and conceptual tools developed across these chapters for (...) developing a case for the universal importance of recognition for humans. It argues in favour of a universalist anthropological position, unusual in the literature on recognition, that aims to construe a philosophically sound basis for a discourse of common humanity, or of a shared human life-form for which moral relations of recognition are essential. This synthetic conception of the importance of recognition provides tools for articulating deep intuitions shared across cultures about what makes human life and forms of human co-existence better or worse, and thus tools for mutual understanding about the deepest shared concerns of humanity, or of what makes us all human persons despite our differences. -/- Recognition and the Human Life-Form will appeal to readers interested in philosophical anthropology, social and political philosophy, critical theory, and the history of philosophy. It also provides ideas and conceptual tools for fields such as anthropology, education, disability studies, international relations, law, politics, religious studies, sociology, and social research. (shrink)

It is not clear that scholars, when they use the term ‘conspiracy theory’, are in fact interested in investigating the phenomenon of conspiracy theories and belief in them as such. I consider two perspectives found in the fast-growing literature on conspiracy theories: The Faux-pas View and The Neutral View. I argue that there is a difference in scholarly motivation, or at a very minimum a difference in the sustaining motivation for the research paradigms. What the motivations are is much too (...) complex to detail in this paper, and I only give a suggestion to possible ones to consider. However, I maintain that investigating the motivations for - and interest in conspiracy theory research will illuminate why there is disagreements on the definition and conceptualization of the term itself. I argue that our interest will inform our research project, and determine the conceptualization of the term ‘conspiracy theory’, which in turn taints our interpretation of the contemporary exploratory research on the subject. (shrink)

Argues that truth, moral right, political right, and aesthetic value may be understood as arising out of a naturalist account of humanity, if naturalism is rightly conceived.

Philosophical anthropology aims to discover what makes us human, but it has produced accounts that exclude some members of our species. It relies often on a non-naturalistic “philosophy of consciousness” and locates humanity in the cognitive capacity to objectively represent things, to reason teleologically and use tools, to use symbols and language, or to be self-conscious and question existence. This work pursues an alternative, thoroughly naturalistic philosophical anthropology in the tradition of Arnold Gehlen. Combining Gehlen’s theory of our behaviorally-detached and (...) culturally-determined impulses with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s views on intersubjectivity, affect, sexuality, and social institutions, the present work locates the human within the unique structure of human feeling. This produces a truly inclusive account of “the human as the other” or Homo alter. The human is deeply and thoroughly dependent on affective, bodily, communicative bonds, in which others appear as sources of meaning, norms, pleasure, and approbation and disapprobation. This socio-biological account of the human makes institutionality central to our form of life but rejects any political anthropology that attempts to use human nature to prescribe a necessary form to institutions such as the home. Such a social and affective account of the human produces a novel approach to the affect of shame as the feeling of institutional rejection. Ultimately, this work uses philosophical anthropology to combat dehumanization. Our unique form of dependency on others and institutions is present, for example, in infants and the severely disabled who may not possess the forms of consciousness and cognition that traditionally are identified with being human. (shrink)

Философские, традиционные подходы к морали в основном основаны на метафизических и теологических концепциях и теориях. Среди традиционных концепций этики наиболее заметной является теория божественного повеления (DCT). Согласно DCT, Бог дает человечеству моральные основы через его творение и откровение. Мораль и божественность были неразделимы со времен самой далекой цивилизации. Эти концепции укладываются в теологические рамки и в основном принимаются большинством последователей трех авраамических традиций: иудаизма, христианства и ислама: наиболее значительной части человеческого населения. Теории Божественного повеления основываются на вере и откровении и (...) не подлежат строгой демонстрации. Противники концепции морали Божьего повеления, основанной на невозможности продемонстрировать свои метафизические и религиозные допущения, пытались (хотя и безуспешно) на протяжении многих веков преуменьшать ее значение. Они придерживались аргумента, что он не демонстрирует никаких материальных доказательств и логической согласованности и по этой причине не может быть рассмотрен в научных или философских целях. Это всего лишь убеждение, и оно должно пониматься при этом условии. Помимо этих крайних противоположностей, многие другие концепции противоречат теориям Божественного повеления, так или иначе, частично или полностью. От классической греческой философии до наших дней многие философы и социологи утверждают, что мораль — это всего лишь конструкция, и поэтому она культурно относительна и обусловлена культурой. Однако это вызывает множество дальнейших дискуссий и ставит перед собой задачу определить важность культуры, какие элементы культуры являются морально определяющими, и, наконец, пределы этой относительности. Моральный детерминизм утверждает, что все, что связано с поведением человека, включая мораль, определяется таким образом, что свобода воли перестает существовать. Совсем недавно современные мыслители утверждали, что существует строгая наука о морали. Однако, несмотря на объяснение множества фактов и доказательств, один только научный метод не может пролить свет на все содержание и значение этики в целом. Понимание морали требует более широкого восприятия и согласия среди философов, чего они так и не достигли. Эти вопросы имеют множество различных конфигураций в зависимости от каждого философского направления и начинают сложный анализ и бесконечные дебаты, если многие из них противоречат друг другу. Вселенная и атмосфера, которые включает в себя это исследование, являются хозяевами всех этих концептуальных конфликтов, наблюдаемых с объективной и эволюционной точки зрения. Однако, несмотря на эти обстоятельства и их внутреннюю важность, эти вопросы далеки от методологического подхода аналитического обсуждения объективной морали, которое, по сути, является целью и областью действия этой работы. Мы должны кратко рассмотреть эти выдающиеся традиционные теории, потому что в этой работе проводится сравнительное исследование, и их предположения, по крайней мере, глубоко отличаются от всех традиционных теорий. Следовательно, становится необходимым предлагать читателю прямые и конкретные элементы сравнения для обоснованной критики без прерывания исследований. Но даже если мы пересмотрим традиционные теории для этой сравнительной и критической цели изложения, они все равно останутся в стороне от наших основных проблем как „чужеродная материя". Цель этой работы состоит в том, чтобы продемонстрировать существование и значение доисторических моральных архетипов — архетипов, вытекающих из фундаментальных социальных потребностей и борьбы за выживание — для определения сущностной основы этики, их агрегации в коллективном бессознательном и, следовательно, для определения того, что такое этика. Эти архетипы определяют эволюционную социальную модель человека. Является ли это мета этической позицией? Да, это так. Кроме того, как и в любой мета этической аргументации, мы должны тщательно искать наилучшие и наиболее правильные пути, предлагаемые аналитической философией. Эта работа была призвана обоснованно продемонстрировать, что мораль не является культурным продуктом цивилизованных людей или современных обществ. Несмотря на многочисленные культурные относительные объединения и вычитания, основные основы являются архетипическими и никогда не менялись структурно. Это рассуждение приводит к тому, что мораль является первым атрибутом „Homo sapiens"; это не собственность или случайность: она объединяет человеческое существо и является частью онтологической человеческой идентичности. Человеческие явления — это непрерывный процесс, который играет свою роль между случайной решимостью и свободной волей, и мы должны спросить, как зародилась мораль и как она пришла к нам в настоящее время. (shrink)

Die philosophischen, traditionellen Ansätze zur Moral beruhen hauptsächlich auf metaphysischen und theologischen Konzepten und Theorien. Unter den traditionellen Ethikkonzepten ist die göttliche Befehlstheorie die prominenteste (DCT). Gemäß der DCT gibt Gott der Menschheit moralische Grundlagen durch ihre Schöpfung und durch Offenbarung. Moral und Göttlichkeit sind seit der fernsten Zivilisation untrennbar. Diese Konzepte tauchen in einen theologischen Rahmen ein und werden hauptsächlich von den meisten Anhängern der drei abrahamitischen Traditionen angenommen: Judentum, Christentum und Islam: dem bedeutendsten Teil der menschlichen Bevölkerung. Die (...) göttlichen Befehlstheorien halten den Glauben und die Offenbarung für ihre Grundlage und unterliegen nicht strikt der Demonstration. Die Gegner der Gottesbefehlskonzeption der Moral, gegründet auf der Unmöglichkeit der Demonstration ihrer metaphysischen und religiösen Annahmen, haben seit vielen Jahrhunderten (obwohl erfolglos) versucht, ihre Bedeutung zu devalvieren. Sie hielten das Argument, dass es keine materiellen Beweise und logische Kohärenz zeigt und aus diesem Grund nicht für wissenschaftliche oder philosophische Zwecke berücksichtigt werden kann. Es ist nur ein Glauben und sollte daher verstanden werden. Abgesehen von diesen extremen Gegensätzen widersprechen viele andere Konzepte den Theorien des göttlichen Befehls, in der einen oder anderen Weise, teilweise oder vollständig. Von der klassischen griechischen Philosophie bis heute behaupten viele Philosophen und Sozialwissenschaftler, dass Moral nur ein Konstrukt ist und somit kulturell relativ und kulturell bestimmt ist. Dies führt jedoch zu vielen weiteren Diskussionen und stellt die Herausforderung dar, die Bedeutung der Kultur, welche Elemente der Kultur moralisch bestimmend sind, und schließlich die Grenzen dieser Relativität zu bestimmen. Moralischer Determinismus behaupten, dass alles, was mit menschlichem Verhalten zusammenhängt, einschließlich der Moral, bestimmt wird, sobald der freie Wille nicht existiert. In jüngerer Zeit haben moderne Denker argumentiert, dass es eine strenge Wissenschaft der Moral gibt. Doch trotz der Erklärung mehrerer Tatsachen und Beweise kann die wissenschaftliche Methode allein nicht den gesamten Inhalt und die volle Bedeutung der Ethik erleuchten. Das Verständnis der Moral erfordert eine breitere Wahrnehmung und eine Einigung unter den Philosophen, die sie nie erreicht haben. Diese Fragen haben viele verschiedene Konfigurationen, abhängig von jedem philosophischen Strang und beginnen komplexe Analyse und endlose Debatten, solange viele von ihnen gegenseitig widersprüchlich sind. Das Universum und die Atmosphäre, die diese Forschung beinhaltet, sind die Herrschaften all dieser konzeptionellen Konflikte, die aus objektiver und evolutionärer Sicht beobachtet werden. Ungeachtet dieser Umstände und ihrer intrinsischen Bedeutung sind diese Fragen jedoch weit entfernt vom methodischen Ansatz einer analytischen Diskussion über objektive Moral, die in der Tat das Ziel und den Umfang dieser Arbeit ist. Wir sollten diese prominenten traditionellen Theorien kurz überprüfen, weil diese Arbeit eine vergleichende Studie beherbergt, und ihre Annahmen unterscheiden sich zumindest tief von allen herkömmlichen Theorien. Daher wird es notwendig, dem Leser direkte und spezifische Elemente des Vergleichs für gültige Kritik anzubieten, ohne unterbrechende Forschung. Doch auch wenn wir die traditionellen Theorien für diesen vergleichenden und kritischen Expositionszweck überdenken, werden sie als „aliena materia" an der Seite unserer primären Anliegen gehalten werden. Unabhängig von der Gültigkeit eines oder aller der Elemente dieser Diskussion und ihrer Bedeutung als philosophisches Universum unserer Forschung, ist der Zweck dieses Werkes, dass die Existenz und die Bedeutung der prähistorischen moralischen Archetypen, die direkt aus den grundlegenden sozialen Bedürfnissen und Anstrengungen für das Überleben demonstrierten Archetypen sind, die Definition der wesentlichen Grundlage der Ethik, ihre Aggregation in das kollektive Unbewusste und die entsprechende logische Organisation und Übertragung auf die evolutionären Stadien des menschlichen Genoms und verschiedene Raum-Zeit-Beziehungen, unabhängig von jeder zeitgenössischen Erfahrung der Individuen. Das durch diese Archetypen definierte System bildet ein evolutionäres menschliches soziales Modell. (shrink)

The dominant theory of the evolution of moral cognition across a variety of fields is that moral cognition is a biological adaptation to foster social cooperation. This chapter argues, to the contrary, that moral cognition is likely an evolutionary exaptation: a form of cognition where neurobiological capacities selected for in our evolutionary history for a variety of different reasons—many unrelated to social cooperation—were put to a new, prosocial use after the fact through individual rationality, learning, and the development and transmission (...) of social norms. This chapter begins with a brief overview of the emerging behavioral neuroscience of moral cognition. It then outlines a novel theory of moral cognition that I have previously argued explains these findings better than alternatives. Finally, it shows how the evidence for this theory of moral cognition and human evolutionary history together suggest that moral cognition is likely not a biological adaptation. Instead, like reading sheet music or riding a bicycle, moral cognition is something that individuals learn to do—in this case, in response to sociocultural norms created in our ancestral history and passed down through the ages to enable cooperative living. (shrink)

Abstract In The Descent of Man (1879), Charles Darwin proposed a speculative evolutionary explanation of extended benevolence—a human sympathetic capacity that extends to all nations, races, and even to all sentient beings. This essay draws on twenty-first century social science to show that Darwin’s explanation is correct in its broad outlines. Extended benevolence is manifested in institutions such as legal human rights and democracy, in behaviors such as social movements for human rights and the protection of nonhuman animals, and in (...) normative attitudes such as emancipative values and a commitment to promote the rights or welfare of animals. These phenomena can be substantially explained by cultural evolutionary forces that trace back to three components of what Darwin called the human “moral sense”: (1) sympathy, (2) our disposition to follow community rules or norms, and (3) our capacity to make normative judgments. Extended benevolence likely emerged with “workarounds,” including political ideologies, that established an inclusive sympathetic concern for sentient life. It likely became as widespread as it is now due to recently arisen socio-economic conditions that have created more opportunities for people to have contact with and take the perspective of a broader cross-section of humanity, as well as other species. (shrink)

Observations of animals engaging in apparently moral behavior have led academics and the public alike to ask whether morality is shared between humans and other animals. Some philosophers explicitly argue that morality is unique to humans, because moral agency requires capacities that are only demonstrated in our species. Other philosophers argue that some animals can participate in morality because they possess these capacities in a rudimentary form. Scientists have also joined the discussion, and their views are just as varied as (...) the philosophers’. Some research programs examine whether animals countenance specific human norms, such as fairness. Other research programs investigate the cognitive and affective capacities thought to be necessary for morality. There are two sets of concerns that can be raised by these debates. They sometimes suffer from there being no agreed upon theory of morality and no clear account of whether there is a demarcation between moral and social behavior; that is, they lack a proper philosophical foundation. They also sometimes suffer from there being disagreement about the psychological capacities evident in animals. Of these two sets of concerns—the nature of the moral and the scope of psychological capacities—we aim to take on only the second. In this chapter we defend the claim that animals have three sets of capacities that, on some views, are taken as necessary and foundational for moral judgment and action. These are capacities of care, capacities of autonomy, and normative capacities. Care, we argue, is widely found among social animals. Autonomy and normativity are more recent topics of empirical investigation, so while there is less evidence of these capacities at this point in our developing scientific knowledge, the current data is strongly suggestive. (shrink)

Social norms – rules governing which behaviours are deemed appropriate or inappropriate within a given community – are typically taken to be uniquely human. Recently, this position has been challenged by a number of philosophers, cognitive scientists, and ethologists, who have suggested that social norms may also be found in certain non-human animal communities. Such claims have elicited considerable scepticism from norm cognition researchers, who doubt that any non-human animals possess the psychological capacities necessary for normative cognition. However, there is (...) little agreement among these researchers about what these psychological prerequisites are. This makes empirical study of animal social norms difficult, since it is not clear what we are looking for and thus what should count as behavioural evidence for the presence (or absence) of social norms in animals. To break this impasse, we offer an approach that moves beyond contested psychological criteria for social norms. This approach is inspired by the animal culture research program, which has made a similar shift away from heavily psychological definitions of ‘culture’ and to become organized around a cluster of more empirically tractable concepts of culture. Here, we propose an analogous set of constructs built around the core notion of a normative regularity, which we define as a socially maintained pattern of behavioural conformity within a community. We suggest methods for studying potential normative regularities in wild and captive primates. We also discuss the broader scientific and philosophical implications of this research program with respect to questions of human uniqueness, animal welfare and conservation. (shrink)

Evolutionary debunking arguments purport to show that, if moral realism is true, all of our moral beliefs are unjustified. In this paper, I respond to two of the most enduring objections that have been raised against these arguments. The first objection claims that evolutionary debunking arguments are self-undermining, because they cannot be formulated without invoking epistemic principles, and epistemic principles are just as vulnerable to debunking as our moral beliefs. I argue that this objection suffers from several defects, the most (...) serious of which is that it has the unpalatable consequence that we should never revise our moral beliefs in response to evidence that our capacity for normative cognition is globally impaired. The second objection, which comes to us from Katia Vavova, claims that evolutionary debunking arguments are doomed to fail, because they attempt to show that our moral beliefs are unreliable without making any assumptions about the nature of morality, and this is impossible. I argue, to the contrary, that the etiological higher-order evidence cited by debunking arguments can give us good reason to think that our moral beliefs are unreliable, even if we make no assumptions about what morality is like. (shrink)

This chapter offers an overview of four key debates about the roles of emotion in morality. First, many believe that emotions are an important psychological mechanism for explaining altruistic behavior and moral conscience in humans. Second, there is considerable debate about the causal role of affective reactions in moral judgment. Third, some philosophers have argued that emotions have a constitutive role in moral thought and even moral facts. Finally, philosophers disagree about whether affective influence undermines the justification of moral beliefs (...) or, in suitable circumstances, guides us toward moral truth. (shrink)

I use the distinction between sentience and sapience to reconstruct the debate between Hubert Dreyfus and John McDowell. I argue that Dreyfus's critique of McDowell's conceptualism relies on conflating detached contemplation with conceptual activity as such. I then argue that McDowell's conceptualism can be enriched and brought into deeper conversation with pragmatism and phenomenology if we take reasons to be a special kind of affordance. Contra Dreyfus, reasons need not disrupt affordances but do so only in specific contexts. I conclude (...) with a suggestion about how to understand the emergence of rational animality within the hominid lineage. (shrink)

In this paper I propose three steps to overcome the force-content dichotomy and dispel the Frege point. First, we should ascribe content to force indicators. Through basic assertoric and directive force indicators such as intonation, word order and mood, a subject presents its position of theoretical or practical knowledge of a state of affairs as a fact, as something that is the case, or as a goal, as something to do. Force indicators do not operate on truth- or satisfaction evaluable (...) entities as on the traditional view, but complete and unify them. Second, higher-level acts such as interrogative, logical and fictional acts create higher-level unities that may suspend commitment to the assertions and directions they operate on. But they do not cancel their force, but transfer the meaning of force indicators into the new unities they create. For example, in the context of asking a theoretical or practical question, the assertoric or directive force indicator now presents the kind of knowledge the subject is seeking. Third, the Frege point conflates different varieties of force. We neither need Frege’s assertion sign, nor Hare’s neustic, nor Hanks’s cancellation sign, but only ordinary force indicators and interrogative, logical and fictional markers. Propositions are not forceless contents to which a subject commits by forceful acts, but forceful acts put forward by higher-level acts which may suspend commitment to them. (shrink)

Traditionally, discussions of moral participation – and in particular moral agency – have focused on fully formed human actors. There has been some interest in the development of morality in humans, as well as interest in cultural differences when it comes to moral practices, commitments, and actions. However, until relatively recently, there has been little focus on the possibility that nonhuman animals have any role to play in morality, save being the objects of moral concern. Moreover, when nonhuman cases are (...) considered as evidence of moral agency or subjecthood, there has been an anthropocentric tendency to focus on those behaviors that inform our attributions of moral agency to humans. For example, some argue that the ability to evaluate the principles upon which a moral norm is grounded is required for full moral agency. Certainly, if a moral agent must understand what makes an action right or wrong, then most nonhuman animals would not qualify (and perhaps some humans too). However, if we are to understand the evolution of moral psychology and moral practice, we need to turn our attention to the foundations of full moral agency. We must first pay attention to the more broadly normative practices of other animals. Here, we begin that project by considering evidence that great apes and cetaceans participate in normative practices. (shrink)

Many believe that moral education can cause moral progress. At first glance, this makes sense. A major goal of moral education is the improvement of the moral beliefs, values and behaviors of young people. Most would also consider all of these improvements to be important instances of moral progress. Moreover, moral education is a form of social learning, and there are good reasons to think that social learning processes shape episodes of progressive moral change. Despite this, we argue that instead (...) of being a cause of moral change, the main effect of moral education is often to provide stability or continuity. In addition, we will argue that even when the conditions are right for moral education to contribute to moral change, it is far from clear that the resulting changes will always, or even most of the time, end up being progressive. (shrink)

Could emotions be a uniquely human phenomenon? One prominent theory in emotion science, Lisa Feldman Barrett’s “Theory of Constructed Emotion” (TCE), suggests they might be. The source of the sceptical challenge is that TCE links emotions to abstract concepts tracking socio-normative expectations, and other animals are unlikely to have such concepts. Barrett’s own response to the sceptical challenge is to relativize emotion to the perspective of an interpreter, but this is unpromising. A more promising response may be to amend the (...) theory, dropping the commitment to the abstract nature of emotion concepts and allowing that, like olfactory concepts, they have disjunctive sensory groundings. Even if other animals were emotionless, this would not imply they lack morally significant interests. Unconceptualized valenced experiences are a sufficient basis for morally significant interests, and such experiences may occur even in the absence of discrete, constructed emotions. (shrink)

A Better Ape covers the evolution of morality from the birth of our ape family through the evolution of human species and all the way up to the development of modern societies. In this summary, we highlight several main elements of this account: the co-evolution of morality with intelligence and complex sociality; the role of social institutions and religious morality in the cultural evolution of behaviorally modern humans in prehistory; the increasing complexity of the moral mind through biological evolution in (...) apes, gene-culture co-evolution in various human species, cultural evolution in Homo sapiens, and rational-cultural evolution in recent centuries; and, finally, a cultural evolutionary model of progressive and regressive moral change on which a key factor driving moral progress is social and democratic integration. (shrink)

In metaethics, evolutionary debunking arguments combine empirical and epistemological premises to purportedly show that our moral judgments are unjustified. One objection to these arguments has been to distinguish between those judgments that evolutionary influence might undermine versus those that it does not. This response is powerful but not well understood. In this paper I flesh out the response by drawing upon a familiar distinction in the natural sciences, where it is common to distinguish folk judgments from theoretical judgments. I argue (...) that this in turn illuminates the proper scope of the evolutionary debunking argument, but not in an obvious way: it is a very specific type of undermining argument that targets those theories where theoretical judgments are inferred merely from folk judgments. One upshot of this conclusion is that it reveals a verboten methodology in metaethics. The evolutionary debunking argument is therefore much less powerful than its proponents have supposed, but it nevertheless rules out what is perhaps a common way of attempting to justify moral judgments. (shrink)

Problems with animal morality: The paper aims at discussing the category of animal morality in the light of contemporary scientific findings and theories. First, the issue of moral development is reconsidered in the context of evolutionary anthropology and primatology, then the main positions in this debate are presented. The author proposes a typology which is based on a distinction between various senses of morality, namely a descriptive, neutral, and normative sense. These three aspects of morality are explained in detail and (...) used when analyzing the problems specific to animal morality. The idea of morality applied by the leading participants of ongoing debates is also discussed. The article concludes with an observation that the main problem of these debates is not the very definition of morality and, at the same time, answering the question as to whether animals are moral beings or not, but rather what is essentially problematic are the consequences to be implied from a specific understanding of morality. (shrink)

This essay draws on Adam Smith’s moral sentimentalism to critique primatologist Frans de Waal’s gradualist theory of human morality. De Waal has spent his career arguing for continuity between primate behavior and human morality, proposing that empathy is a primary moral building block evident in primate behavior. Smith’s moral sentimentalism—with its emphasis on the role of sympathy in moral virtue—provides the philosophical framework for de Waal’s understanding of morality. Smith’s notion of sympathy and the imagination involved in sympathy is qualitatively (...) different from animal sympathy. I argue that Smithian sympathy includes the ability to represent propositional attitudes and take into account multiple perspectives which are then synthesized into a singular impartial perspective. Furthermore, Smithian moral judgment requires the capacity for emotion regulation and moral self-cultivation, or the ability to shape and control one’s reactive attitudes. Taken together, these capacities far outstrip the capacities of animals, disrupting de Waal’s gradualism. (shrink)

Empirical studies of the social lives of non-human primates, cetaceans, and other social animals have prompted scientists and philosophers to debate the question of whether morality and moral cognition exists in non-human animals. Some researchers have argued that morality does exist in several animal species, others that these species may possess various evolutionary building blocks or precursors to morality, but not quite the genuine article, while some have argued that nothing remotely resembling morality can be found in any non-human species. (...) However, these different positions on animal morality generally appear to be motivated more by different conceptions of how the term “morality” is to be defined than by empirical disagreements about animal social behaviour and psychology. After delving deeper into the goals and methodologies of various of the protagonists, I argue that, despite appearances, there are actually two importantly distinct debates over animal morality going on, corresponding to two quite different ways of thinking about what it is to define “morality”, “moral cognition”, and associated notions. Several apparent skirmishes in the literature are thus cases of researchers simply talking past each other. I then focus on what I take to be the core debate over animal morality, which is concerned with understanding the nature and phylogenetic distribution of morality conceived as a psychological natural kind. I argue that this debate is in fact largely terminological and non-substantive. Finally, I reflect on how this core debate might best be re-framed. (shrink)

Normativity is widely regarded as the ability to make evaluative judgments based on a shared system of social norms. When normativity is viewed through the cognitively demanding lens of human morality, however, the prospect of finding social norms innonhuman animals rapidly dwindles and common causal structures are overlooked. In this paper, I develop a biofunctionalist account of social normativity and examine its implications for how we ought to conceptualize, explain, and study social norms in the wild. I propose that we (...) think of social normative systems as behavior-regulatory power structures that resolve conflicts between nested levels of selection in favor of the higher level. I argue that the best case for social norms outside of humans is not in the animals one might expect, such as primates or other large-brained vertebrates, but rather in social insects. Finally, I engage with a number of potential objections to this unorthodox proposal. (shrink)

When two agents engage in a joint action, such as rowing together, they exercise joint know-how. But what is the relationship between the joint know-how of the two agents and the know-how each agent possesses individually? I construct an “active mutual enablement” account of this relationship, according to which joint know-how arises when each agent knows how to predict, monitor, and make failure-averting adjustments in response to the behaviour of the other agent, while actively enabling the other to make such (...) adjustments. I defend the AME account from three objections, and I then use this account as the platform for an examination of the reducibility of joint know-how to joint propositional knowledge. A summative account of joint propositional knowledge is incompatible with the reduction of joint know-how to joint propositional knowledge, whereas a distributive account is not. I close by highlighting some open questions the AME account brings into view concerning the evolutionary origin and scaling up of joint know-how. (shrink)

According to the dual inheritance theory, cultural learning in our species is a biased and highly efficient process of transmitting cultural traits. Here we define a model of cultural learning where social learning is integrated as a complementary element that facilitates the discovery of a specific behavior by an apprentice, and not as a mechanism that works in opposition to individual learning. In that context, we propose that the emergence of the ability to approve or disapprove of offspring behavior, orienting (...) their learning, transformed primate social learning into a cultural transmission system, like that which characterizes our species. Assessor teaching facilitates the replication and/or reconstruction of behaviors that are difficult to imitate and helps to determine which behaviors should be imitated. We also explore the form in which assessor teaching has conditioned the evolution of our abilities to develop cultures in the hominin line, converting us into individuals equipped with what we call a suadens psychology. Our main point is to defend the hypothesis that suadens psychology determines the stability and dynamics that affect the trajectories of many cultural characters. We compare our proposal with other theories about cultural evolution, specifically with dual inheritance theory and cultural attraction theory. (shrink)

Parallels in anatomy between humans and domesticated mammals suggest that for the last 300,000 years, Homo sapiens has experienced more intense selection against the propensity for reactive aggression than any other species of Homo. Selection against reactive aggression, a process that can also be called self-domestication, would help explain various physiological, behavioral and cognitive features of humans, including the unique system of egalitarian male hierarchy in mobile hunter-gatherers. Here I review nine leading proposals that could potentially explain why self-domestication occurred (...) in H. sapiens, whether by selecting in favor of cooperation and tolerance or by selecting against aggressiveness. To account for the domestication syndrome, proposals must explain what led to a decline in fitness of highly aggressive males, and why the explanatory factor applies only to H. sapiens rather than to other species of Homo. The proposed explanations invoke genetic group selection; group-structured culture selection (also known as cultural group selection); social selection by female mate choice; social selection by male partner choice; increased self-control; cooperative breeding; high population density; use of lethal weapons; and language-based conspiracy. Most proposals face difficulties in accounting for the origins and/or maintenance of self-domestication. I conclude that the evolution of language-based conspiracy, which is a form of collective intentionality, was the key factor initiating and maintaining self-domestication in H. sapiens, because it is the most convincing mechanism for explaining the selective pressure against individually powerful fighters. Sophisticated language enabled males of low fighting prowess to coordinate in executing physically aggressive and domineering alpha males. This system is known today as a leveling mechanism in small-scale societies. Group-structured culture selection possibly accelerated the process. (shrink)

Why did such highly abstract ideas as truth, knowledge, or justice become so important to us? What was the point of coming to think in these terms? This book presents a philosophical method designed to answer such questions: the method of pragmatic genealogy. Pragmatic genealogies are partly fictional, partly historical narratives exploring what might have driven us to develop certain ideas in order to discover what these do for us. The book uncovers an under-appreciated tradition of pragmatic genealogy which cuts (...) across the analytic-continental divide, running from the state-of-nature stories of David Hume and the early genealogies of Friedrich Nietzsche to recent work in analytic philosophy by Edward Craig, Bernard Williams, and Miranda Fricker. However, these genealogies combine fictionalizing and historicizing in ways that even philosophers sympathetic to the use of state-of-nature fictions or real history have found puzzling. To make sense of why both fictionalizing and historicizing are called for, the book offers a systematic account of pragmatic genealogies as dynamic models serving to reverse-engineer the points of ideas in relation not only to near-universal human needs, but also to socio-historically situated needs. This allows the method to offer us explanation without reduction and to help us understand what led our ideas to shed the traces of their practical origins. Far from being normatively inert, moreover, pragmatic genealogy can affect the space of reasons, guiding attempts to improve our conceptual repertoire by helping us determine whether and when our ideas are worth having. (shrink)

In December 2013, the Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP) filed a petition for a common law writ of habeas corpus in the New York State Supreme Court on behalf of Tommy, a chimpanzee living alone in a cage in a shed in rural New York (Barlow, 2017). Under animal welfare laws, Tommy’s owners, the Laverys, were doing nothing illegal by keeping him in those conditions. Nonetheless, the NhRP argued that given the cognitive, social, and emotional capacities of chimpanzees, Tommy’s confinement constituted (...) a profound wrong that demanded remedy by the courts. Soon thereafter, the NhRP filed habeas corpus petitions on behalf of Kiko, another chimpanzee housed alone in Niagara Falls, and Hercules and Leo, two chimpanzees held in research facilities at Stony Brook University. Thus began the legal struggle to move these chimpanzees from captivity to a sanctuary, an effort that has led the NhRP to argue in multiple courts before multiple judges. The central point of contention has been whether Tommy, Kiko, Hercules, and Leo have legal rights. To date, no judge has been willing to issue a writ of habeas corpus on their behalf. Such a ruling would mean that these chimpanzees have rights that confinement might violate. Instead, the judges have argued that chimpanzees cannot be bearers of legal rights because they are not, and cannot be persons. In this book we argue that chimpanzees are persons because they are autonomous. (shrink)

Poetry is a process. While people typically refer to poems as textual objects, our experience of poetry is inherently embodied and enacted, meaning that we experience poems as events that we contextualize as gestalt representations. We experience metaphors, too, as processes, which arise from experiential gestalts, that extend gestalt structures and lay the conceptual foundation for our experience of the world. This article argues that, like metaphors, poetic gestalts can be mapped onto other experiences to help people navigate their worlds. (...) While this kind of poetic thought has largely been considered by scholars to have existed only since the emergence of the modern human mind sometime in the last 60,000 years, the author suggests that poetic thought likely arose prior to modern cognition, and may have in fact given rise to it. A crucial aspect of the embodied and enactive approach to poetry outlined in the article is that people’s experience of poetry is fundamentally contextual and emotional. Furthermore, because emotions are a primary source of meaning, our emotional responses to poetry make it a useful tool for extending our own conceptual apparatuses, enhancing emotional intelligence, and for generating shared values. (shrink)

The puzzle of how altruism can evolve has been at the center of recent debates over Hamilton’s Rule, inclusive fitness, and kin-selection. In this paper, I use recent debates over altruism and Hamilton’s legacy as an example to illustrate a more general problem in evolutionary theory that has philosophical significance; I attempt to explain this significance and to draw a variety of conclusions about it. The problem is that specific behaviours and general concepts of organism agency and intentionality are defined (...) in terms of concepts of evolutionary “costs” and “benefits,” and these terms have determined the role that agency should play in evolutionary explanation. However, costs, benefits, and agency are not only or even best conceived through evolutionary effects in a biological context. The paper proceeds as follows: first, I explain how the issue of agency relates to the evolutionary puzzle of altruism. Next, I discuss how questions about agency have figured in recent debates over Hamilton’s legacy. In the final section, I argue that Denis Walsh’s “situated Darwinism,” which attempts to return the organism to central status in biological explanation, offers a more productive route for thinking about different forms of costs, benefits, and agency. Finally, I argue that the upshot of all this is that there may be many different, and equally valid, ways to express what organisms are doing and how they are behaving based on different currencies of cost and benefit—even if these may stand in some tension. I illustrate this through returning to the case of altruism and using examples to show that even in non-humans there can be many forms of altruism, even if they are not all biological altruism as defined in the conventional evolutionary terms. (shrink)

The cognitive and evolutionary sciences of religion offer a standard model of religious representations, but no equivalent paradigm for investigating religiously interpreted altered states of consciousness (religious ASCs). Here, I describe a neo‐Durkheimian framework for studying religious ASCs that centralizes social predictive cognition. Within a processual model of ritual, ritual behaviors toggle between reinforcing normative social structures and downplaying them. Specifically, antistructural ritual shifts cognitive focus away from conventional affordances, collective intentionality, and social prediction, and toward physical affordances and behavioral (...) motivations that make few references to others’ intentional states. Using synchrony and dance as paradigmatic examples of antistructural ritual that stimulate religious ASCs, I assemble literature from anthropology, cognitive neuroscience, and philosophy of language to offer fruitful empirical predictions and opportunities for testing based on this framework. Among the empirical predictions is that antistructural ritual may provide for cultural change in religions when religions are construed as complex adaptive systems. (shrink)

Biological market theory has in recent years become an important part of the social evolutionist’s toolkit. This article discusses the explanatory potential and pitfalls of biological market theory in the context of big picture accounts of the evolution of human cooperation and morality. I begin by assessing an influential account that presents biological market dynamics as a key driver of the evolution of fairness norms in humans. I argue that this account is problematic for theoretical, empirical, and conceptual reasons. After (...) mapping the evidential and explanatory limits of biological market theory, I suggest that it can nevertheless fill a lacuna in an alternative account of hominin evolution. Trade on a biological marketplace can help explain why norm-based cooperation did not break down when our late-Pleistocene ancestors entered new, challenging social and economic environments. (shrink)

The structural-systematic philosophy requires a moral theory. This essay seeks to determine whether either of two recent works, Joshua Greene’s Moral Tribes and Michael Tomasello’s A Natural History of Human Morality, should influence that theory. It first argues that Greene’s fails to make its case for utilitarianism over deontology. It then argues that Tomasello’s thesis that early humans developed moralities of sympathy and fairness, particularly when taken in conjunction with aspects of Alan Gewirth’s moral theory, fits well with the moral (...) theory envisaged by extant works on the structural-systematic philosophy. The envisaged theory maintains the objectivity of human rights. (shrink)

Two major philosophical movements have sought to fundamentally rethink the relationship between humans and their environment(s): environmental ethics and enactivism. Surprisingly, they virtually never refer to or seek inspiration from each other. The goal of this analysis is to bridge the gap. Our main purpose, then, is to address, from the enactivist angle, the conceptual backbone of environmental ethics, namely the concept of intrinsic value. We argue that intrinsic value does indeed exist, yet its "intrinsicality" does not boil down to (...) being independent of the interests and needs of humans. Rather, it is brought forth by what we callshared enactionof an axiological domain. The latter is built upon such core posits of enactivism as autonomy, enaction, participatory sense-making as well as the most recent concept of loving as knowing proposed by Hanne De Jaegher. (shrink)

We welcome Tomasello’s new book on the natural history of human morality as an important confirmation of the evolutionary approach, which sees adaptive behaviors and their psychological underpinnings as linked to a species’ socioecology (the package of subsistence, social, mating, and rearing systems). This perspective automatically leads to the conclusion that the basic set of moral preferences is a straightforward human adaptation to the derived cooperative foraging niche of nomadic foragers, which involves a high degree of interdependence. We provide more (...) background information in support of this evolutionary approach, call for work on defining the contents of the innate core of moral preferences it implies, and urge philosophers to pursue its implications more seriously. Tomasello also offers a historical reconstruction, but his scenario is not compatible with recent comparative data showing a surprising overlap with aspects of human morality, nor does it fit the currently best-supported evolutionary scenario of hominin foraging. We offer a better-fitting alternative, but also call for more behavioral work in child development and on nonhuman primates to improve this reconstruction. (shrink)

Humans rely heavily on their prosocial relationships. We propose that the experience and display of prosocial emotions evolved to regulate such relationships through inhibiting individual selfishness in service of others. Two emotions in particular serve to meet two central requirements for upholding prosociality: gratitude motivates maintenance of ongoing prosocial interactions, and guilt motivates repair of ruptured prosocial interactions. We further propose, and review developmental evidence, that nascent forms of these two emotions serve their respective functions from early in ontogeny. The (...) remarkably early emergence of these prosocial emotions allows even very young children to participate in and benefit from prosociality. We discuss the implications of and challenges to this conclusion and identify pressing future directions for this work. (shrink)

In this note, I ask what (if any) linguistic means above the word level might have already been in place before our full-blown syntactic capacity involving recursive Merge has evolved. I argue that the ‘pre-Merge era’ might have been characterized by paratactic emotive utterances comparable to root small clauses in modern languages. At the end of this contribution, this new emotive perspective on so-called ‘living linguistic fossils’ is extended to the core syntactic property of displacement, which features an augmentation strategy (...) in the form of multiple copies that is reminiscent of doubling and reduplication processes involved in conveying expressive meaning components. (shrink)

Chimpanzees and humans are close evolutionary relatives who behave in many of the same ways based on a similar type of agentive organization. To what degree do they experience the world in similar ways as well? Using contemporary research in evolutionarily biology and animal cognition, I explicitly compare the kinds of experience the two species of capable of having. I conclude that chimpanzees’ experience of the world, their experiential niche as I call it, is: intentional in basically the same way (...) as humans’; rational in the sense that it is self-critical and operates with logically structured causal and intentional inferences; but not normative at all in that it does not operate with “objective” evaluative standards. Scientific data do not answer philosophical questions, but they provide rich raw material for scientists and philosophers alike to reflect on and clarify fundamental psychological concepts. (shrink)

Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, EarlyView.

My response to the commentaries focuses on four issues: the diversity both within and between cultures of the many different faces of obligation; the possible evolutionary roots of the sense of obligation, including possible sources that I did not consider; the possible ontogenetic roots of the sense of obligation, including especially children's understanding of groups from a third-party perspective ; and the relation between philosophical accounts of normative phenomena in general – which are pitched as not totally empirical – and (...) empirical accounts such as my own. I have tried to distinguish comments that argue for extensions of the theory from those that represent genuine disagreement. (shrink)

To explain the evolutionary emergence of uniquely human skills and motivations for cooperation, Tomasello et al. (2012, in Current Anthropology 53(6):673–92) proposed the interdependence hypothesis. The key adaptive context in this account was the obligate collaborative foraging of early human adults. Hawkes (2014, in Human Nature 25(1):28–48), following Hrdy (Mothers and Others, Harvard University Press, 2009), provided an alternative account for the emergence of uniquely human cooperative skills in which the key was early human infants’ attempts to solicit care and (...) attention from adults in a cooperative breeding context. Here we attempt to reconcile these two accounts. Our composite account accepts Hrdy’s and Hawkes’s contention that the extremely early emergence of human infants’ cooperative skills suggests an important role for cooperative breeding as adaptive context, perhaps in early Homo. But our account also insists that human cooperation goes well beyond these nascent skills to include such things as the communicative and cultural conventions, norms, and institutions created by later Homo and early modern humans to deal with adult problems of social coordination. As part of this account we hypothesize how each of the main stages of human ontogeny (infancy, childhood, adolescence) was transformed during evolution both by infants’ cooperative skills “migrating up” in age and by adults’ cooperative skills “migrating down” in age. (shrink)

Humans share with other mammals and primates many social motivations and emotions, but they are also much more cooperative than even their closest primate relatives. Here I review recent comparative experiments and analyses that illustrate humans’ species-typical social motivations and emotions for cooperation in comparison with those of other great apes. These may be classified most generally as (i) ‘you > me’ (e.g., prosocial sympathy, informative and pedagogical motives in communication); (ii) ‘you = me’ (e.g., feelings of mutual respect, fairness, (...) resentment); (iii) ‘we > me’ (e.g., feelings of obligation and guilt); and (iv) ‘WE (in the group) > me’ (e.g., in-group loyalty and conformity to norms, shame, and many in-group biases). The existence of these species-typical and species-universal motivations and emotions provides compelling evidence for the importance of cooperative activities in the human species. (shrink)

Technologies can have profound effects on social moral systems. Is there any way to systematically investigate and anticipate these potential effects? This paper aims to contribute to this emerging field on inquiry through a case study method. It focuses on two core human values—truth and trust—describes their structural properties and conceptualisations, and then considers various mechanisms through which technology is changing and can change our perspective on those values. In brief, the paper argues that technology is transforming these values by (...) changing the costs/benefits of accessing them; allowing us to substitute those values for other, closely-related ones; increasing their perceived scarcity/abundance; and disrupting traditional value-gatekeepers. This has implications for how we study other, technologically-mediated, value changes. (shrink)

_GPs serve in a double role of treatment provider and expert in certain social insurance systems, such as the Norwegian one. Some physicians assert that the ethical obligations of the two roles conflict with each other. The objective of this article is to show that social insurance medical ethics, which are based on recognised principles of medical ethics, unite the physicians’ obligations associated with these roles. The method applied is a medical ethics conceptual analysis. The material consists of literature on (...) normative SIME. The study shows that SIME expands the role of the treatment provider to a wider societal context. Here, physicians should attempt to balance the perspectives of sympathy with empathy, as treatment providers, with the impartiality in their role as experts. Five principles of medical ethics are fundamental. Respect for human dignity is the overarching principle of medical ethics. The four others are nonmaleficence, beneficence, autonomy, and social justice. The article discusses two areas where it is asserted that the roles of treatment provider and expert conflict with each other: the application of beneficence and justice, and the duty of confidentiality versus the duty to provide information to the National Insurance service. The study concludes that there are no basic ethical conflicts between the two roles. The ethical problems that may arise when exercising this duality should be viewed in the same way as other ethical problems in medicine. Actual application and balancing of the principles may necessitate negotiations between patients and physicians. _ _Keywords_: dual roles, professionalism, deliberation, impartiality, medical principle ethics, values of welfare state. (shrink)

This paper offers a noncognitivist characterization of moral attitudes, according to which moral attitudes count as such because of their inclusion of moral concepts. Moral concepts are distinguished by their contribution to the functional roles of some of the attitudes in which they can occur. They have no particular functional role in other attitudes, and should instead be viewed as evolutionary spandrels. In order to make the counter-intuitive implications of the view more palatable, the paper ends with an account of (...) the evolution of normative judgments as exaptations of the cognitive structures that underlie beliefs. (shrink)

The self-domestication hypothesis suggests that, like mammalian domesticates, humans have gone through a process of selection against aggression – a process that in the case of humans was self-induced. Here, we extend previous proposals and suggest that what underlies human social evolution is selection for socially mediated emotional control and plasticity. In the first part of the paper we highlight general features of human social evolution, which, we argue, is more similar to that of other social mammals than to that (...) of mammalian domesticates and is therefore incompatible with the notion of human self-domestication. In the second part, we discuss the unique aspects of human evolution and propose that emotional control and social motivation in humans evolved during two major, partially overlapping stages. The first stage, which followed the emergence of mimetic communication, the beginnings of musical engagement, and mimesis-related cognition, required socially mediated emotional plasticity and was accompanied by new social emotions. The second stage followed the emergence of language, when individuals began to instruct the imagination of their interlocutors, and to rely even more extensively on emotional plasticity and culturally learned emotional control. This account further illustrates the significant differences between humans and domesticates, thus challenging the notion of human self-domestication. (shrink)